Elon, Empress of America

To understand the Trump/Musk dynamic, we must look to the Byzantine Empire.

. . . Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
—Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

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For weeks now, Elon Musk and Donald Trump have been more or less attached at the hip—conjoined-twin tyrants, working in tandem to consolidate their power, plunder our resources, and end American democracy.

This is not something we’ve ever seen before in the White House. Sure, Dick Cheney exerted enormous influence over George W. Bush, especially in Dubya’s first term, to the point where late-night comedians were making ventriloquist-dummy jokes, but there was no question of who was actually in charge. Certainly Cheney didn’t appear at Oval Office Q-and-As, kite-high on Black Beauties, rambling on and on, while one of his four-year-old grandkids wiped boogers on the antique gold curtains.

The Trump/Musk dynamic is without precedent in the annals of the United States, which now stretch back a quarter millennium. Many satirists, comics, political commentators, social media influencers, and meme-makers have taken to calling Elon “President Musk,” caricaturing him seated behind the Resolute Desk. And while the Hitler-heiling, Putin-fluffing South African interloper is clearly piloting the ship of state, that’s not the most precise analog. For that, we have to travel back in time eight and a half centuries, to the end of the eleventh century, and five thousand miles east, to the gleaming medieval city of Constantinople.

In 2022, I published a long historical novel set in the Byzantine Empire. One of the many things that fascinated me about the relatively obscure period were the gender dynamics. Women could, and did, wield enormous power. In times of war especially—and imperial troops were often putting down some uprising or other, or else repulsing the Turks or fighting off the Franks—the internal administration of the Empire was left to the Empress. But there was a catch: now matter how good she was at the job—and a lot of them were excellent—she could not rule alone. If anything happened to her husband, the wolves would gather, and it was an anxious, sometimes perilous, end-of-a-thriller-movie sprint to see if she would maintain control, be sent to a convent, or die.

In my novel, Empress, the narrator writes about the sudden and improbable fall of Eudokia Makrembolitissa, who had, through guile and sheer force of will, been Empress to two emperors in succession:

Observing the desperate and wily machinations of the Empress after the death of her futile husband, Maria learned an important lesson: while a man, even a lesser mortal like one of the rogue’s gallery that held the Western throne before the fall of the city of Rome, could assume command exclusively and explicitly, a woman, even an one as formidable as Eudokia, required the intercession of a husband or son if she wished to rule. A fact of female life, as unjust as it was inviolate. The Empress had been ably handling the administration of the government for years, the nominating of officials, the monitoring of the Treasury, the scheduling of public events at the Hippodrome—thankless tasks Constantine would sooner ignore than perform. But as soon as he breathed his last, it was as if she had perished with him. While plenty of women had wielded enormous power since the dawn of the Empire ten centuries ago, none ruled independently. Livia required Caesar Augustus, Julia Domna required Septimius Severus, Theodora required Justinian, Eudokia required first Constantine and now Michael. The lesson of the exchange that night was this: If Maria was going to have any real power, if she was ever going to be more than just a fetching figurehead, if she was going to make her indelible mark on History, she needed at least one male child.

In AD 1061, Eudokia managed to bury her husband, Constantine X Doukas, and hastily marry a prominent general, Romanos IV Diogenes—thus elevating her new husband to the throne. (For some byzantine reason, her status as Empress could make any mediocrity an Emperor with a simple wedding vow, but she could never be one herself.)

And that’s the dynamic we now see operating in the Oval Office. Elon Musk is Eudokia Makrembolitissa. (Same initials, even! And you can almost spell his full name using letters from hers!) He’s overseeing the administration of the Empire, leaving the hapless crowned head beside him to focus on, and to fuck up, foreign policy. Not only that, but he’s making like a good royal wifey and producing lots of heirs. He is Elon, Empress of America.

The thing is, things didn’t end up so great for Eudokia. Her second husband Diogenes, you see, was a total catastrophe. (Everything Romanos Touches Dies.) He lost in humiliating fashion at Manzikert, in a haphazard and unnecessary attempt to win Turkish territory, and wound up having his eyes put out. She could not survive his removal—her second term, we might say—despite her own son, Michael, taking the throne.

In Empress, I describe the shocking scene in the Loge of the Hagia Sophia, when she was, quite literally, sacked. (Psellos was an imperial advisor and her mortal enemy.)

“My late husband would have found some deep meaning therein,” Eudokia said, “and I perhaps would have scoffed at him. But there is no doubt that it is an ill omen. Perhaps…”

She did not finish her thought, for Psellos burst into the Loge with a sextet of Varangian Guard which seized her, twelve relentless hands ripping off her imperial garments and knocking her tiara to the ground. Eudokia screamed, and although there were priests praying in the vast church below, none so much as glanced up at the Loge. Maria could only watch helplessly as they stripped her almost naked, and Psellos with sheep shears tonsured Eudokia’s long black hair. . .

The guardsmen threw her, gently weeping, into a burlap sack, bound it with rope, and whisked her out of the church.

As he followed the company out of the Loge, Psellos turned to Maria. “Forgive me, Your Highness,” he said, bowing deferentially, and then he too was gone.

The whole episode was over in sixty seconds—a fall from grace as sudden as it was humiliating.

“It was stunning,” Maria told me later. “This beautiful woman, powerful and wise, had run the Empire for years and was an all-consuming presence in my life, and in an instant, she was gone. I spent the entire afternoon hysterically weeping, my eyes like fountains. I was completely and utterly devastated. It was like the sun itself, the source of all light and energy, had been suddenly and without warning blotted out of the sky—almost like her dream presaged.” Indeed, there was some analog between the arrest of Eudokia and the blinding of Diogenes: in both cases a plunging into darkness.

Elon is the Empress of America. He may appear all-powerful now, and smug as can be, but he must rule alongside an Emperor, or he cannot rule at all. Them’s the rules. It’s all or nothing. Zero sum. When Trump goes away, so does Musk.

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And like in the Byzantine Empire in the second half of the eleventh century, the Emperor Donald I Trump has been busy abroad, demolishing our foreign policy. In just four weeks, he has wrecked things so completely, so totally, that the country may never fully recover—and he may, for good measure, take down the entire Westphalian order that has governed international relations since the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 in the process.

This is very very very bad.

Consider: We are seventy-nine days away from the eightieth anniversary of Victory in Europe Day. On May 8, 1945, nine days after Trump’s idol Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in his Berlin bunker, the Allies accepted the unconditional surrender of what remained of Nazi Germany. In Europe, at last, the Second World War was over.

The loss of human life was astonishing. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust (despite what the neo-Nazis Elon promotes on X might say to the contrary). From the first of September 1939 until VE-Day, half a million Hungarians died, a quarter million Dutch (many due to famine), three quarters of a million Greeks, six hundred thousand French, three hundred thousand Czechs and Slovaks, half a million Latvians and Lithuanians. The U.S. and the U.K. lost nine hundred thousand between them. Half a million Italians died, half a million Romanians, a million Yugoslavs, six million Poles. Seven million Germans died, and some twenty-five million Soviets: Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Chechens, Georgians, Armenians, Azeris, etc. And this is hardly an exhaustive list.

Rattling off numbers is a poor way to convey the unimaginable horrors of World War II: the devastation, the loss of life, the mass starvation, the destruction of property, the human suffering, the assault on arts and culture, the enormous waste of resources—all because a hateful, delusional, aggrieved little man fancied himself a conqueror.

Twenty-one years before the Nazis rolled into Poland, Europe finished fighting the First World War. Nineteen million people died. The causes of that war are complex and still a subject of debate, but the 1914 enmity between France and Germany had its origins in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, when the French were made to cede Alsace-Lorraine to the Germans; there were almost a million casualties in that war. A generation before that, much of Europe was embroiled in the Crimean War, in which 1.1 million Russians, Brits, Frenchmen, Ottomans, Sardinians, and Greeks died. A generation before that, the Napoleonic Wars ravaged the continent and beyond: four million people dead or missing.

We can keep going back like this to the eleventh century, when Eudokia Makrembolitissa was still Empress, and Constantinople was still the seat of Christendom. Here’s what was happening in Europe at that time, as described in Empress:

In the West, meanwhile, a new tribe of barbarians emerged from the North. Although they were duly converted to Christianity, and thus not technically barbarians, their manner and mien was nothing short of savage. One of these Normans, called William, the bastard son of the Duke of Normandy and a peasant seamstress, conquered England in AD 1066, not long after one of his brethren, Robert Guiscard, or “The Fox”—one of the most detestable personages in the history of this and every other world—invaded and took most of Italy from us, repulsing the mercenary garrisons the Emperor had stationed there. Only Bari, on the east coast of the boot-shaped peninsula, remained in Byzantine hands. This was the price the Empire paid for not heeding the sage advice of Isaac Komnenos! For Constantine X Doukas, too consumed by piety to place any value on well-trained troops, had foolishly abandoned my relation’s prudent plan of investment in the armed forces, as discussed previously, relying instead on hired hands, with predictably disastrous results.

That was just before the First Crusade, and all of its attendant horrors.

You get the idea. The continent has known war upon war upon war upon war, stretching back as far as the eye of history can see.

But for the last eighty years, there has been peace in Western Europe. Yes, there were uprisings against Soviet rule, unrest in the Balkans, and plenty of contained conflicts. But the fact remains that for eight decades, the British have not fought the French, the French have not fought the Germans, the Germans have resisted rolling tanks into Belgium, and so on. I cannot stress enough how unusual this is historically. The last time there has been this long a period of peace over this much of Continental Europe was during the reign of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius in the second century.

We have been living through, and enjoying, a historical anomaly.

There are two main reasons for the extended period of peace. First, after the Second World War, the United States emerged as the most powerful nation on earth—the de facto policeman of the world, and a global champion of democracy and freedom. (One can quibble, certainly, with how effectively or honorably the U.S. fulfilled these obligations, but America was clearly the preferable hegemonic power to the U.S.S.R. or the P.R.C.) And, second, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bound the European member nations together with each other and with Canada and the U.S. If the Soviets dared to go on the offensive, Moscow would have to deal with a coalition of Western democracies.

Functionally, this period is now over. The Vice President made that clear in his remarks at the Munich Security Conference last week, when he claimed, preposterously, that the threat to Western democracy wasn’t coming from Moscow or Beijing, but from inside the house. The real enemy, Couchfucker stupidly declared, is the governments in Berlin and Bucharest and elsewhere who refuse to break political bread with Nazis.

“For years we have been told everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values, everything from our Ukraine policy to digital censorship is billed as a defense of democracy,” Vance said, “but when we see European courts cancelling elections”—a reference to Romania throwing out the results of its recent election that the Kremlin tampered with—“and senior officials threatening to cancel others we ought to ask ourselves if we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard.” About the far-right AfD party in Germany, traditionally shunned by all the other parties for being, you know, Nazis, he added: “We do not have to agree with everything or anything people say, but when political leaders represent an important constituency it is incumbent on us to listen.” And then, in case anyone missed the point, he spent half an hour meeting with the leader of said AfD party, the very model of a Hitler-approved Aryan woman, Alice Weidel—while snubbing the actual chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

This prompted the somnambulant Scholz to fire back, per Reuters:

“That is not appropriate, especially not among friends and allies. We firmly reject that,” Scholz told the conference on Saturday, adding there were “good reasons” not to work with the AfD.

The anti-immigration party, currently polling at around 20% ahead of Germany’s February 23 national election, has pariah status among other major German parties in a country with a taboo about ultranationalist politics because of its Nazi past.

“Never again fascism, never again racism, never again aggressive war. That is why an overwhelming majority in our country opposes anyone who glorifies or justifies criminal National Socialism,” Scholz said, referring to the ideology of Adolf Hitler’s 1933-45 Nazi regime.

Good on Olaf Scholz. But this is all very very very bad.

While the U.S. nominally remains in NATO, there is, as Vance idiotically bleated in Munich, “a new sheriff in town,” and Trump, Vance, and the imperial idiot’s embassy of bunglers are on the verge of upending eight decades of foreign policy that produced unprecedented peace and prosperity, as well as technological innovations beyond the Byzantines’ wildest dreams. Like the AfD, the new regime in Washington prefers to align itself with the autocracies of Russia and China—democracy be damned. Or, as the former Foreign Minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, put it, “The current US administration does not see the EU as it once did—culturally it sees itself aligned with the movements within Europe that are interested in destruction.”

What happens now? Here’s what to expect: Putin will make his demands: the Donbas, Crimea, and whatever other territory he wishes to extract; a guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality, so Kyiv will not join NATO; and the removal of Zelenskyy as president. Trump will art-of-the-deal-fully agree at once to whatever his whoremaster wants, and maybe add some mineral rights for himself the Americans. Then it will be up to Britain, France, Germany, Poland, and the rest of Europe to decide if they want to raise up their own armies to defend Ukraine and themselves—or capitulate to Vlad the Puny like “new sheriff” Donald the Short-Fingered. Oh, and at some point, the United States will probably find some bullshit pretext, modeled on Putin’s chicanery in Crimea, to seize Greenland. That should be fun.

“If Europe is unable to stand up, Ukraine will be forced to rely on itself and a smaller group of allies that continue to give support,” Landsbergis writes. “Threats to European security will grow immensely. Putin will get braver, meaning more war in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, and beyond.” China, he predicts, would then fill the vacuum, offering protection to Ukraine—with disastrous results for Europe. “China as Ukraine’s protector would start replacing the US in the role of keeping Russia out of the Eastern Flank. EU countries in the East would be dependent on China’s protection and the racketeering would spread West.”

With Trump handing Ukraine to Putin on a silver platter, a united EU is the only democratic force powerful enough to defend Kyiv and keep Moscow in check.

“My hope lies with Europe, with the appearance of a leader with Churchill’s resolve, the spirit to say we will never surrender, we will defend all of Europe, from Ukraine to Portugal,” Landsbergis says. “I am fully aware that my suggestion leads only to blood, toil, tears and sweat. But we have done it before and we can do it again. The alternative is to rebuild the continent after another devastating war, and that would be much harder and take much more time.”

I agree with him. The mistake that the West has made with Putin is the same mistake it made with Hitler. Appeasement doesn’t work. One fascist dandelion quickly spreads to the entire lawn, and then the threat is exponentially more dire.

You don’t negotiate with Nazis. You have to kill them. There’s no other way.

To be fair to Emperor Donald, the United States has bungled its policy with regards to Ukraine since at least 2014—when Putin occupied Crimea and Obama responded with a shrug and some toothless sanctions—and its relationship with Russia since the Yeltsin era. Trump’s coziness with the Kremlin has been well documented, on these pages and elsewhere. For two and a half years, Biden failed to adequately supply Kyiv with the weapons it needed to defend itself and decisively defeat Moscow. Biden, Trump, Obama, and Bush II all failed to recognize Putin for the criminal psychopath he is, despite his true colors being shown all the time. Bill Clinton badly misread Yeltsin. And now Putin’s puppet is back in the White House, Washington has skedaddled out of Europe, and the best case scenario for favorable resolution of the Ukraine war involves armies assembling in Germany, in France, in Britain, in Poland.

This is very very very bad.

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The Byzantines didn’t have elections every four years. The Empire relied on a well-oiled machine of bureaucracy, run in the main by eunuchs, to collect its taxes (it did not exempt its wealthy from paying up, nor would the Empress ever dream of firing all the bureaucrats), and if they didn’t like the Augustus on the throne, their only recourse was to wait patiently for him to kick. The best Byzantine ending involved no small amount of deus ex machina.

This is another passage from Empress, where the Empress implores the Emperor to get his head out of his ass and do something about the military threats to the Empire gathering on all sides:

“We have to take action,” Eudokia told her husband. “The time has come.” In spite of her lack of familiarity with the military, the shrewd Empress recognized the precarious dangers lurking, and was desperate to locate a solution. “Raise an army. Call on our allies. Something.”

To which the Emperor replied, “Yes, we must do something—we must pray,” and took to the nearest church.

But God helps those who help themselves, as the playwright says, and no amount of devotions, however heartfelt, was going to make the Turks and the Normans scatter. No, that’s not fair to the Almighty, who moves in mysterious ways. The Lord did answer His petitioner’s prayers to save Byzantium, albeit in a manner the Augustus may not himself have chosen: God summoned Constantine to Heaven.

When the Emperor died of grippe on the Feast of the Annunciation, AD 1067, “he left abundant material for would-be eulogists,” the ever-obsequious Psellos would later insist. Rubbish! The lone virtue of the seven-year reign of Constantine X Doukas…is that he had the good sense to expire before losing the Empire entire.

We should be so lucky.

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Photo credit: Eudokia the Empress. Drawing of Elon is from this.