Standards of a republic

 As the Roman Republic was dying, a symptom or maybe cause was a tendency to more and more ignore rules as to when and how often a given individual could hold a given office.  Now we see something similar being tested with Trump and him in a third term.

There is a real parallel, but also an important difference.

Many historians of the late Roman Republic argue that the Republic depended less on a single written constitution than on a web of laws, customs, expectations, and precedents—the mos maiorum ("custom of the ancestors"). Offices were annual, power was shared among colleagues, there were age requirements, and there were expected intervals before holding the same office again. Over time, however, exceptions became more common. Marius held an unprecedented series of consulships; Sulla marched on Rome and became dictator; Pompey received extraordinary commands; Caesar accumulated offices and powers that stretched or bypassed existing norms. Each step was usually justified as a temporary response to an emergency.

One of the striking features is that very few of these men openly said, "The constitution doesn't matter." Instead, they argued that the circumstances were exceptional and that the normal rules had to bend. Once one exception was accepted, the next became easier.

That is why many political scientists and historians pay attention not only to laws but also to norms. A republic can survive occasional bad laws if everyone respects the underlying rules of the game. It can also survive some norm-breaking. But if every faction begins treating rules as obstacles to be worked around whenever convenient, institutional trust erodes.

The difference with the United States is that the presidential term limit is not merely a custom. The Twenty-Second Amendment explicitly states that no person shall be elected president more than twice. A third term would therefore require either a constitutional amendment, a legal theory that courts accepted as bypassing the amendment, or an outright refusal to obey the constitutional system. The Roman Republic often relied on custom; the U.S. restriction is written constitutional law.

So I would say your comparison is strongest not at the level of "Trump equals Caesar"—historical analogies usually become misleading when they get that specific—but at the level of constitutional culture. The late Roman Republic provides a warning about what can happen when political actors increasingly test whether long-established restraints are actually enforceable. The question is never just whether a particular rule is broken. It is whether people continue to believe that rules should bind their own side as well as their opponents. That was one of the central problems Rome struggled to solve in its final century.

After the issue made over Obama's birth certificate, one is inclined to see a certain hypocrisy.

Yes, many people saw it that way.

The Obama birth-certificate controversy was fundamentally about whether Obama was constitutionally eligible to be president. Despite repeated confirmations by Hawaiian officials, the release of both the short-form and later the long-form birth certificate, and examinations by journalists and fact-checkers, the controversy persisted for years.

Because Donald Trump was one of the most prominent figures promoting questions about Obama's eligibility before eventually acknowledging that Obama was born in the United States in 2016, critics naturally point to a contrast: questioning another president's constitutional qualifications while later entertaining discussions about ways around the Twenty-Second Amendment's two-term limit.

Supporters of Trump would generally argue that the situations are different. They might say that asking for proof of eligibility is not the same thing as advocating a constitutional change or exploring legal theories about term limits. Critics, however, see a broader pattern: strict constitutional scrutiny when applied to opponents, but a more flexible attitude when applied to one's own side.

That accusation of selective constitutionalism is hardly unique to one party. American politics is full of examples where people become ardent defenders of a principle when it constrains their opponents and less enthusiastic when it constrains their allies.

That is one reason the Roman comparison is interesting. In Rome, the problem was not merely that rules were broken. It was that political factions increasingly judged rules by whether those rules helped or hindered their immediate objectives. Once that habit becomes widespread, constitutional arguments often become less about principle and more about which interpretation benefits one's side at the moment.

Whether one agrees with the comparison or not, that tendency—to apply standards unevenly—is a recurring feature of political systems long before and long after Rome.