Trump and the Republicans have rejected Zeus’s Law.

In The Odyssey, Zeus’s Law is the rule you break at your peril: when a stranger arrives, you feed them, house them, and protect them before you ask who they are or what they want. The host does not get to interrogate first. The guest does not get to loot the pantry. Zeus Xenios watches. Violators get turned into swine, blinded, or slaughtered in their own halls.

Nolan packaged an ancient Greek idea—xenia, guest-friendship—as “Zeus’s Law” so modern audiences would feel it in their gut. Treat the traveler the way you would want to be treated if you washed up on a strange shore. Civilization itself depends on it. Without that thin layer of trust, travel, trade, and peace collapse.

The metaphor writes itself.

The ancient rule, in one sentence

You do not get to decide the stranger is an enemy before you have offered bread and a roof. That decision comes later, if at all. The law exists because everyone, sooner or later, is the stranger.

Republicans and Trump have spent the last several years doing the opposite in policy and rhetoric: treat the stranger as a threat first, hospitality second (or never). Borders first. Reciprocity later. Mercy as optional. Rules-based order as a sucker’s game.

That is the rejection.