The Romans believed you could kill a man twice: once with a knife, and once with a chisel. Damnatio memoriae was the final insult – the attempt to erase a disgraced leader not just from power, but from history itself. Names scraped from stone. Faces smashed out of marble. A bureaucratic fantasy that if you removed the image, the damage would politely follow it into oblivion.

It never did.

Which is worth remembering when people fantasise about a future where Donald Trump or Nigel Farage are somehow airbrushed out of the record, as if history might do us the courtesy of forgetting its own mistakes. They won’t be erased. They’ll be preserved, not as heroes, but as warnings.

Rome’s condemned emperors weren’t nobodies. They were reminders of moments when the system broke down, when spectacle replaced competence and grievance became governance. That’s why the Senate went after their memory so aggressively: not because they were insignificant, but because they were awkward. Proof that power had slipped the leash.

Trump and Farage sit in that same uncomfortable space. Not great statesmen, not master strategists, just opportunists who learned how to monetise anger in an era of economic erosion and cultural exhaustion. They didn’t invent the decay; they surfed it, grinning, while institutions buckled beneath them.

Like those defaced Roman busts, their absence would tell a louder story than their presence ever could. You don’t explain the early 21st century without explaining how democratic systems proved so pliable, how media ecosystems rewarded provocation over truth, how resentment was sold as authenticity and bought in bulk.

History doesn’t forget figures like this. It labels them. Contextualises them. Pins them to the page with a quiet but devastating caption: this is what happens when inequality deepens, trust collapses, and politics becomes theatre. The real memorial isn’t a statue, it’s the wreckage left behind. Fractured discourse. Weakened norms. A lingering sense that the rules are optional if you shout loudly enough.

So no damnatio memoriae here. No chisels, no erasure. Just the long, cold afterlife of being remembered as a cautionary tale, the kind future generations study not with admiration, but with disbelief that it was ever allowed to happen at all.