22 March 2023

Should Trump Be Crucified?

 He certainly deserves it.  But the tl;dr answer is no.

The ancient Romans mostly reserved their most horrible punishment for what they deemed the most serious crime: Sedition against Rome.  Crucifixion was the worst way to die that they could think of, and they were very inventive.  The person is suspended by their outstretched arms so that in order to draw breath, they were working against their own weight.  Eventually, they would suffocate, but it would often take days.  They'd often add several other non-fatal injuries to make it even more painful, and to attract scavengers, which would begin picking the victim apart while still alive when they realized he couldn't resist.  Once the person died, they'd be left up there for all to see, as the scavengers completed their work.  To a Roman, a proper burial was important to their idea of afterlife, so this was a fate worse than death.  It was a reminder, often left standing for years, that loyalty was important and enforced.

History has undermined much of the meaning of this.  Part of it was done by the Romans themselves, by applying the punishment occasionally to crimes other than sedition and by tolerating the punishment to be weakened, most often by killing the victim early or by allowing the family to remove the body and give it a proper burial.  Jesus benefited from both of these.  The story of Jesus has also resulted in the punishment being connected with martyrdom.  Modern passion plays sometimes have a willing victim crucified, although generally not for long enough to kill them.  Jesus was purportedly convicted of sedition, but what the actual act of sedition might have been has been lost or possibly suppressed.  The Romans were actually pretty tolerant of alternate religions; it's unlikely they'd have crucified Jesus based on the story we're told.  (one possibility: there were actual bands of seditionists in the holy land doing terrorism to try to make the Romans abandon their colony.  It's certainly possible that Jesus was involved with one of these in some way.)

Donald Trump has been our very worst president.  He is amazingly corrupt, and what little he actually did accomplish was deeply counterproductive.  His handling of the virus probably killed half a million americans more than a competent handling would have, and several times that world wide, and has led to the virus becoming intractable, where a better response might have been able to suppress it.   His support of Putin and other autocrats has given them freedom to suppress their populations and kill their neighbors.  His tax cut had no positive effects at all, and made the deficit much larger.  His deregulation has resulted a significant bank panic and several environmental disasters.   His judicial nominees have proven to be shockingly corrupt. He openly leaked highly classified documents to his Russian allies and stole  hundreds more--possibly planning to use them to buy safe passage once US authorities caught up with him.  And he attempted to overturn a fair election in several different ways to stay in office.  Sedition.

Trump is exactly the guy that crucifixion was intended for, and my gut really wants to see him tortured to death this way, as a punishment for him and as a warning for all the mini-Trumps who might like to continue his misdeeds.  But my head reminds me that cruelty like that would lower me to his level...the 8th amendment got it right.  No cruel or unusual punishments, no matter how terrible the crime.  But we need to actually punish this guy, and soon, or his imitators will not be intimidated.