Tate Brown slams Senate Republicans for blocking the SAVE Act—despite 50 votes and VP JD Vance’s tiebreaker—calling Jon Thune a stalling "Decline Inc. manager" while mocking Ted Cruz and Thom Tillis as incompetent on immigration. Guest Jeremy Ryan Slate draws parallels to Rome’s third-century collapse, citing the Federal Reserve (1913), 15,000% inflation by 284 AD, and Valerian’s capture by Shapur I as a "footstool" symbol of empire overreach. He warns America’s trajectory—monetary debasement, border chaos, and elite fragmentation—mirrors Rome’s gradual decline unless constitutional checks are restored. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Tate Brown here holding it down, and I'm very pleased to announce we're not jumping straight into a live stream this time.
The last two installations of the Tim Cast News Live Show, we've taken you straight to a press conference or something along the lines featuring President Trump.
Well, today we're actually going to get right in.
We're going to have some stories.
It's going to be a beautiful time, a beautiful time.
It's going to be business as usual, which I love.
I'm very happy to report because these last few days have been so wacky and wild.
I don't know if you're much of a wonk, if you consider yourself a politico or not, but if you've been really keeping a close eye on the news, again, this hasn't been in the front pages or anything.
No one's really talking about it.
But again, if you kind of go back page and usually dive in, take a look, you have seen that we've gone to war with Iran.
It's pretty interesting.
So that's been dominating, obviously, the entire zeitgeist.
I'm just being a little sarcastic there.
Dominating the Zeitgeist.
And it's a really tricky situation to be in as a political commentator, I guess you would, that's what I would technically classify as.
Because there's almost like pressure on you to develop a new take, right?
Like everyone's on there giving their take.
Everyone's giving their take on the situation.
And it's just really difficult because it's, I talked about it with Doyle yesterday, John Doyle, Patriot.
It's one of those things where it's like, I'm against this, but it's happening.
So there's not really much you can do.
Now you just have to evaluate the ways out, the off-ramps, and that sort of thing.
So it's a tough position to be in because I really don't have any super fiery, you know, fiery, hot, nuclear takes on the whole situation.
I'm just kind of like, we need a little time to let this simmer to really kind of gauge where the Trump admins' head's at.
Because, you know, there's a lot of people that I really like and I really trust that are geopolitical analysts or truly true politicos.
And they're all sort of disagreeing on outcome possibilities on where the Trump administration's head is at specifically, what the goals are.
Very complicated situation.
So with that, we are going into a normal show today, which is good.
We have quite a few stories, but I do have the lead.
Obviously, the lead is over the SAVE Act.
Again, Jon Thune, total coward, which is just, it's just typical of the Senate at this point.
Total coward.
The SAVE Act has been sitting on his desk and he refuses to do anything about it.
It because he has priorities like housing acts, like quite literally prioritizing like a housing act that no one cares about over the Save Act, which in many ways does make or break future elections.
It is a very monumental bill, and it's just sitting on his desk and it's stonewalled, it's blackwalled.
Betting markets, polymarket, calci, no matter where you look, they have the odds of this becoming law in 2026 at about 15%.
So this isn't likely to pass at this point.
It's just the reality of the situation.
I'm not saying that the black bill, this is why maximum pressure needs to be put on these senators, but it's very, very disappointing for a variety of reasons.
Jon Thune is just almost purposely spiking the bill.
That's what that's the only way it can really come off as I mean.
He's paying it lip service.
He's done this to everything.
He pays the entire Trump agenda lip service.
And when it actually comes time to passing any legislation that would support the Trump project, Trump's policy goals, nowhere to be seen.
Just disappears and he comes up with excuses.
So we'll get into all that.
We'll get into Iran.
Specific happening regarding Iran was kind of interesting was regarding insurance underwriting.
I know that you may be thinking, like, oh, that's kind of boring.
That doesn't sound too interesting.
Well, it's actually a huge geopolitical play.
Many are speculating that Trump did this on purpose.
Again, this is kind of the classic debate surrounding Trump.
Was it 40 chess or was it he just had good instincts and then he got a favorable outcome from a decision he made?
It's hard to tell.
But again, insurance underwriting, I'll tell you, I'll explain really.
Well, I'll have someone explain that's a bit more of an expert on insurance underwriting than I am why this is such a big deal.
We had a few more happenings in regards to Iran, a bit of Kino, and then we have some reactions we could get to if we have time.
And we will be joined at the half hour mark.
I wanted to switch it up today because it's been very Iran heavy and everyone in the Munt Rumble lineup today is talking Iran, giving all the takes.
I wanted to give you guys a break.
Seeing as I am on Eastern time, this is the time with a lot of people.
A lot of people are on their lunch break at the noon hour.
I'm aware that a lot of you guys watch the show on your lunch break.
So for the half hour mark, I wanted to go a little more interesting direction.
He is kind of an expert on Rome, the Roman Empire, and tying America back to Rome, where we are in that timeline, these sorts of things, sort of the equivalences, and where that comparison kind of breaks down.
He really is a pro on this topic.
So I'll be bringing him in at the half hour mark.
I'm just going to make sure everything is sorted there.
So with that, we're going to get into our stories today.
I think I got all the housekeeping out of the way.
I think we're good.
Yes.
I'm a little, I don't know what's going.
There's something going around in the DC area.
Like, I have producer Andrew in the house today.
Producer Andrew is holding it down for the producer's chair.
Um, producer Callan's down for the count.
I don't know what's going on, but like Callan has got super sick.
I'm hearing rumors, reports that other people are getting sick.
I don't know what's going on.
Um, I'm feeling a little weird, I'll say a little wacky and wild.
So, uh, who knows what's going on?
Who knows what's going on?
We need maybe a new round of vaccines, maybe I think would be a solution here.
So, with that, I think an actual cure could be Cast Brew Coffee.
I'm not a doctor, I'm not getting this medical advice, but I am confident that Cast Brew probably could cure just about any disease known to man.
I would recommend personally the Appalachian Knights.
The Appalachian Knights are really a serious, seriously good blend of coffee.
Big fan of it.
This is the really intriguing product that is new on the block.
This is the new kid on the block.
It is the Cast Brew Vaults Black.
Now, this is really interesting stuff.
This is Cold Brew Concentrate.
So, it's this really concentrated formula of coffee that you can then mix with whatever you would like to produce sort of a cold brew beverage of your choice.
So, this is really an interesting product.
I'd seen this elsewhere.
I was very excited that we were getting into the cold brew concentrate game, and I think we do it better than anybody.
I've sampled it myself.
It's really some exciting stuff.
So, I'd recommend grabbing a bottle of listen to see what you think because I don't know if you've seen this stock.
It's getting a little low, it's getting a little low.
So, make sure you grab yourself a bottle of Cast Brew Vault Black or whatever else you want, whatever you see on the store that catches your eye.
A lot of these are selling out, you know, a lot of these favorites here, like the Timpool Blueprint Collection, the 28th Amendment.
But we still got stickers, we got a flag, slap, classic t-shirt.
What else do we got?
The Don't Be Gay board is still we got plenty of those sitting around.
Um, so maybe uh consider grabbing that.
Uh, the B Gay board just seems to be dominating.
I don't know what it is, it's very interesting.
So, with that, we're gonna get into the Save Act.
This is really pissing me off, um, as it is everyone else.
Every American Patriot is a bit frustrated by this.
Matt Walsh put good commentary up.
So, the situation that we're looking at right now: Save Act is sitting on Jonathan's desk.
He hasn't even introduced it for a vote yet.
He claims two things he was claiming: his first excuse was we didn't have enough yeses.
Well, now we do.
Now, we have 50 yeses.
Susan Collins, about a week and a half ago, said she's going to vote.
She's going to co-sponsor the bill.
She's going to vote yes.
So, that gives us 50 votes.
The three holdouts are the three people that Murkowski is the only person that says, No, I'm not voting for it.
So, that leaves you at 52.
That leaves you John Curtis from Utah, who's like a coward.
He sucks, so I wouldn't bank on him.
And Mitch McConnell out of Kentucky.
And Mitch McConnell's reasoning is like just retarded.
He's like, oh, well, the federal government shouldn't be handling elections.
It should be state by state.
Again, he's like 80, so I don't expect, or he's like 90.
He's really old.
So, I don't expect him to have any wherewithal of thinking long term because he can't, because he's going to die any minute now.
So, this is why he can't think in terms of like, what will this country look like after I die?
No, he's just concerned about like his autistic policy positions.
He could never concede on them because he's a man of principle, and principles is all that matters.
He just has zero understanding of what time it is, zero understanding that we're swirling the drain as a country, zero understanding that we likely won't have a country very soon if we don't start taking drastic measures.
He is just a senior manager of the Decline Inc. of the United States.
So, sick and tired of these people, but that still leaves us with 50 senators.
So, if this bill were to be introduced and it could progress to a vote, it would pass.
It would be 50 votes plus Vice President JD Vance being the tiebreaker, Save Acts, and sent to Trump's desk.
It would be a very beautiful thing.
And it's not terribly complicated.
The only thing that you would really so we get the 50 votes.
We get the Susan Collins on board.
Who knows what we gave her, by the way?
That's kind of the no one's answering me.
I'm asking all my people in DC.
No one's giving me an answer on what we gave Susan Collins.
I have no idea.
Some people have speculated it was we promised to cool down ICE operations in Maine.
I don't know if that's true, but I've heard this from a few people that would know.
But I've also heard from some other people that they just promised to back her in our next election.
So either or, that seems like whatever.
This is small potatoes compared to the Save Act.
If this is what it takes to get this thing across the finish line, I'm all for it.
But so we get the 50 votes, and then Thun comes out with a new excuse.
He's saying, Well, we can't get around the filibuster.
And then everyone immediately says, Well, you could just do a talking filibuster.
The Democrats will eventually break if you do a talking filibuster.
We do this.
This happens.
This is not an unusual thing to happen.
And he just has been dragging his feet.
His excuse for not sort of utilizing the talking filibuster is he says, Well, this would also require all 50 Republicans that are yeses on it to not crack.
So his solution is because there's a chance that a Republican might flake, which who knows if that would happen.
So far, they're all endorsing or co-sponsoring the bill.
So his solution to that is just let the bill die.
That's his solution.
That's his brilliant 40-chess solution from John Thune: well, I'm not entirely sure.
There's a small chance that the Republican majority might, you know, crack during the talking filibuster.
So therefore, I'm going to kill the bill and ensure it has zero chance of passing.
That is his actual solution.
Total joke.
And then it gets worse and worse and worse.
John Thune, again, just At best, just a scared man.
At worst, a bonehead.
I would assume that people that are in the Senate are not actually idiots because they've made it to the Senate.
It's probably actually very high IQ people.
They're lawyers and these sorts of things.
It almost makes it worse is they know what they're doing and then they're just charging forward with this ridiculous theorizing.
Jon Thun then, now we're going into the Passover Easter cycle.
There's typically, if you look at the calendar, the Senate calendar that was published at the beginning of the year, at the end of March and early April, it is marked for a recess, right?
It is marked for the senators to be able to go back to their districts, do whatever they want.
Obviously, Easter, Passover.
It's whatever.
That happens every year.
He's calling it early, and it's not a total recess.
So if it was a total recess, right?
A full-blown recess, then Trump could start at least getting some of his appointees through the door.
Recess appointments, right?
So like, again, we go into a full recess.
That gives Trump the opportunity because if we're not going to get our legislation passed, we might as well get something out of this.
So go into a full recess, send everyone home, and then Trump can start doing some recess appointments.
We have a lot of great guys that are still waiting to take their gig, a year and some change into the Trump administration.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
Instead, he does this half-baked measure where he's like, I want to leave the door open to negotiations just in case the Democrats change their mind.
Like, are we new around?
Are you new around here?
Is it seriously?
Is this what we're holding out for?
We're holding out for about the Democrats to come to their senses.
You know, like, what they're going to wake up.
Is that seriously what you're expecting?
So he's like, I want to leave the door cracked for a negotiation.
So what we're going to do is we're going to have these like hour-long meetings, like every three days in the Senate where like a few senators will get together and they'll have a chat on the Senate floor.
And that will technically keep the Senate open.
You know, despite the fact that DHS is being held up, DHS funding is being held up by the Democrats.
Despite the fact that we have the SAVE Act sitting on his desk, despite the fact that Trump can't get any of his appointees through.
Despite all that, he's taken the worst possible solution, which is just like ensure that we simultaneously can't pass legislation while also guaranteeing that Trump can't get his appointees through.
So he's like taking the worst of both worlds.
He's taken the do-nothing option.
That's what's happening here.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
And his reason, he keeps talking to the, I don't know why he keeps talking to the press because he has like nothing to say.
Because he's like clearly just like making excuse after excuse after excuse, blaming everything on the Democrats.
It's like, we know you're ilk.
We know how Republican senators are.
You could claw back some dubs here if you would like.
Instead, all he can really muster up the strength to do is try to ram through a housing act, which like helps poor people buy houses.
That's the priority right now.
We're at war with Iran.
We have an entire mass deportation apparatus that's being held up because the Democrats are blocking DHS funding.
We have the SAVE Act, which could potentially guarantee Republican electoral victory for generations.
We have all these fantastic Trump appointees that are just sitting on the bench because they can't take their job because they can't get through the Senate.
And your solution is, and your priority among all of those, your priority is a housing act.
Is that seriously what we're doing here?
A housing act.
So it's an absolute joke.
I'm just sick.
I'm just really, I'm just sick and tired of these people.
This is why I'm so avidly pro-Trump and why a lot of people get critical of me as they say, well, you cut Trump too much slack because these are his teammates.
This is who he has to deal with.
The fact that every great thing, the Trump administration, the second term is a strong record so far.
I know now is not a popular time to say that because of the whole Iran debacle.
But if you look, he's done a good job.
He's doing a good job, I'd say a great job on a lot of things, on a lot of topics, or a lot of issues, but none of it has been done traditionally.
This is all being done through the executive branch.
This is all being done by the executive branch.
And the problem is if heaven forbid something happens in 28, the Republicans lose, a lot of this can get overturned.
A lot of this can get undone fairly quickly by the next Democrat president.
Because again, it's all being done at the executive level.
Again, mass deportations, if you can get enough out, they can just bring a lot of legals back in because the executive has a lot of control over immigration policy and these sorts of things.
This is where Congress is to step up.
And we're not asking them to go above and beyond and be leaders.
Trust me, we would not ask them to be leaders.
We would not ask them to have any backbone.
We just want them to rubber stamp the Trump agenda.
That's all we're asking.
Hey, your job is just rubber stamp the Trump agenda.
Because I don't know if you guys notice, whenever Trump's not on the ballot, you guys get smacked.
Like we're about to get popped in the midterms.
Trump's not on the ballot.
No one in America cares about the Republican Party.
And the worst is the senators that think people like them.
Like Ted Cruz, Ted Cruz is the worst because the difference between Ted Cruz and like John Thun or like Tom Phyllis is Tom Phyllis and John and John Curtis and John Thune, they all understand that they're a senator and everyone hates them.
They kind of understand that.
That's why they don't bother trying to start podcasts.
That's why they don't try to like, you know, appeal to like Americans or try to like, you know, LARP like they're one of us.
I actually kind of respect that they know everyone hates them and so they just act like slime balls.
Kind of respect that actually, because Ted Cruz is way worse.
Ted, he's got like a mullet and like he's going on podcasts and like he's trying to like LARP like he's one of us and and then you go and look at how he actually what his actual positions are and it's like literally the positions you would expect from a Democrat 15 years ago like that's three did you see where he was on I don't have the clip up because this is a tirade here Did you see the clip where he was talking to local news in Texas and he's like my and he and he does this like he just hams up this like totally fake Texas accent.
It's the worst, and he and he goes.
You know my immigration policy is really simple, illegal bad legal, good.
And I'm sitting there like hey hey Ted, I know you're.
You know, you know you got your like LARP going on.
Have you been to Dallas recently?
Have you been to the DFW recently?
I don't know if you noticed the place looks like a you know, a refugee camp there.
It is not American anymore, there's Indians everywhere and you're learning about new countries, countries you've never even heard of, and there's like a million of them there everywhere you go.
It's, it's horrendous.
And those people didn't come in here illegally, right?
Texans are actually pretty used to Mexicans, believe it or not, because they've been around each other for 200 300, 400 years.
Tajanos have been in the country for quite a long time.
So Mexicans like you see them in Texas and they don't really seem out of place.
You know this isn't to say this, is to say they should all, like all illegal um immigrants, regardless of where they're from, should be deported bar none.
I'm really tired of the excuses um, but it is to say like Mexicans in Texas is not like the most shocking, surprising thing to see um.
Granted, they've come at a really high volume over the last 34 years and they're changing a lot of places.
That is true.
But it's to say that Texans aren't necessarily caught off guard.
If they walk down, you know, they walk into a shop and everyone's Mexican.
It's not like that surprising for a Texan.
Maybe it would be for someone in Illinois or someone in New York or even someone in North Carolina, but it's not for Texans, and that's that's mostly pertaining to illegal immigration, now legal immigration.
This is where people start coming in from India, they start coming in from the Philippines, they start coming in from Nigeria.
Very foreign, very foreign.
They do not have any desire to assimilate.
Maybe there's exceptions, but I say it on the show all the time.
Exceptions don't disprove the norm.
They're every and they're everywhere.
They're literally building giant monkey statues in Texas, these giant, you know, 40 foot tall statues of like monkey gods.
I guess, like you know, Indians worship like A monkey or something.
Who knows what's going on?
I don't really care, quite frankly.
It's all false.
Hinduism is completely false anyway, so I'm not particularly like concerned on which animal they're worshiping on which day.
They got this giant monkey statue, and they're and I'm just and then Ted, all he can say, all he can say to his constituents in Texas who are seeing this, who are upset by this, everyone's talking about it, even like moderate people.
I know people from Texas that are as moderate, I think Mitt Romney was like far right.
And they're even saying, Yeah, I don't know.
My kids' school is just full of Indians and Arab people.
If the same people are coming to the United States, but they've done it legally, are you okay with that now?
Is the problem simply like the procedure?
Is that your issue?
It's a procedural issue.
But if the exact same people come, but now they have like a stamp on their passport and they're like in the country correctly, you're good at that?
Seriously?
The whole issue is the people.
That's the whole issue.
I don't really care how they came.
If like 100,000 people came from Norway illegally, I don't think I'd have too big of an issue with that.
I would say, okay, maybe you should go back and get it done the right way.
But they wouldn't really cause any problems and I wouldn't really notice them, you know, because they would, they're fairly similar to us.
They would kind of fly under the radar.
I'd probably notice their accent, but they would assimilate very quickly.
It's pretty easy for people from similar cultures to assimilate.
Versus, let's just do a hypothetical.
Okay, let's just do a hypothetical.
100,000 Danish people, maybe not, we have an axe of grind with us now.
100,000 Dutch people, right?
100,000 Dutch people versus 1 million Indian people.
Now, you may be saying, okay, that's easy.
The 100,000 Dutch people.
That's a no-brainer.
100,000 Dutch people coming illegally versus 1 million Indian people coming legally.
Oh, now this is a real tongue.
This is a real, you know, kind of boggles the mind.
This is kind of, because you're thinking, well, of course I want the Indians.
You know, this is what you're thinking because I care about the legal process.
No, you're not.
You're lying.
You're like, you're mentally captured if you're thinking that way.
You're letting the Ted Cruz neocon mass migration, Koch brothers open borders proposal thinking pollute your brain.
Of course not.
Because we all know, we all know what's going on here.
We all know that these people have a really tough time assimilating the United States.
This isn't to say that like they're inferior.
This isn't to say that like they're like not the same value as human life.
I'm not saying any of that.
I'm just saying when you're conducting your immigration policy, you need to base it off of trends.
You need to base it off of predictable outcomes.
You need to base it off of data.
And the reality is, the further culturally these countries are from us, the more difficult of a time they have assimilating.
Exhibit A. Go to Nick Shirley's YouTube channel and see what the Somalis are up to in Minneapolis.
This is not complicated stuff.
It's really not complicated stuff.
This is what pisses me off.
This is what you see.
Tom Phyllis, senator from North Carolina, you know, unbelievable.
He goes, he just loses it at Kirsty Gnome.
And he just, you want to know why he's doing this, by the way.
John Curtis, same thing.
John Kerner Senator from Utah.
Total idiot.
Total joke.
The reason why they're crashing out like this, when's the last time we saw Tom Phyllis crash out?
Most of you probably never heard of the guy, Tom Tillis.
I'm not even getting his name pronounced right.
Tom Tillis.
A lot of you probably haven't even heard of the guy.
Even I probably, a lot of North Carolina haven't even heard of the guy.
But then all of a sudden, now he's this renegade and he's challenging kind of the conventional conservative assumptions.
You don't want to know why?
Because he's retiring, so he doesn't have to appeal to you anymore.
Now he doesn't even need your vote, so we can let it fly what he actually thinks.
And this is what this Joker actually thinks.
Take a look at this.
Good.
So this guy is just a total, total joke.
That's like, drop the southern accent and get it, make it a little gayer.
You're basically watching a Hassan Piker stream.
That's effectively what you're watching right there.
I mean, am I wrong, Producer Andrew?
No, he's not even not wrong.
Because it was like literally lived hard boilerplate that he was just spouting off.
Oh, you're creating a culture of evil in your, and you're creating this culture where immigrants are scared.
They're scared for their lives because Stephen Miller's just so obsessed with deporting a lot of people when he should care about quality.
We want quality deportations.
That's not what we asked.
That's not what any of us asked for.
Go back to the RNC.
What do the signs say?
They say mass deportations now.
Not really high-quality deportations now.
We've already, we've had that.
We've had high-quality deportations for a while now.
Rosie O'Donnell got deported to Ireland.
Like, we've gotten some high-quality deportations.
Ellen DeGeneres she got shipped off to England we've got we're good we got the hype And to be serious, like, even the Democrat administrations would still arrest, like, the top-shelf illegals that were, like, really a problem.
Like, they're killing a lot of people because it would start to cause problems for them electorally.
Like, even the Democrats understood quality deportations.
That's not what we're, that's not what we don't.
That's not what we care about.
Tom, you don't even spell Tom right.
You spelled an H.
That just shows you, that tells you everything you know about this guy.
You can't even spell Tom right.
His name's Thom.
Thomm Tillis.
Like, I got a lit, like I'm Daffy Duck.
I don't want this guy in Senate.
This guy doesn't represent me.
Total joke.
What do you mean?
Quality matters.
How about we deport really violent criminals and illegals?
Because they're all high-quality deportation.
Well, they're all low-quality people if they're coming in the country illegally.
We do it live, and then when you guys see this upload go up later on YouTube, we work some fancy, we get some fancy camera tricks going, and then it's like we jumped in like nothing ever happened.
So I am the CEO of a company called Command Your Brand.
And for the past decade, we've been helping our clients to be on the right podcast out there.
My master's is actually in early Roman Empire propaganda.
And for the last decade, I've been talking about something I call the Roman pattern, the three things that cause civilizations to collapse, monetary debasement, immigration, and loss of ethics.
So I think there's definitely a lot to talk about there.
Well, I guess a good place to start maybe would just be: what do you think the Trump 2, specifically the Trump second admin, where does this tie into?
What does it remind you of?
Because, I mean, I know a bit of Roman history, but I'm really still a novice.
I would say, compared to even a lot of people in the space, you know, and I hear people constantly, it's almost like a trope at this point where they compare us to Rome.
But can you maybe break down specifically where we are at this moment and how this does tie in or possibly where there actually is like a detachment as well?
And when you look at Rome, people very often want to make the comparisons to Trump and Sulla and a lot of like kind of what Sulla did after, you know, the Marian reforms and Marius holds seven consulships and whatever it might be.
But honestly, I don't know that it's a direct translation.
And I tend to look at because if you look at Sulla, Sulla's part of the Roman Republic, whereas the empire is kind of the later stage.
And for America, I really look at us becoming an empire many, many years ago.
I look at 1913 as a very pivotal year because there's three things that happened that year.
The Federal Reserve, the 17th Amendment, which is actually something Tim's talked about quite a bit, where state legislatures are no longer selecting senators, are selected by popular vote.
So the Senate and the House essentially do the same thing.
And the other being the income tax amendment as well.
So if you kind of look at that, we've been in a very much empire stage for a long time.
So, I don't know if there's a direct comparison empire-wise to what's happening with Trump too.
But if I've looked at a lot of the patterns that we see, the thing that I do see is America where it is now is very similar to where Rome was in its third century crisis.
And in the third century crisis, the thing we don't have is we don't have military commanders declaring themselves president and attacking each other.
But we do have a lot of the core components where they had inflation by 284 is at 15,000%.
They were no longer able to control their borders because there was so much infighting.
And they were really in the downslide of an empire.
So I do see some of those things with where we are now.
But as I said, history doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme in a lot of ways.
Well, this is interesting because, you know, typically when people talk about Rome sort of going from republic to empire, they often point to this moment.
They say now is the moment where America is shifting from a republic into a full-fledged empire.
Maybe this occurred in the last 20, 30 years.
So that's really interesting that you point back to the early 20th century as that moment where that occurred.
I guess because people look at the pure sort of just the post-Cold War, like unipolar moment that we're in, and they maybe point to that as why that's why, you know, this is truly the moment we became this all-encompassing empire.
But that's why I look at executive power is kind of the main reason I'm looking at that because if you look at, you know, the way America is set up, we're supposed to have three co-equal branches of government.
But if you look at since Woodrow Wilson and later FDR is even bigger than that, the executive positions continued to centralize and centralize and centralize.
And if you look at even Trump, you look at Biden, you look at Obama and even Bush, they're mainly ruling by executive order, which, you know, as much as I liked a lot of what Trump did and tried to do in the first term and some of what he's tried to do here, I don't love that he's ruling by executive order because that's not how the government's supposed to function.
It is very much more of an emperor type role compared to an executive type role.
Yeah, I mean, that was the point I made in the opening monologue regarding, you know, John Thune holding up the Save Act and just conducting affairs just really sloppily.
And I'm like, I mean, I'm a huge, you know, Trump shill, quite frankly, but seeing we're in this stage where I'm like, if a Democrat, God forbid, you know, were to win in 28, a good chunk of the Trump agenda gets rolled up within a few months because a lot of this just is not being codified by the Republican majority.
Well, that's the problem you get is each administration rolls back the dictates of the previous administration because there's no actually law holding it in place.
They were saying this happened in Rome where you got to this point where it was very unstable, where you just had emperors and leaders broadly across the empire just contradicting their predecessor, power struggles, these sorts of things.
And it just became very unclear to the population, you know, what direction is this actually going.
How agile can we even be as far as policymaking, as far as conquest and these sorts of things?
The thing I'll say is, as I said, it's not a direct comparison because the issue you see in the third century is you see emperors that are basically military commanders deciding they're an emperor, raising an army, attacking someone else and declaring themselves emperor.
So from 235 to 284, you have at least, and there's likely more from some of the coinage they've started finding, but at least 26 different emperors in that time period of about 50 years.
So there is a lot of turnover.
And what it becomes is it's not who has the most political power, who has the most qualifications for the job, but it's whoever has the biggest army.
But we do see the way, even with the groups like Antifa and a lot of the rioting and things that we see on the ground, there is a lot of political fractioning right now.
It is something that's definitely happening.
But if you want to go even earlier, even Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire says if you wanted to look at kind of the most prosperous time to live, it's during what's called the time of the five good emperors.
And the thing that's different about those five, so that starts in 96 with Nerva.
So it's Nerva, Antonine, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, who's the last one.
And Aurelius breaks that and names his son Commodus to be the next emperor.
The thing that they did is they chose the best politically qualified person to be the next emperor rather than their son, because it kind of gives you a mixed bag of emperors.
And the rule of Commodus is what Gibbon says takes the empire and takes it from one of marble to one of steel and rust.
Because the rule of Commodus that ends in 192, it's what's called the year of the five emperors.
And the last one that comes out of it is a guy named Septimius Severus.
And he's a general, and he basically attacks Rome, declares himself emperor, removes the Praetorian Guard, puts in a new Praetorian Guard.
And that model is going to be what every emperor after that point is going to use to get power.
Raise a military, double their pay, give them more things than you could imagine.
And it's what's going to really fuel inflation a lot faster.
So it is, though it's not a direct comparison, it does show kind of how power starts to disintegrate.
And nobody really knows who's, number one, who's in charge, but number two, what are the actual laws?
There's so many different directions we could go here.
I guess the primary one, I guess we should still hit on because I was saying, you know, sometimes you hear these and they almost seem like cliches.
It's kind of hard to parse through what's actually a true comparison, what's not.
One that I commonly hear that you'll see, you know, publicized quite extensively on like Twitter or Facebook or these sorts of places is they talk about the migration in Rome and how Rome increasingly became less Roman.
And then obviously has a one-to-one with basically every country in the West, specifically the United States.
And then two, I don't know if this one is, I don't know how accurate this one is, but they often refer to sort of a similar welfare arrangement where they talk about that there was sort of a grain subsidy that was provided for a lot of citizens in Rome in the later years.
And that one I'm not as I don't know as much about, so that's why I wanted to ask you.
So there's two brothers, Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus.
Gaius Gracchus had fought in the Punic Wars, and when they're over, he's on his way back to Rome, and he's kind of seeing a lot of the desolation in the countryside as he's coming back to Rome.
So one of the things he does is he institutes the grain roll when he becomes tribune of the plebs.
And he's actually going to be assassinated by being beat to death in the Senate chamber with the stool of a chair.
And this graindle, though, it starts with him and it's going to continue.
And actually, Julius Caesar, when he becomes dictator for life in 46 BC, one of the main things he's going to do is actually take this graindle and systemize it.
So it becomes a lot easier to actually give it out to people.
So all citizens were guaranteed a certain amount of grain.
And actually, one of the most powerful men in Rome was the man in charge of the grain supply.
So that's going to continue to become a problem for Rome because one of the reasons that Rome is able to rise like it is is something called the Roman climate optimum.
They basically had perfect weather from about 200 BC to around 200 AD.
So because of that, there's a lot more of an ability to feed people.
Now, around the 250s, they're going to be experiencing climate change.
And the emperor during that time, Decius, is dealing with barbarians on the borders, climate change, and he says the best solution is to force people to sacrifice to the gods and persecute Christians.
He's trying to restore what's called the peace of the gods, hoping that climate change will end and the barbarians will leave them alone.
Now, obviously, that doesn't work, but you're going to see grain prices doubling, quadrupling.
They're going to continue to go up.
So now this need to feed all of these people becomes a whole lot harder.
And if you want to go a little bit earlier into 212 AD, Emperor Caracalla is trying to basically get money back into the purse because he spent a lot of Rome's money.
So he issues an edict and gives 30 million free people citizenship overnight.
Now, that also would have given them access to the grain dole in addition to what he was trying to get, which is the ability to tax them because their tax percentage would have gone from 5% to 10% by becoming citizens.
So you're going to see that graindle cost now continue to go up.
So that is something that feeding the Roman people becomes a very, very expensive thing to have.
And I know this is something there's a long thread between Elon and Roman helmet guy.
I don't know if you've seen this on X.
That was quite, quite interesting.
And the issue of what is Roman-ness is something that's often been debated because Rome is very cosmopolitan in a lot of ways and has been so for a long time.
You have a lot of the early Italians, when you're looking at the early Republic, that you would say, well, they're Roman.
But then Rome, one of the reasons it's able to expand in the Republic is they don't, when they conquer places, they say, give us soldiers, not taxes early on.
So Rome starts to expand through bringing in armies to actually serve for Rome.
And they would allow a lot of the wealthier classes in those areas to have Roman citizenship and rule the area for Rome.
So what is Roman-ness is something that is hard to debate because it does continue to get watered down as Rome becomes more cosmopolitan.
Now, the thing I'll say is you have these migrations that happen in the third and fourth century from barbarians coming into Roman land.
But one of the things that precedes this is in the 160s, you have what's called the Antonine Plague.
And about 10% is kind of the low end of this of the empire actually dies.
They think it's smallpox.
They're not really sure.
So the population starts to contract because they have that plague.
And then if you go into the 250s, they have another plague called the Cyprian plague.
So the population is collapsing from illness in addition to barbarians being brought into the empire.
So it does become a longer-term problem.
And if you look at how Rome, quote unquote, falls, it's kind of more of a fade out than a fall as kind of the Roman elite become barbarian elite and kind of inherit the same system.
That seems to be where people then tie into the United States the most, right?
It's like the fall, the turnover from Roman elite.
Because I mean, America, you know, I'm an advocate of sort of this heritage American sort of label.
I think it's very useful and I think it's going to help us sort of consolidate policy.
That being said, I can concede that the American identity still is a bit complicated, right?
It's not just like 100% English or 100% French.
Like there's a little more to it.
And it does evolve over time.
You see this throughout the United States.
It does evolve.
It does expand.
You have other groups that are also distinctly American that are within the borders of the United States.
That's where then again, you start to see those comparisons to Rome is, okay, you see the churn of identifiably American elite into identifiably foreign elite.
Again, there's sort of foreign interests in the United States that wield quite a bit of power, these sorts of things.
And I know Tim's actually talked about this on IRL a number of times, where if you look at like the American Revolution as a great example, it's not a one-year or two-year event.
It's generations.
It takes decades to actually get to that moment.
And I think when we write history, we write it in postscript.
We can see that important day.
We can see what happened there.
And we say, well, that's an important day.
But for somebody that lived before the day or after the day, they're a regular person, their life wouldn't have been that much different.
But I think if you're looking at patterns and indicators in the third century, one of the things you start to see is Rome makes agreements with barbarians that had been living on the borders and in the borders, what are called the federati.
And what they would do is they would get sustenance and money from Rome to protect the borders.
What starts to happen is as these emperors are raising armies and fighting each other, they start to care less about those borders.
And they start to break their agreements with those federati on the Roman borders.
So then they start living within Roman territory, not under Roman law, and within their own enclaves.
And I think that's a really interesting comparison to now because as people have less identifiable, I guess, Roman-ness or Americanness in a lot of different ways, and the reason that they're in your place really is for your currency, as your currency starts to collapse, well, what do they have allegiance to?
And I think that's the real problem you have to look at.
Because if your currency is collapsing, and if you look at inflation over the last hundred years, it really is insane.
And as I mentioned in the 280s, Rome's at 15,000% inflation.
So as that currency starts to lack value, the people that are there for the currency, well, they're not going to care about that country anymore because the currency is the reason they're there, right?
So I think that's the real concern to me as people start to kind of form their own enclaves and not really want to be part of the system, right?
Because if you look at Rome, being a cosmopolitan empire for the first 200 to 300 years worked really well because people wanted to be a part of the system.
They valued citizenship.
They valued the currency.
But as those things start to disappear, well, you don't really need the empire anymore.
And I think that's the problem you start to see as the downslide of an empire occurs.
Was there, as far as we can tell, was there awareness among the Roman eliter, maybe even just the Roman public broadly at the time that this was sort of the slow-moving disaster that we, you know, that eventually unfolded?
Or were they kind of asleep at the wheel?
Because that's kind of the situation now in America where it seems like the majority of the population kind of understands there's something wrong if they can't quite articulate it.
But among the public, among the elite, like it's still taking a bit of time to fully wake people up to this issue, what's going on, connecting all the dots.
I mean, Trump obviously does indicate that the majority, maybe it's tipped over into like, yes, this is a problem.
was there any sense of that in rome at the time like or was it well i think i think for regular people you're going to start to see that in the marketplace because one of the problems you have is the currency is going to collapse You have the black market starts to rise, and people actually start trading on regular base metals because they know that coin doesn't have the percentage of gold they were telling you it had or the percentage of silver that it had.
And they know, well, I can trade this number of horses for this number of sheep, and that's fair.
So you do start to see that among regular people where a black market's going to rise.
And in the 280s and 290s, one of the things that Diocletian does as part of his reforms is he actually creates price controls.
And it doesn't work really well.
And it actually fuels the black market even more because people realize those coins aren't really paying for much.
So that is something you see as the rise of a black market to kind of fund the regular people.
Now, the elites, the problem is, and I think this is the most direct comparison to our elites now.
They're just playing musical chairs for whoever's in power now, whoever's going to be in power next.
And I think you look at the way history is written, you can go even earlier to the time of Nero.
Well, people writing during Nero's life loved him, but people that wrote after his life hated him, right?
Because he's no longer here.
He's no longer a threat.
And I think that's what you have to look at is the elites are really oblivious and just grasping for power.
And that's why I look at ethics being a major issue because they start to care less about the future and more about what's power now, what's going to get me money now, and how am I doing in the moment?
And I think a really good example of this is in the late third century in the 270s, Rome actually breaks into three empires.
It breaks into the Gallic Empire in the West, the Central Roman Empire, which is kind of hollowed out, and then the Palmyron Empire in the East.
And then there's a man named Aurelian in 274 that reconquers the West, reconquers the East, puts it all back together, and then his reward is being assassinated.
So this is the issue you start to have is you don't have consistent power by men that actually deserve to be there.
And because if you look at it, and what our founders were trying to do and the way they were trying to do it is they took the best parts of democracy, the best parts of republicanism, and the best parts of monarchy to try and make our system, right?
Because there are benefits to each individual system.
So I think they would be looking at that.
And I'm trying to remember offhand, I think it was Plato that has a theory of political systems and how they break down.
And I think if you look at that, it's a really good description of kind of where we're going and how things are going.
Because we're not really a functional republic in a lot of ways anymore.
And democracies can generally become tyrannical eventually, because you look at even what happened to Athens during the time of the tyrants of Athens.
Eventually it goes from, you know, this democracy, which actually lasts a very short period of time, and it just becomes a strong man running a nation.
So when I look at that, I don't know that our founders were necessarily trying to rebuild Rome because even the Roman Republic, you have about 10% literacy and it's run by about those same 10%.
So most people wouldn't have actually had a ton of political power.
So, and for them transitioning to a republic to an empire, their life wouldn't have been that much different.
It just would have been a new guy in charge.
So I think when our founders are looking at it, they were trying to take the best aspects of different systems and trying to make something that could work better in a little bit longer.
But once again, if our constitution isn't used and doesn't function in the way it was written, as we've kind of seen over the last hundred years, it does become really hard to maintain that system.
So in the homeland, in the Roman homeland, what does it look like for the citizenry as a vacuum begins to form, right?
As Rome really begins to fall?
Again, obviously, this took a few generations, but what were the dramatic differences in the lives of someone that lived, I guess you would say, modern Italy, especially, but certainly like core Roman territory?
What did that look like?
What came about afterwards?
Obviously, everyone knows that there kind of was a retraction in human development and these sorts of things.
Could you maybe elaborate on that?
Because that's obviously what a lot of people fear.
A lot of people have a difficulty even imagining what the world would look like without the United States, or at least like a sort of neutered version of the United States.
Well, I think it's the hard part is, and this is something a lot of Roman historians talk about, is the thing that we're missing is we have to surmise how regular people were doing and feeling.
There isn't a ton of how were regular people feeling.
It was pretty much elites writing about how we're pretty much elites writing about how elites are doing.
And at the same time, because of power changes, a lot of sources have been lost.
And also because of what they were written on, a lot of sources have been lost.
So the thing you have to look at is actually structurally what happens.
476 is kind of the date that's given for when the Western Empire falls.
And you get a lot of heat if you say Rome fell in 476 because the Byzantine Empire only gets that name in the 16th century.
They consider themselves to be Romans.
And a lot of historians will say, well, Rome fell in 1453 to the Ottomans because it is, though the system becomes different.
It is still Roman and there was still an emperor.
And Charlemagne rising in 800 to them would have been like, who's this guy?
I don't understand.
Now, if you look at the Western Empire and kind of that period of the fall, you have to look at how that happens.
What ends up happening is in 476, there's a barbarian king because over the last hundred years, barbarian commanders had pretty much been running the emperors that were in there.
They were like figureheads.
There's a child named Romulus Augustulus.
He's a teenage emperor.
And there's a barbarian commander named Odoaker that actually retires him, gives him a pension, doesn't kill him, sends him to Ravenna to live.
And that is the last emperor of Western Rome.
Odowaker becomes the first king of Rome.
And he's followed not too long after that by Theodoric.
But what happens is it starts to break up into smaller individualized kingdoms because there is no real central power anymore.
Power becomes local.
So I think if you want to look at what would happen if a nation state collapsed or if something like America collapsed, it becomes more individualized and local.
And the problem you are going to have on that is you will start to have problems with your neighbors, right?
Because the thing that does benefit us as America, with a federal system, we're much stronger together for international relations than we are as individual states.
And that would be a real problem we would have.
So standard of living would change dramatically because your money isn't the money being used anymore.
Your power as a body that's combined doesn't exist anymore.
And I think that would be the real problem that people would be struggling with is, you know, your state of, I live in New Jersey, our state of New Jersey would not be very powerful compared to like a state of California that just has more people and more size.
So those are things you would really have to look at as something starts to disintegrate.
Because, you know, everyone's talking about the Balkanization of the United States, and a lot of people are like excited for it.
And I'm like, that just completely neuters us.
And like internationally, the entire system would shift because, I mean, I've been on the show.
I've been slightly, I'm not as eager to declare China as like this preeminent superpower.
I think increasingly we're seeing cracks, but I do think if a vacuum were to form in the next 10 years, they're obviously positioned quite well.
So it'd be more of just a changing of the guard.
I had, I guess, one more question because we have a little bit more time.
I'm curious, going back into antiquity, if there was a war where Rome, you know, later on, truly overextended themselves, because this is obviously Trump is the hot hand right now because all of his operations are seemingly no blowback, but a lot of people are saying Iran is clearly different.
Is there an example in Roman history of a war where Rome truly overextended itself and it had massive ramifications for the elite back home?
And not long after that is when the Gallic Empire is going to break off and the Palmyran Empire is going to break off because now Rome is so much weaker.
So in a moment like that, you can see fracturing start to happen.
So I don't know that you're going to see a moment like that.
But I think to see that power structure in a moment when an empire is already weak from immigration and inflationary issues, it doesn't bode well for the future.