On December 8, 2020 President Trump had a meeting with Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and a little-known former Trump administration official, Emily Newman. But they’d come to convince Trump that he had the power to take extreme measures to keep fighting.
The hours to come would pit the those advocating for extreme measures to save the presidency against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines, and doing what would be necessary to save the country from a stolen election.
Powell began this meeting by confronting President Trump with the grim reality of the situation. She told the president that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.
Powell presented an affidavit from papers in her lap, claiming it contained testimony from someone involved in the development of rigged voting machines in Venezuela. She proposed declaring a national security emergency, granting her and her associates top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.
White House senior adviser Eric Herschmann pushed back on everything. Powell was arguing that they couldn’t get a judge to enforce any subpoena to hand over the voting machines because all the judges were either intimidated or corrupt. She and her group repeatedly referred to the National Emergencies Act and a Trump executive order from 2018 that was designed to clear the way for the government to sanction foreign actors interfering in U.S. elections.
Their theory was that because foreign enemies had stolen the election, all bets were off and Trump could use the full force of the United States government to go after Dominion. In the end Trump declined to act; he refused to cross the Rubicon, and the rest is history.
2070 years earlier Julius Caesar faced the same decision and did act.
On January 10, 49 B.C., on the banks of the Rubicon River in southern Gaul (near the modern-day city of Ravenna), Julius Caesar and the soldiers of the 13th Legion waited and weighed their options.
The Rubicon is, in reality, little more than a stream. Its significance to Rome lay in its location, marking the official border between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, the region south of the Alps governed by Julius Caesar. Despite its appearance, crossing this humble river would have serious consequences. According to the law of the Roman Republic, any provincial governor leading troops across the border back into Italy would be declared a public enemy. It was, quite simply, an act of war.
Huddled against the biting cold, many of the soldiers of the 13th Legion of the army of the Roman Republic had served under Caesar for much of the previous decade. They had witnessed the honing of his skills as a military and political strategist, subjugating Gaul (corresponding to much of modern-day France and northern Italy), extending the bounds of the Roman Republic as far as the Rhine, and all the time shoring up his influence back in Rome. Alarmed by his growing power, the Senate ordered Caesar to set aside his command.
Caesar had no intention of obeying the Senate, and he knew perfectly well what the consequences of his insubordination would be. He understood that civil war would most likely ensue between himself and the Roman nobility, led by his strongest rival and former ally: the brilliant military commander Pompey the Great. If Caesar chose to cross the Rubicon, there would be no turning back.
Down to the River
The day before the crossing, Caesar acted as if nothing unusual was happening. The conqueror of Gaul attended a public event in Ravenna and carefully examined plans for a gladiator school. Secretly, he had ordered his cohorts to proceed to the banks of the river and wait for him there. Later, during dinner that night, he told his guests he would have to leave them for a moment. A chariot pulled by mules from a nearby bakery was waiting for him outside, and after a considerable delay in finding the exact position of his troops, he eventually managed to join them on the bank. Here he mulled the agonizing choice that lay before him.
Writing around a century and a half later, the historian Suetonius produced an account of this moment that reveals the legendary status the event had attained in the Roman mind. Still unsure whether to advance, a man of extraordinary height and beauty appeared, clearly sent by the gods. “The apparition snatched a trumpet from one of them, rushed to the river, and sounding the war-note with mighty blast, strode to the opposite bank. Then Caesar cried: ‘Take we the course which the signs of the gods and the false dealing of our foes point out. The die is cast.’”