Have We Seen This Before?
What Trump, Meloni and an old Roman consul have in common.
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is a European campaign strategist with direct experience running and advising campaigns for some of Europe's largest pro-European organisations. He founded the European Campaign Playbook to codify practitioner knowledge across the EU's 27 political environments and make it accessible to campaign professionals, advocacy teams, and civic organisations working at the European level. His work spans electoral strategy, EU public affairs, digital campaigning, and the integration of AI tools into political communication workflows.
Disclosure
Sebastián Rodríguez Pérez is the founder of the European Campaign Playbook and Campaign Intelligence Library. He has worked with pro-European organisations across multiple EU member states. He maintains editorial non-partisanship in all published content; where articles relate to campaigns or organisations he has directly worked with, this is disclosed within the article. He holds no current positions in active electoral campaigns.
What it covers
Six habits that recur when outsiders build political authority, traced through Gaius Marius, Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni, and what each means for political communicators.
Who it is for
Political communication professionals, speechwriters, campaign strategists and anyone who writes candidate biographies or leadership narratives.
When to use it
When you are building or scrutinising a leader’s story: an origin narrative, a record of achievement, or the case for another term.
Key takeaway
The job of a political communicator is to make leadership understandable, and to notice when the story has become an excuse. Preferably before the seventh consulship.
In brief
- Being an outsider is a political relationship, not a clean employment history.
- An attribute becomes credible when people can see what it cost.
- A personal journey becomes powerful when supporters see their own standing in it.
- Success earns trust. It does not settle the next election in advance.
- Watch what supporters are being asked to excuse.
- Build a political story that leaves room for correction, and departure.
A campaign pitch that never goes out of fashion
There is a campaign pitch that never seems to go out of fashion. The people in charge have failed you. They look down on you. They also look down on me. Perhaps we should do something about that.
It works particularly well when the people in charge respond by looking down on everyone involved.
Donald Trump has his version. Giorgia Meloni has hers. Gaius Marius was working with recognisably similar material in the Roman Republic more than 2,000 years ago.
No, Trump is not Marius with a social media account. Meloni is not about to requisition a legion. Their records and political systems differ enormously. But put their stories beside one another and certain habits become difficult to miss: how an outsider acquires authority, how personal success becomes collective vindication, and how being useful can turn into being supposedly irreplaceable.
For political communication professionals, this is where the ancient history gets uncomfortably close to the day job.
The outsider has some excellent connections
Marius came from Arpinum and lacked consular ancestors. That made him a novus homo, a “new man”, in a political culture deeply impressed by who your grandfather had been. He also benefited from aristocratic backing and married into the patrician Caesars. The establishment, it turns out, has always produced some remarkably well-connected outsiders.1
Meloni called herself an “underdog” in her 2022 parliamentary address. She was Italy’s first female prime minister, emerging from a political tradition long kept at the margins. She had also been a minister and deputy speaker of the Chamber. Both things were true.2
Trump offered a different bargain. In his 2016 convention speech, knowing the system from within became his qualification for repairing it. His claim to belong with the excluded did not require him to have lived like them. It required him to convince them he would take their side.3
There is a useful lesson here for anyone writing a candidate biography. Do not airbrush the connections. Explain the conflict. Who denied the candidate recognition? What did the candidate have to overcome? Why should that experience matter to anyone else?
An origin story needs to survive a reasonably curious journalist.
Before the slogan, there were the scars
In the speech Sallust gives Marius, scars and military decorations become evidence of fitness to govern. His opponents have distinguished ancestors; he has done the fighting himself. This is a historian’s literary reconstruction, not a verbatim campaign recording, but the argument is clear.4
Marius’s courage had a physical history. His competence had to survive contact with an enemy.
Modern leaders offer other forms of proof. Trump presented business success as preparation for national leadership. Meloni’s account of overcoming exclusion asked audiences to recognise persistence and toughness. Those claims require different kinds of scrutiny. Commercial achievement does not automatically establish public competence; persistence does not establish that the destination was wise.
Still, the communications principle holds. “Resilient” is an adjective. A setback, a cost and a recovery give someone grounds to believe it.
The problem begins when the adjective becomes permanent. Once the leader is officially “decisive”, does anyone still get to call a particular decision foolish?
When they insult me, you hear yourself
Marius’s breakthrough came in 107 BC, amid frustration with the war against Jugurtha. He won the consulship and secured the command through a popular vote despite the Senate’s preference for Metellus. Sallust describes artisans and farmers leaving their work to support him. They were investing something more substantial than a favourable opinion.5
His advancement could mean that the people who dismissed him had been wrong about others, too.
Trump compressed the representative claim into four words: “I am your voice.” Meloni’s underdog story offered recognition through a different experience of exclusion. Marius’s challenge to inherited prestige made earned advancement the issue. These stories invite supporters to place something of themselves inside the candidate’s success.
That helps explain why a devastating attack can fail. To its author, it exposes an unfit politician. To a supporter, it may sound like the same old people explaining why someone like them should never have got this far.
A sneer is a very expensive form of political communication. Occasionally, you are paying to advertise your opponent’s central argument.
The dangerous bit is that they sometimes deliver
Marius’s reputation had serious foundations. The Jugurthine War ended under his command in 105 BC, with Sulla instrumental in securing Jugurtha’s surrender. Marius defeated the Teutones in 102 and, alongside Catulus, the Cimbri in 101. He held five consecutive consulships from 104 to 100. Fear made continued reliance on an effective commander persuasive.6
He had changed the question. Rivals now had to explain why Rome should risk someone else.
Meloni’s contemporary argument is less spectacular, but politically substantial: stability. On September 4, she celebrated her administration becoming Italy’s longest-serving single government of the postwar era. In a country accustomed to governments falling, staying in office is an achievement voters can understand. Her opponents dispute whether that endurance has delivered enough improvement.7
Trump’s “I alone can fix it” takes the claim further. The word “alone” leaves the audience with a national problem and one authorised repairman.
There is the boundary worth watching. A record can justify another vote. It cannot make asking for alternatives an act of irresponsibility.
Then the strength starts swallowing the judgement
Sallust records something chilling about Marius: success made even rash decisions look like evidence of ability. At Capsa, the town surrendered, yet it was destroyed; inhabitants were killed and others sold into slavery. Sallust acknowledged a violation of the laws of war, then explained it through military necessity. Marius’s prestige increased.8
His brutality was present during the celebrated rise. The people applauding the result were not the people paying its worst costs.
The modern comparison concerns accountability, not equivalence with ancient warfare. In January 2025, Trump pardoned or commuted sentences for offences connected with January 6 and directed the dismissal of pending cases.9 He presented this as national reconciliation. It also raises a question about the standards a movement applies to conduct associated with its own cause.
Meloni supplies a different and necessary comparison. Italians rejected her government’s judicial referendum this year, as Euronews reported.10 A prominent leader could be refused. Forceful leadership and unchecked authority are not interchangeable.
For a communications team, the practical test is painfully simple: can you still describe a failure as a failure, including when your own leader caused it?
Unstoppable is usually a temporary condition
Marius’s political position weakened after his alliance with Saturninus ended in violence in 100 BC. In 88, his struggle with Sulla over a military command culminated in Sulla marching on Rome. Marius fled, returned with Cinna in 87, and shared in a victory followed by killings of opponents. He died in 86, shortly after beginning his seventh consulship.11
Notice who made the decisive military escalation: Sulla, the aristocratic rival. The respectable alternative was quite capable of helping wreck the Republic.
Marius was formidable because his experience, achievements and public appeal reinforced one another. He became terrible as violence displaced the restraints that should have applied to him and his enemies alike. The later ancient accounts are partisan enough to demand caution about motives. They leave little room to mistake the outcome for healthy political competition.
So, have we seen this before?
Parts of it, certainly. The outsider with access. The biography that becomes a shared grievance. The achievement that makes another term seem obvious. Then, sometimes, the expectation that gratitude should cancel scrutiny.
The job of a political communicator is to make leadership understandable. It also requires noticing when the story has become an excuse.
Preferably before the seventh consulship.