History does repeat itself. Before empires fall they become extremely corrupt and conspicuous waste is the order of the day. We saw that in ancient Rome when the emperor Caligula would cover his bed with cash money, fornicate atop it, and then hurl the cash into the nearest fireplace — while he dissolved pearls in acid, and drank the liquified pearls in his wine, making the beverage insanely expensive. That was Caligula’s eff you to the universe. On some level he knew he had as much business being a Roman emperor as he had being a racehorse or an eagle.
A fantastic fate had put Caligula into the position he was in, and he worked out his insecurities by being the very picture of debauchery and excess and seeking to destroy all that was good in his world. In that sense, he’s a lot like Donald Trump. Caligula was assassinated in the tunnels leading from the coliseum, and Trump, blessedly, will either finish out his term or die in office from complications related to poor diet and obesity.
But I digress. This story is about the banana. Not just any banana but the banana that you see depicted above, taken by AP photographer Eduardo Munoz Alvarez. The banana was part of an art exhibit and it sold for $6.2 million to one Justin Sun, a very wealthy Chinese national and one who has the pocket change to buy *artwork* such as what you see above with that kind of a price tag. Was Sun a connoisseur of the arts? Hungry, maybe? Because Sun didn’t just buy the artwork, he consumed it. He took the banana off of the canvas and ate it. That was the act that put me in mind of Caligula. There’s a commonality of minds here, liquified pearls, six million dollar bananas. And you’ll read a lot more about Mr. Sun below.
That was last year. This year Mr. Sun went to Donald Trump’s meme coin fest. Therein lies a tale. Steve Schmidt gets the same vibes I do from Mr. Sun and his take on Trump is that he’s “Nero combined with Caligula.” No argument here.
Before talking about his ecstasy let me share this reporting about the insanity at hand from Business Insider:
“The official backers of Trump’s meme coin, $TRUMP, are hosting a gala at the president’s DC-area private golf club. The top 220 holders of the digital token were invited to join the president.
On average, they spent over $1 million on the coin to secure a seat, per NBC News.
The White House has defended Trump’s appearance amid criticism from congressional Democrats and government ethics organizations.
“The President is working to secure GOOD deals for the American people, not for himself,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said in a statement. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public — which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media.”
This is what we know about Trump’s meme coin dinner.
Dinner with Trump isn’t cheap. The lucky winners spent $394 million on the meme coin, per research conducted by blockchain analytics company Nansen, NBC News reported.
The actual cost varies significantly from those at the very top to attendees who just barely made the cut. The top seven holders spent more than $10 million each, while those spending less than $100,000 filled the final 24 slots.
The average winner spent $1,788,994.42, per NBC News.
Trump’s family has made tens of millions already
Trump’s family and other coin backers have brought in over $320 million in trading fees so far, according to a Reuters report that cited research by Chainalysis, a blockchain analytics firm. Of those fees, at least $1.35 million were collected after the meme coin’s official website announced the Trump dinner.”
The Washington Post, tragically yoked to the moral cowardice of its owner, wrote about Justin Sun, the Chinese billionaire, the top holder of the Trump coin.
These paragraphs about Sun stand out. According to reporters Katrina Northrop and Vic Chiang:
He whooped enthusiastically when Trump arrived at the black-tie gala at a Trump golf club in Virginia. “Yeah, super cool!” he shouted when the president asked the participants if they had seen Marine One outside.
He posed in front of the Stars and Stripes with his fist raised, captioning the photo on X: “Fight! Fight! Fight!,” echoing a Trump catch-cry.
He claimed to have been “awarded” a Trump Golden Tourbillon watch, retail price $100,000, by the president. And he breathlessly documented he whole thing on X. (Trump was not in Sun’s footage of the watch presentation.)
“It’s really nice to be here today … to witness this great moment of crypto,” he said in one of the videos.
It was clearly a big night for Sun, who holds more than $20 million in the $TRUMP meme coin, which he says makes him the top holder of the coin. He also invested $75 million in another Trump family crypto project, World Liberty Financial, after his election victory.
Sun, who founded the cryptocurrency Tron, has good reason to present himself as Trump’s biggest fan.
The Biden-era Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Sun with fraud and market manipulation in 2023. But in February, after Sun announced his investment in World Liberty, the SEC asked a court to pause the lawsuit.
Truly, there are no words.
Donald Trump is engorging himself like a locust. He is selling out America to a bevy of Arab and Chinese billionaires, while chaining America’s billionaires to his throne with leashes that let them partake in the taking — so long as they stay quiet and in line.
The appeasement of Trump’s corruption and aggressions has become table stakes in the new American economy, where the free enterprise system is being replaced by a gangster economy where the rule of law and transparency fade to black.
There is economic misery ahead for the American people, and crazy Donald doesn’t care.
And the government churns on as usual. Schmidt points out that Democrats, including Cory Booker who is the most inspirational Democrat in office these days, voted to confirm the nomination of Jared Kushner’s felon father as the Ambassador of France. That’s important because it’s the most recent normalization of the completely abnormal that we have been collectively living in since 2016.
Somebody like Charles Kushner would never even have been considered for Ambassador to France prior to his son’s father-in-law being elected president. That’s when it all went south. And we, as Democrats, have been ineffectual in stopping this erosion because these votes, these confirmations still keep happening.
This is how Rome fell. And this is how America is slipping away to authoritarianism. The abnormal is the abnormal. It needs to be treated as such. Once you start normalizing the abnormal with a yeah, but — and voting in the likes of Kushner, or Hegseth, or Noem, or Patel, just keep reeling off the names — that is how the republic is lost.
empires cometh and go, it’s the human condition
Banksy created a new genre called *auto-demolition art* a few years back. Do you think we could interest him in doing a trump piece?
“We saw that in ancient Rome when the emperor Caligula would cover his bed with cash money, fornicate atop it, and then hurl the cash into the nearest fireplace — while he dissolved pearls in acid, and drank the liquified pearls in his wine, making the beverage insanely expensive. That was Caligula’s eff you to the universe.”
Just a nitpick here, Ursula, but, um, NO ONE “SAW” Caligula do any of that. Most of the things attributed to Caligula were written down years–even decades–after Caligula’s death, mostly passed along by his political adversaries (at least the ones that Caligula somehow did NOT kill during his lifetime). Even the story about the pearls in wine has been attributed to Cleopatra (who died some 70 years before Caligula did–in fact, she died more than 40 years before Caligula was even born). It’s not likely that the Jewish philosopher Philo bore witness to Caligula’s having sex on money (Philo being one of the few who actually dealt with Caligula personally and wrote about the experience–but his meeting dealt with matters involving the Jewish community in Egypt). Suetonius, the most cited “biographer” of Caligula, was literally born nearly 30 years after Caligula was killed and his work, “The Twelve Caesars,” wouldn’t be published until 80 years after Caligula’s death, so it’s very unlikely he had any sort of direct knowledge of Caligula’s actual behavior.
As to the whole idea of his having sex on top of money and throwing it in the fireplace, well, that’s pretty unbelievable since Roman money at the time was metal coinage. Paper money (still not exactly comfortable but far more so than metal coins) wouldn’t appear in Europe until the late Middle Ages (mainly in the form of promissory notes or what we would think of as travelers’ checks) and what we would think of as standard paper currency like a dollar bill only appeared in Europe in the 17th century. (Paper currency or paper notes were known in China as far back as the 11th and 12th centuries–which is how Europeans learned of them, through Marco Polo’s stories.)
It’s not to say these aren’t nice little stories (with more than a little propaganda value) but let’s not engage in perpetuating historically dubious stories as some kind of proven fact.