Whom would you rather have make a speech about the death of one of your loved ones, Donald Trump or Pericles? For Simon Schama over on the Twitter yesterday, there’s no contest: “Grief obliges eloquence or silence. Pericles. Lincoln. Then ‘evil losers'”. It’s certainly true that there’s no contest when it comes to eloquence and rhetorical skill, or even basic grammar – but the differences aren’t so stark when it comes to the ends of such speeches. For Trump, the deaths of children, teenagers and their older relatives in Manchester are fuel for his confused, ill-directed crusade against ‘radical Islwmic terrorism’, fuelling suspicion of Muslims in general. For Pericles, the deaths of Athenian soldiers were weaponised to urge the survivors to sacrifice themselves for the city as well, with the grief of their families waved away. The issue with Schama’s contrast isn’t that Pericles lost the war or was responsible for starting it, as various people responded to him; it’s that the contrast isn’t as stark as he implies. As for his “Thucydides would block you and so will I”, nice line, but would the man willing to face up to the full ghastliness of human weakness and violence really filter reality like that?
Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse the sub-tweet, I feel ever more disturbed by the sorts of people who choose to incorporate Thucydides into their Twitter identity, and the violent right-wing views many of them seem to hold – and what this says about the modern image of Thucydides, if not necessarily the work itself…
Sphinx 
Your specialization in “reception”: I didn’t get it at first but now I do.
Yes, for all we know, “the real Pericles” was a more eloquent Trump – or a Trump with better speechwriters. Pericles, for all the things he did in life, became in death a convenient figure for a master historian’s narrative. We can’t know Pericles without assessing Thucydides – and we can’t know Thucydides, as you dismally point out, unless we possess the identification needs of skinheads.
But let’s switch heroes. Trump awaits his historian, but will Trump ever become a graphic movie hero, like Leonidas, standing in defense of the world alongside his 300 realtors? Putin, perhaps – but I’ll warrant not Trump.
To be fair to Pericles, all the evidence suggests that he wrote his own speeches! On top of that, he appears to have been a successful and generally popular leader with a clear strategy, albeit a strategy of imperialist aggression – so, any comparison with Trump falls entirely in Pericles’ favour.
But. If one is not generally in favour of imperialist aggression, there’s no reason to heroise Pericles. There’s a serious debate to be had as to whether Thucydides was a fan of his (as many have thought, some arguing that the entire work is intended to relieve Pericles from any blame for Athens’ defeat) or whether his account was critical – I incline to the latter, but am well aware that this may be wishful thinking.
Regardless of whether the Funeral Oration is really attributable to Pericles or Thucydides, and if the latter then regardless of whether he intended us to take it at face value or not, there are things I find disturbing about it; it’s a brilliant bit of rhetorical and emotional manipulation designed to use the dead from the first year of the war to encourage the Athenians to carry on sacrificing themselves – and that’s how it was used in the First World War, as a cover for the introduction of conscription. The idea that it’s an appropriate model for mourning isn’t persuasive to me.
As to your question, Trump as martial hero takes us into realms of unimaginable kitsch. But I can imagine futures in which he is portrayed as the decisive statesman, the beloved leader, the voice of the people. I’d just hope not to have to live in them.