Trump isn't a dictator, try as he might

JULIUS CAESAR still casts a long shadow. We have a 12-month calendar — and leap year — thanks to Julius. July is named after him (though the salad isn’t). The words “czar” and “kaiser,” now mostly out of use, simply meant “Caesar.”

- JONAH GOLDBERG

We also can thank Caesar for the durability of the term “dictator.” He wasn't the first Roman dictator, just the most infamous one. In the Roman Republic, the title and authority of “dictator” was occasionally granted by the Senate to an individual to deal with a big problem or emergency. Usually, the term would last no more than six months — shorter if the crisis was dealt with — because the Romans detested anything that smacked of monarchy.

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon (where we get that phrase), his enemies in the Senate fled. So, the remaining senators named him dictator for 11 days to hold fresh elections. His second dictatorship was set for 10 years, and then finally he was named dictator for life.

In the centuries that followed Caesarism, not dictatorship, was the real dirty word, at least for lovers of liberty.

Even in America, dictator still had some of that “emergency problem-solver” connotation. During the Great Depression, many Americans craved just such a man. Legendary liberal columnist Walter Lippmann wrote at the dawn of the Great Depression, “A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the roughest spots in the road ahead.”