One of the coin collector’s most coveted treasures is an Ancient Roman denarius minted around 45 BCE, featuring a laurel-wreathed profile of the statesman Julius Caesar. The four-gram coin contains more than 90% silver, but precious metals aren’t what make the denarii valuable. Nor is it the rarity of mint condition examples that drives the value of the coin to upwards of $1,000. Rather, it’s the historical significance: The denarius is the first coin that commemorated a living Roman leader, minted as the republic slid into empire. Before Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he emblazoned his visage on the very money that Romans carried in their purses, a potent reminder in what was ostensibly still a republic of where all power originated and terminated. Classicist Mary Beard explains how Caesar was a tyrant in love with his own image, writing in Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World (2023) that “he set about flooding the city and wider world with portraits, in numbers never seen before: hundreds, if not thousands were planned.” In the last days of law’s rule, the Roman historian Suetonius reported that a statue of the statesman was graffitied with the simple observation that “Caesar is our king today.” More than two millennia later, in the American republic that has long imagined itself as a new Rome, we might commiserate with that anonymous vandal. Copy of an Ancient Roman denarius with a portrait of Julius Caesar (undated) (photo by Sussex Archaeological Society, Laura Burnett; photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0; edit Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)Drafts for a prospective $1 Trump coin (post by Steve Guest via X, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)Last month, it was reported that Donald Trump’s Department of the Treasury will mint a one-dollar coin in honor of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, featuring a profile of the 47th president, every swirl in his combover visible on the metal frieze. Brandon Beach, the United States Treasurer, tweeted, “No fake news here … Looking forward to sharing more soon, once the obstructionist shutdown of the United States government is over.” Earlier this year, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina introduced legislation to print $250 bills with Trump’s portrait (perhaps the expected future price for a dozen eggs). Congress decreed as early as 1866 that the United States would not put living people on currency — though just as the administration ignored the Hatch Act, the separation of powers, and posse comitatus, they’ll presumably ignore this provision as well. That these proposed coins and bills supposedly commemorate the American Revolution and its violent rejection of all monarchical trappings is beyond ironic. The Trump denarius is clearly anathema to our republican values and democratic principles, but its aesthetics, from the coins to the memes, also tell us more about this administration’s fascist politics. Trump has most likely never heard of the Caesar denarii, and likely knows little of the aspiring emperor’s political views. Yet many of the creepy oddballs and second-rate academics who populate the ranks of think-tanks, providing impetus for the continuing authoritarian creep (more of a sprint these days), are more intimately acquainted. Michael Anton, director of Policy Planning for the Trump administration, Fellow in American Politics at the right-wing Claremont Institute, and secret clothes-horse, has admiringly pined for “a form of one-man rule” in his 2020 book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, a system he terms “Red Caesarism.” Little that is surprising or new here. When it comes to authoritarianism, Beard writes that Caesar was “cast in this founding role,” so that his proper name not only became the Roman title for an emperor, but also trickled through history in the titles for the rulers of other nations as well, from the “Kaisar” to the “Czar.”Beyond monarchism, Roman aesthetics were appropriated wholesale by 20th-century (and now 21st-century) fascists as well, from Benito Mussolini’s neoclassical-inspired Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana to the imperial eagle used by the Nazis. After all, the very word “fascism” is derived from the Roman fasces, a symbol designating strength composed of an axe surrounded by a bundle of sticks. But if Trump’s tin-pot dictator act follows the same Caesar-fantasy script as past authoritarians, there is a new meaning to his proposed coin as well. Flip the Trump dollar over, and what you’ll see is another image of the president (appropriate that they’ve suggested minting a cheater’s trick coin). This one is an action shot of the then-candidate following the attempted assassination in Butler, Pennsylvania, when he was on the campaign trail, his tie akimbo and his bouffant tussled, a tiny fist held aloft and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” replacing the motto of liberty. Perhaps this evokes the traditional visual logic of fascism, but it’s also the iconography of a new form — the meme. A recent meme President Trump posted declaring the Democrats “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN” (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)Meme logic is less a departure from traditional fascist aesthetics than its logical conclusion. While Walter Benjamin argues that “Mankind in the time of Homer” was “a spectacle for the Olympian gods,” it has now “become one for itself.” And so fascist discourse, which is based in the aestheticization of politics, continually updates itself to the medium of a given age. Just as nearly a century ago fascists deployed radio and film, so do their ideological descendants use memes, social media, and above all, artificial intelligence. Where Mussolini broadcast Ezra Pound and Adolf Hitler championed the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, Trump relies on the impersonal power of the algorithm. Since the now positively archaic days of bot farms and Cambridge Analytica, Trump has graduated to more sophisticated digital manipulation predicated on the surreal nightmare logic of AI slop. Images of cruelty proliferate, such as the official White House X feed sharing a Studio Ghibli-style cartoon depicting the arrest of a crying immigrant; a recent meme that declared the Democrats “THE PARTY OF HATE, EVIL, AND SATAN”; or the AI-generated video promulgating the conspiracy theory that there are so-called “med-beds” capable of reversing illness — a form of sadism seemingly directed to his own supporters in that it makes promises to those who are desperate and believe his lies. A Studio Ghibli-style AI-generated image of Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a woman arrested by ICE, tweeted out by the official White House account (@WhiteHouse via X; screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, who once championed the countercultural possibilities of the internet, writes in his Substack that, true to the original analogy of memes being a virus, they serve to “bypass the neocortex — the thinking, feeling part of the brain — and go straight to the more primal brain stem beneath.” That’s equally the intent for those who love Trump and those of us who hate him. The White House sharing AI slop of Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought as the Grim Reaper targeting cartoon babies in sombreros — just think about that for a second — both titillates and terrifies. That this material can be produced almost instantaneously by an unthinking program and pushed to granularly defined populations makes it more potent than anything past authoritarians could have dreamt of. AI slop demonstrates not just the technological flexibility of Trump’s fascist aesthetics — it is the ultimate example of it, the culmination of the hateful dream of eliminating the human entirely. A nadir of Trump’s memes, so far, was his promulgation of an AI slop video of himself as a fighter pilot in a king’s crown who, despite incorrectly wearing his oxygen mask, is able to dump tons of noxious, brown liquid shit from his plane as he flies above a group of No Kings protestors in Times Square. Shocking as it may be to envision an American president fantasizing not just about flinging excrement at American citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, but also doing it with a weapon of war, nothing about Trump’s juvenile video should actually be surprising considering his character. Also unsurprising is the craven boot-licking by Republican politicians that makes Trump’s reign possible — see, for instance, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (an evangelical Christian) claiming that the video was simply “using satire to make a point.” A now-deleted post by President Donald Trump of an AI-generated video promoting the conspiracy theory that there are so-called “med-beds” capable of reversing illness (@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social, screenshot Lisa Yin Zhang/Hyperallergic)This administration has long exemplified the use of media and mediums that have a juvenile cast to them; their rhetoric was forged in forms like shock jock talk radio and stand-up, and now memes and AI. The macho profanity is very much a feature. In Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society and Capture American Politics (2024), journalist Elle Reeve argues that the alt-right championed a belief that “any joke was permitted,” even as such noxiousness transformed them into basically a “herd of brain-washed swastika-posting sheep.” Herein is the problem with Johnson’s defense of Trump’s video — what is it supposed to satirize? The claim itself makes no sense. Comprehensibility and consistency have never been virtues of the MAGA movement, but it’s notable how even the semblance of a relationship between reference and referent has all but vanished. They’ve gotten lazy with even the performance of being genuine. Herein actually lies a certain kind of hope, for if the feces video demonstrates anything, it’s that Trump himself was rattled by the massive No Kings rallies. Nearly seven million people — nearly 2% of the population — marched in the protests. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth has written that the number of protestors required to peacefully topple an authoritarian regime is 3.5%. As resistance to Trump grows, the toothlessness of his meme power also becomes increasingly clear. That this is a form of governance by spectacle should be obvious by now — it’s simply memes all the way down. As such, Trump’s coin isn’t literal; it’s expressed through the currency of the algorithm, showcasing not just neoclassical triumphalism but also the patently Instagrammable — content made for Reels, TikTok, and YouTube shorts. Even more novel, however, is that Trump himself is fundamentally an AI-generated meme; his is the algorithmic presidency. Caesar was a decorated general, but Trump is only the performance of a strongman, a simulacrum of himself — signifier without signified, referent with no reality. Many pundits harp on his so-called erraticism, but Trump is actually supremely predictable. Praise pleases him, criticism is condemned, everything is “tremendous,” “beautiful,” or “great.” The man is all input-and-output, a simple machine. A cult of personality with no personality, no interiority or reflection — a husk, a void, an empty vessel. All that matters is the ever-churning of dangerous and damaging content, as symbolically devalued as the rapidly declining dollar that his handlers want to slap his face on.