Douthat's not saying. Just saying.

Oddly enough, George W. Bush does resemble Cato the Younger, a bit. Image via Barry Strauss. But as far as imperialism goes, there's a reason Mr. Pierce named him our C-Plus Augustus.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "From Obama to Trump", New York Times, February 27 2016:

I'm not saying Trump is all Obama's fault, but I can think of about a million reasons for saying it, and they're ever so intellectual-sounding. I'm just saying.

Because he's so saddened, right, by the Democrats' unseemly glee at the Republican pickle, or fear of what might happen if the Trumpster succeeds. Think it's funny, don't you, liberals? Or inspires you with terror?

What it hasn’t inspired is much in the way of self-examination, or a recognition of the way that Obama-era trends in liberal politics have helped feed the Trump phenomenon.

Yes, we have to ask ourselves what we have done to encourage the Donald and Donaldism. Look into your heart, libs!

Not that Republicans aren't to blame, in a manner of speaking, for their own share, which includes the "cratering" of the George W. Bush presidency, the way the party "alternated between stoking and ignoring working-class grievances", and the party's failure to stop him up to now. No doubt you shouldn't have cratered that presidency. I'm not sure what the second one means, but if it's a euphemism for "encouraged the development of racist rage among middle-aged and under-educated white men without really intending to satisfy their demands", I can give you that one.

On the other hand Trump's not even interested in our voters. What am I supposed to have done?

President Obama didn’t give us Trump in any kind of Machiavellian or deliberate fashion. But it isn’t an accident that this is the way the Obama era ends — with a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.

Ah well, looks like we've already gotten to peak Douthat, and it's only the third graf. I'm not saying he did it on purpose, but he did it, and it's not an accident. Just saying.

And how, pray, did the president inadvertently but not entirely without advertence give us Trump?

First, the reality TV element in Trump’s campaign is a kind of fun-house-mirror version of the celebrity-saturated Obama effort in 2008. 

Are you saying Trump's celebrities are fat? No, it's that the Obama campaign had

The quasi-religious imagery and rhetoric, the Great Man iconography and pillared sets, the Oprah endorsement and Will.i.am music video and the Hollywood stars pledging allegiance — it was presidential politics as one part Aaron Sorkin-scripted liturgy, one part prestige movie’s Oscar campaign.

Which all corresponds precisely to

the nearly-inevitable next step: presidential politics as a season of “Survivor” or, well, “The Apprentice,” with the same celebrity factor as Obama’s ’08 run, but with his campaign’s high-middlebrow pretensions stripped away.

It's nearly inevitable!

Then, Trump is

also proving, in his bullying, overpromising style, that voters are increasingly habituated to the idea of an ever more imperial presidency— which is also a trend that Obama’s choices have accelerated. Having once campaigned against his predecessor’s power grabs, the current president has expanded executive authority along almost every dimension: launching wars without congressional approval, claiming the power to assassinate American citizens, and using every available end-around to make domestic policy without any support from Congress.

Expanded his executive authority left and right, up and down, forwards and backwards in time. I'm pretty sure he has never launched a war without congressional approval, while vainly begging Congress to make its voice heard every time he does embark on some military action, and never claimed the power to assassinate American citizens (that Greenwaldish way of putting it is seriously distorting: the administration obtained a legal opinion that it's permissible to target-kill enemy combatants believed to be in the act of mounting terrorist operations from foreign war zones, including when they are US citizens; the president can't order the killing of anybody not an enemy combatant, regardless of citizenship). I'm very glad he has found those "end-arounds" (as the expression suggests, entirely legal maneuvers) to enable government to do something as the legislature sits in its room paralyzed by severe obsessive-compulsive disorder passing the same unworkable bill over and over again. Sorry to be a bore about this.

Which makes it altogether fitting — if deeply unfortunate — that his reward is the rise of a right-wing Caesarist whose authoritarian style and outrageous promises makes George W. Bush look like Cato the Younger.

Because the one of the two things Trump and Obama have in common (the other being their insistence on not cutting Social Security) is their rejection of the single most imperial moment in American history since the conquest of the Philippines, George W. Bush's inexplicable personal decision to seize Iraq ("He tried to kill my dad!"). You keep using this word, "imperial", I do not think, etc., etc.

2008 Democratic convention, with Doric columns, via Tom Hoopes, link below, August 31 2015. According to whom Trump said, "I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created," and Obama "promised seven times to create 7 million jobs". Not only that, but Obama had two Doric columns, and a lot of columns were written about Trump's Two Corinthians. Of course I made that one up. But is it a coincidence? I think not.

A search for a picture of Obama's Greek-column speech leads me to a polemic at a website called Catholic Voter from last August, asking, "Is Trump the New Obama? Ways They Are Alike":

People complain that Trump is a clown from reality TV. But that has not been a negative for presidents from the time Clinton appeared on the Arsenio Hall show to Obama and his buzzfeed selfie stick.  And don’t forget that Obama’s White House lit itself up with rainbow colors to celebrate the redefinition of marriage and tweeted a “Straight Outta Compton” meme to sell his Iran deal …

No, it's not as sophisticated as the Monsignor. But do you suppose that's where he picked up the idea? I'm not saying crank conservative Catholic websites are responsible for Ross Douthat. That's obviously the fault of the liberals, and chunky Reese Witherspoons, who have driven him into his curious condition. But I think crank conservative Catholics need to ask themselves some hard questions. Just saying.

Then again, Ron Fournier thinks this is the best column ever; see Driftglass. Also, Steve M reminds us that Obama couldn't come close to the celebrity saturation we got in the 1980s under the president of whom Douthat once wrote,

Reagan was a politician who channeled conservative populism without letting it consume him, who was guided by ideology without being imprisoned by it, and who worked, mostly successfully, in the zone where right-wing populism and middle American anxiety overlapped. And that balancing act, rather than the defeat of right-wing populism by the forces of the K Street and their out-of-touch champions, seems like what both the right and the country need again today.

And Susan of Texas gives him Hell (capped because I mean it more or less literally, this is some very high-class invective).

UPDATE: Last time the Monsignor floated the idea of Obama as Roman Empire, November 2014, I got pretty pissed off, and wrote about at some length. Just so you don't think I'm short of ideas on the subject.