On Thursday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof – a man who once titled a column “Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists” – has now topped his own high standards for idiocy. Tweeting about President Trump’s proposed budget, which slashes spending across a variety of agencies, Kristof tweeted:
There are a few problems with this tweet.
First off, while the barbarians sacked Rome in 455 AD, they didn’t actually depose the Roman emperor until 476 AD.
Second, the Trump budget increases defense spending while cutting funding for the EPA, the State Department, the Agriculture Department, the Labor Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Commerce Department, the Education Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Transportation Department, the Interior Department, the Energy Department, the Small Business Administration, the Justice Department, and NASA. It also increases funding for Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. It doesn’t touch the entitlement programs that actually comprise the vast majority of the budget.
The Roman Empire did not fall because of lack of funding for its labor department. It should have increased defense spending, restricted immigration, and stopped its governmental overreach domestically. Edward Gibbon suggested a few reasons why the Roman empire fell, including decline of family structure, high taxes and high spending, hedonism, and decaying military structure. Here’s Gibbon:
Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long. The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed and finally dissolved by the partial institutions of Constantine; and the Roman world was overwhelmed by a deluge of Barbarians.
Modern scholars suggest that the Roman empire fell because it simply lost relevance – it decayed into obscurity rather than being toppled from without by a mighty invader. As Columbia history lecturer Nathan Pilkington wrote in The Washington Post, “Rome had become peripheral to the empire it created, whose center of political and economic life shifted to Constantinople, modern Istanbul, over the course of the 4th century A.D.”
You’ll notice that nowhere does he lament the loss of Roman funding for the National Roman Endowment for the Arts.
But that’s the thing: for Kristof and company, the barbarians aren’t external threats to America, or even emissaries of foreign nations living within the United States – the barbarians are Trump supporters. Trump is the Visigoth at the gates, and he has already deposed the old emperor, Obama, who was a genteel man of worldly convictions. Now Trump is ruining the empire so painstakingly built by the left.
Except that Trump isn’t a Roman emperor, America isn’t Rome, and cutting the budget from mammoth to slightly less mammoth isn’t exactly an overthrow of the existing order.
But don’t worry: the left will always strain history in order to achieve its end goal, the polarization of the electorate and the announcement that we’re on the verge of the apocalypse thanks to Alaric Trump.