When Donald J. Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States on January 20, 2017, I wrote an essay for the London-based website openDemocracy: “The die is cast: Why Trump can’t help but try dictatorship.” He couldn’t help but try it not only because of his twisted character but also because of what has happened to the American people—because of what’s been done to us, sometimes brutally but often subtly and with our complicity, ever since the beginning of the republic.

The Founding Fathers anticipated our present travails with despairing clarity. When Benjamin Franklin rose to cast his vote for the Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787, he warned that “this Constitution with all its faults…can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.”

Alexander Hamilton saw the enormity of the gamble. Even while campaigning for the new Constitution, he wrote, in The Federalist Papers, that “history seems to have destined Americans, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

“When the people give way,” warned John Adams, “their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American constitution is such, as to grow every day more and more encroaching. Like a cancer, it eats faster and faster every hour.”

“History does not more clearly point out any fact than this,” wrote founder Richard Henry Lee, “that nations which have lapsed from liberty, to a state of slavish subjection, have been brought to this unhappy condition, by gradual paces.” It could happen not with a bloody coup but with a smile and a friendly swagger, when the people had grown tired of self-government and could be jollied or scared into servitude.

The founders anticipated someone like Trump partly because they’d been reading Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which was hot off the presses in the 1770s. We should read Gibbon now, too, paying close attention to his account of how the Roman republic slipped into tyranny when powerful men had seduced or intimidated its citizens so that they became a stampeding mob, hungry for bread and circuses.

Gibbon wrote that the overconfident Romans were slow to discover the introduction of “a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire,” under which Roman citizens “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”

You might say that Americans have been there before, going back to the early worship of George Washington, whom many would have made a king. But Washington declined this invitation because his own “civic-republican” character was stronger than Trump’s. You might say that the republic has recovered from several earlier lapses, as when the Civil War produced Lincoln’s “a new birth of freedom,” or when the rampant consumerism of “the Roaring ‘20s” imploded in 1929 but led to the New Deal.

But if we really want to recover the spirit of liberty that Trump has twisted and coopted, we’ll need not only to prevent billionaires and their emulators from becoming Trump’s puppeteers or henchmen, in and out of the cabinet, and not only to rein in the financing and consumer-marketing schemes that bypass our brains and hearts on their way to our lower impulses and our wallets. Since long before Trump’s reality TV show “The Apprentice” became a hit, conmen and unbridled commercial forces have been softening us up, leaving us, as Cicero said of his fellow Romans, “too ill to bear our sicknesses or their cures,” capable only of occasional, mob-like eruptions and cries for a strongman.

Here it’s worth recalling Gibbon’s description of how Augustus became Rome’s first emperor by convincing a weakened citizenry that he was restoring their republic precisely as he was killing it:

Augustus was sensible that…the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom. A feeble senate and enervated people cheerfully acquiesced in the pleasing illusion, as long as it was supported by the virtue, or even by the prudence, of the successors of Augustus. It was a motive of self-preservation, not a principle of liberty.

Gibbon sketches the Romans’ varied motives for exchanging robust citizenship for servility. You may be able to locate some Americans, including many of Trump’s heartland supporters and maybe even yourself, in the following:

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, [Augustus’s] humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians, who had almost universally embraced the philosophy of Epicurus, enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquility, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

Especially chilling is Gibbon’s account of how Augustus “reformed” the Senate, blackmailing and brutalizing certain Senators and so terrifying the rest that they passed prerogative after prerogative from the people and the Senate to him: “It was dangerous to trust the sincerity of Augustus; to seem to distrust it was still more dangerous…. [The] greatness of the Roman state, the corruption of manners, and the license of the soldiers, supplied new arguments to the advocates of monarchy.”

In 2017, Trump was considering creating his own private security force, independent of the Secret Service. When his transition team discovered that Presidents also have complete command of the National Guard unit of the District of Columbia, it informed that unit's commander, Errol Schwartz, that his dismissal would be effective at noon on Inauguration Day, while the ceremony was underway, so that he wouldn’t even be able to welcome back the troops he’d sent out that morning.

Two days before the Inauguration, that decision was reconsidered, and Schwartz was granted enough time to finish the ceremony and wrap up his affairs. Will we see any such restraint in Trump’s second term? Or will we re-live Gibbon’s account of the formation of Augustus’s Praetorian guard after the Senate granted him “an important privilege”? “By a dangerous exception to the ancient maxims, he was authorized to preserve his military command, supported by a numerous body of guards, even in time of peace, and in the heart of the capital.” Donald J. Trump’s frightening course as a self-avowed savior of the republic is path-dependent as well as historically precedented. I don’t see anything in his record, his character, or our circumstances that will discourage or curb it.