The Rise of Red Caesarism
After the murder of Charlie Kirk, a fringe idea that explains Trump 2.0 is spreading.
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Red Caesarism is the once fringe idea that America, its laws, its government, and its cultural institutions are so dominated and corrupted by the left that the only means available for a conservative restoration is to empower a Caesar-like authoritarian unbound by traditional norms or constitutional constraints.
In a very short period, the idea moved from being taken as seriously as Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto to an increasingly accurate description of America under Donald Trump.
The idea has its roots in a notorious 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election,” by Michael Anton, who made the case for Trump as an emergency response to what he believed was the terminal crisis of American decline. (Trump and his supporters were the passengers storming the cockpit to save the country.) Anton worked briefly as a spokesman for Trump’s NSC, and in 2020, he published The Stakes, which outlined the scenarios under which a Red—or Blue—Caesar might rise in America.
The following year, Curtis Yarvin, a “monarchist,” came along explicitly calling for an “American Caesar,” and Anton hosted him on his podcast at the Claremont Institute. Their ideas got mainstream attention when Damon Linker, who has studied this phenomenon more closely than anyone, started writing about the right’s growing flirtation with a post-constitutional dictatorship. Though with Biden in office, the level of alarm was still relatively low.
The Claremont Institute became the main forum for discussion of the idea, often with lots of throat-clearing and caveats from its writers that they were being descriptive, not prescriptive.
“Among exclusively bad options,” Claremont’s Casey Wheatland wrote in 2023, “the people may be left with no alternative except to mitigate the decay by hoping for an autocrat who at least militates for order rather than further chaos and recrimination—a Caesar rather than a Sulla.”
In 2024, the right-wing journal First Things published an essay praising Augustus and concluding that in a time of “multiple economic crises, costly wars, the overturning of our whole system of morality, and the worst choices of political leadership our republic has ever faced,” history teaches that “bad times can summon great leaders from the most unexpected sources.” Hint hint.
During the transition last December, The Guardian reported on Yarvin’s influence on several top Republican officials, including incoming Vice President JD Vance, and Anton was appointed director of policy planning at the State Department.
These right-wing intellectuals were pushing on an open door. The Trump policy blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was simpatico with Red Caesarism. It called for centralizing power in the White House, purging the civil service, and smashing as many chokepoints on presidential power as possible. It was the unitary executive theory, already popular with many more traditional conservatives, on steroids.
Meanwhile, Trump himself has long been personally obsessed with having the powers of a “dictator” as president and increasingly used the word in the way he often does with something controversial—first it’s a joke, and then it’s not.
Once you dig deeply into the key Red Caesar texts, you start to see it everywhere in Trump 2.0: the unprecedented use of emergency proclamations to unlock extraordinary powers; the harassment of law firms, universities, and private individuals through executive orders; the use of the regulatory regime to attack the media and curb criticism from the press; the total politicization of the Justice Department; the attempt to remake cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian to conform to a right-wing vision of art and history.
A section of Linker’s account of the 2021 Anton-Yarvin podcast was especially prescient—and chilling:
When Anton asks how Trump-Caesar should respond to Harvard, The New York Times, and the rest of the theocratic oligarchy blaring air-raid sirens about the imposition of dictatorship, Yarvin indicates that it would be essential to “smash it” with one blow. To suggest that Caesar should be required to deal with “someone else’s department of reality is manifestly absurd.” Going on, Yarvin explains that “when Caesar crosses the Rubicon, he doesn't sit around getting his feet wet, fishing. He marches straight across the Rubicon” and uses “all force available.” Once that happens, the whole world can be “remade.”
Once you understand that this isn’t a fringe idea anymore, but a guiding philosophy of top Trump officials, whether they’ve ever heard of Yarvin and his ilk or not, moments of potential crisis, like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, should set off very loud alarm bells.
Sure enough, almost everything coming from the Trump administration since Kirk’s murder has accelerated the Red Caesar trend. And the commentary from many right-wing voices outside the administration suggests a growing interest in the idea.
Here are some of the scattered reports that have probably crossed your feeds in recent days:
Trump and Vance tied Kirk’s murder to left‑wing extremism and vowed a government response, with Trump floating terrorist designations and RICO prosecutions for liberal groups. Today, Trump declared Antifa a terrorist organization.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the DOJ would “target” people for “hate speech” after the killing. There is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment, so Bondi narrowed her claim to unprotected categories (true threats/incitement). Deputy AG Todd Blanche suggested federal probes of “organized” anti‑Trump protesters.
Vance hosted Kirk’s show from the White House and pressed listeners to identify and contact employers of those “celebrating” the murder. In other words, a state-endorsed campaign of doxxing.
A House panel summoned online‑forum CEOs to testify about the assassination and related online content.
The American Mind published “Charlie Kirk, Martyr”, concluding with “Beware the People weeping / When they bare the iron hand,” and explicitly reframing the moment as about “the wielding of power for the common good.”
Steve Bannon and allies repeatedly used “war” language, questioned the official narrative, and hinted at extraordinary measures, an attempt to move the Overton window toward emergency governance.
Organized disinformation campaigns from Russia, China, and Iran have tried to shape the narrative around the killing—an accelerant for “emergency” rhetoric and policy.
ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show indefinitely after Kimmel’s monologue about the Kirk killing. The step followed affiliate pressure (notably Nexstar) and public warnings from FCC chair Brendan Carr suggesting regulatory consequences. Trump, of course, cheered the move.
All of this conforms with key indicators of what a Red Caesar turn in America would look like: more concentration of Article II power, more talk of “exception” politics justifying the smashing of norms, more punishment of the Trump administration’s enemies, more disdain for pluralist checks, and an increasingly powerful president who sees all of this and wants even more.
All the closing points are right on target. So many of us saw it coming, but those who voted for Little Caesar loved that he hates those policies and people he hates. Even during the turbulent 60s, it didn’t feel to me as hateful as it does today. I weep at the direction our country is headed and wish we could find a way to break free.