{"id":215,"date":"2026-06-05T23:38:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T23:38:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=215"},"modified":"2026-06-05T23:38:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T23:38:48","slug":"donald-trump-false-prophet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=215","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump: false prophet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The epic disaster that followed Donald\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s air assault on Iran was the expression of two extreme likelihoods. One concerned the assault itself, which almost everyone knew would empower the Iranians by handing them pretext for shutting the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 which is why prior administrations, however much they hated the mullahs, didn\u2019t do it. The second concerned\u00a0Trump<\/span>, whose grandiosity and lack of judgment more or less preordained that he would eventually do something not just monumentally corrupt but practically and irreversibly disastrous.<\/p>\n

Read more How misology stole our humanity<\/a><\/p>\n

But, using certain utopian mental adjustments,\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s elite supporters discounted or dismissed this latter likelihood. By utopian I don\u2019t mean their understanding of\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0himself was idealistic or unrealistic. In fact, it was often the opposite. Many of\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s supporters openly conceded that his character was uniquely bad. Yes, they said,\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s an unsavory guy by the ethical standards we uphold in regular life, but politics is not regular life, and, more important, the present moment isn\u2019t regular politics. They believed, circa 2016 and again circa 2020 and 2024, that the hegemony enjoyed and enforced by authoritarian progressives both inside and outside government had grown so total and entrenched, and was so perverse in the beliefs it propounded and protected, that conservatives had to abandon politics as usual in favor of something more transgressive and outrageous.<\/p>\n

This is where the utopianism comes in. But, before I go into the specific utopian characteristics of pro-Trump<\/span> thinking, I want to back up and note the structural similarities between such thinking and more familiar forms of utopian political theory and practice that reach us from the political Left.<\/p>\n

The progressive \u201chegemony\u201d I referred to above has clear parallels with capitalist society as it appears in Left-wing theorizing. This thinking grew from Marx\u2019s own \u201ccritique of ideology\u201d, the view that people, in effect, could not see and think and govern beyond the stage of economic history in which they found themselves. The critique of ideology came to eclipse economic analysis and dominate the most influential Marxist writing in mid-20th century Europe and America, as capitalism began to look more protean and resilient than Marx had predicted. Needing to account for this resilience, Marxists such as Frankfurt School luminaries Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse began to dwell on the power of capitalism to reproduce itself at the level of ideology, the symbolic and spiritual realm of society and culture in which political imagination and moral belief are formed. In this theorizing \u2014 which, thanks to some vigorous sloganeers, we now know as \u201cCultural Marxism\u201d \u2014 everything from popular culture to advertising to psychotherapy works to palliate political discontent, to tease up and give benign release to revolutionary energies, to teach that capitalism is everything and the only thing people might hope for.<\/p>\n

Thus did these social and cultural forces within capitalism evolve and spread into a hermetic system of political consciousness often called the \u201ctotality\u201d or the \u201csocial totality\u201d in Leftist theory. For these high theorists, theorizing was pretty much all there was left. With the partial exception of Marcuse, they\u2019d lost faith in revolution, partly because it seemed impossible, given the adaptive powers of the capitalist totality, and partly because they\u2019d seen how real revolutions ended up. It was much easier for Marx, working not that long after Hegel and before any \u201cMarxist\u201d revolutions had happened, to write as if some force of History would guide the transition from revolutionary smashing and the dictatorship of the proletariat to an ideal society where the state itself has withered away. Writing in the Forties and Fifties, Adorno could have no such assurance.<\/p>\n

The most prominent updating of this tradition of largely academic theorizing about the \u201csocial totality\u201d is Empire<\/em>, the 1999 book by American professor Michael Hardt and Italian philosopher and ex-convict Antonio Negri. Empire<\/em> was something of a surprise hit when it came out, despite its dense academic prose, because its update of the post-Marxist portrait of the social totality gave it a global scale, and everyone was on about \u201cglobalization\u201d at the time. According to Hardt and Negri, the increasingly globalized economy both relied on and supported its own totality, which they called \u201cEmpire\u201d \u2014 a decentralized and \u201cdeterritorialized\u201d system of trading markets, financial circuitry and undemocratic institutions working on behalf of capital, secured by networks of coercive geopolitical power emanating from the Pentagon. What made Empire<\/em> nearly impossible to oppose is that it was both everywhere and nowhere in particular.<\/p>\n

Empire<\/em> and its illustrious predecessors, then, recast the political challenges facing radical politics so that they look more or less insurmountable. The social totality of mid-century capitalism, and then the globalized Empire of the end of the century, are so fully stitched together that both electoral opposition and more radical militancy are hopeless. Instead, these theorists tend to reimagine radical politics as happening on smaller scales, via the more abstract or personal channels of art, lifestyle, gender and sexuality. Perhaps the best example of this dynamic was the Occupy protests of 2011. They began as a swaggering movement against financialized capitalism in the seemingly propitious time after its near-suicide. But then they resolved into merely an outdoor chill session of affluent hipsters, while financialized capitalism righted itself and reassumed control.<\/p>\n

American conservatives of the early 21st century found themselves in a parallel predicament to those thwarted Occupiers. By the 2010s, cultural progressivism had turned into a constant, slow-moving revolution in morals that felt, paradoxically, like a suffocating status quo, indeed its own sort of social totality. The nuclear family was breaking down, and elite commentators were defending its demise (while continuing to form nuclear families themselves). Popular culture was growing ever more garish in its sexuality. Racial discourse was a pageant of unhinged accusation, in which everything was \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d.<\/p>\n

At some point, conservatives realized what they were facing wasn\u2019t just a social totality, an organic interweaving of various moral tendencies of the age. What they were facing was a hegemon, an Empire \u2014 what people were starting to call \u201cthe Regime\u201d. These tendencies were propagated by an interlocking network of powerful institutions<\/em> \u2014 from the media to universities to advertising to NGOs \u2014 which were not just adopting novel and radical beliefs but enforcing them as orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

Directly opposing the Regime became hard to imagine. Like Theodor Adorno, who channeled his gloomy Leftism into the private experience of difficult art, some embattled conservatives chose retreat rather than confrontation. Perhaps the best-known example of this thinking was Rod Dreher\u2019s 2017 book\u00a0The Benedict Option<\/em>, which imagined a politics that ducks below the official level of advocacy and electioneering and turns to the nurturing of traditional family life, the homeschooling of children, and the building of small-scale Christian communities. The Dreher option rests on the reasonable idea that the intensity of partisan political fighting needed to effectively oppose the Regime would be bad for the soul, and the soul is the most important thing.<\/p>\n

For people like Dreher,\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0made the prospect of taking on the Regime feel even more sordid and soul-endangering. But for other conservatives, it was precisely\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s crude vitality that made it possible to imagine finally doing this. \u201cYes,\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0is worse than imperfect,\u201d Michael Anton wrote in his famous\u00a0\u201cFlight 93 Election\u201d\u00a0essay in the\u00a0Claremont Review<\/em>. \u201cSo what?\u201d The threat and influence of the Regime were so dire that a\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0presidency was worth the risk. Anton takes his own sort of historical reassurance from the direness of the moment. He didn\u2019t say that\u00a0Trump<\/span> was guided by a Hegelian force of reason in History, which would steer his actions toward desirable consequences. He said things were so bad that we couldn\u2019t bother worrying about consequences. A radical break and some righteous smashing were good enough.<\/p>\n

Charles Kesler\u2019s Claremont Review<\/em> essay from two years later, \u201cThinking About Trump<\/span>\u201d, echoes Anton\u2019s realistic appraisal of Trump<\/span>\u2019s character but adds certain conceits that start to make the pro-Trump<\/span> case look more directly teleological. The badness of Trump<\/span>\u2019s character, Kesler suggests, might be the very thing that leads not just to a righteous assault on the Regime: but to happy outcomes in general. He invokes Machiavelli, noting that sometimes a statesman \u201cmay be persuaded to serve the people for the sake of his own personal glory\u201d. The badness of motives turns into a goodness of outcomes by an alchemy of political calculation.<\/p>\n

Read more The hollow \u2018accusation\u2019 campaign targeting Graham Platner<\/a><\/p>\n

But a more relevant force in the writing of Trump<\/span>\u2019s presidential destiny was the American Constitution. \u201cAs it happens,\u201d Kesler wrote, \u201cthe U.S. Constitution famously set up a series of institutional checks and balances to encourage ambitious men to vie against other ambitious men to serve the public good.\u201d The Constitution is as a machine that converts men\u2019s selfish natures \u2014 \u201csupplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives\u201d, as Federalist 51 put it \u2014 into effective governance.<\/p>\n

Other Trump<\/span> supporters have been eager to look beyond the machine-modernism of constitutionalists like Kesler and imagine that the forces shaping Trump<\/span>\u2019s presidential ends are simply divine. This was the surprising phenomenon in which devout Christians found that they had the same cultural and political enemies as Trump<\/span>, and that Trump<\/span> seemed to be conducting his war of insults on their behalf. These Christians quickly put a providential spin on his famously ungodly ways. Kesler himself describes this dynamic in sympathetic terms (while, in cagey Straussian fashion, withholding overt sanction of its supernatural substance).<\/p>\n

In 2018, for example, evangelical leader Mike Evans spoke of Trump<\/span> as \u201cthis flawed human being like you or I, this imperfect vessel\u201d, and of God as \u201cusing him in an incredible, amazing way to fulfill His plans and purposes\u201d. Since he first emerged as a Republican presidential contender and hate-object for America\u2019s secular elites, this Christian love \u2014 circumspect, haloed in divine paradox \u2014 was the dominant way in which the un-Christian Trump<\/span> was cast as an agent of higher fate.<\/p>\n

And then he got shot. That is, in July 2024 Trump<\/span> got nicked in the ear when he might have been hit squarely somewhere fatal, and those halos of Godly paradox were flung away like Frisbees. Trump<\/span> was now simply the Ordained, divinely consecrated before our eyes by the blood of the outside edge of his own right ear. The not-notably-religious Steve Bannon said, \u201cTrump<\/span> wears the armor of God.\u201d Tucker Carlson called the miss \u201cdivine intervention\u201d. Of the moment when the bloodied Trump<\/span> stood and shook his fist, Carlson said, \u201cThis was no longer a man\u2026 this was the leader of a nation.\u201d Darren Beattie called Trump<\/span>\u2019s 2024 election \u201cmiraculous\u201d, and saw it \u201cleading to a new Golden Age\u201d. This was not the usual thanking of God after a near disaster. It was also the summoning of a Trumpian future<\/em>, a declaration that it was ordained and guided by Providence.<\/p>\n

But I think this tic, the repeated reference to outside forces and higher destinies by\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0supporters, is something of a tell. In other words, these people wouldn\u2019t even be\u00a0thinking\u00a0about the great fateful forces supplementing\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s character and directing Trumpian energies towards higher ends if that character were not so uniquely and dangerously defective. They devote a moment\u2019s thought to\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0\u2014 the transgressive brilliance he directs against secular elites, the baroque collection of vices that make up his personality \u2014 and the agonized mix of attraction and misgiving generates an urgent, symptomatic, pressure-releasing remedy:\u00a0Constitutional machinery<\/em>! Higher destiny<\/em>!\u00a0Imperfect-vessel-of-divine-purposes<\/em>! A good name for this compensatory impulse, I think, is \u201cneurotic providentialism\u201d. That is, the destiny-mongering around Trump<\/span>\u00a0has always had something confessional about it. By insisting that President\u00a0Trump<\/span> is doing the work of an ingenious constitutional machine, or is an agent of higher ends, one neurotically concedes a deep underlying worry about his total unfitness to be president.<\/p>\n

Still, were it only the Trumpian motive<\/em> that\u2019s defective, per Federalist 51, I might be on Charles Kesler\u2019s side. I might place my trust in our Constitution\u2019s ability to check-and-balance the slightly corrupt and the overly vainglorious. But if it were just a matter of motives or morality, there\u2019d be no need for the neurotic compensation, no need for the destiny-mongering. The real Trumpian defect that calls out for cosmic or constitutional supplement was always in judgment<\/em>. His supporters neurotically conjure higher powers that might connect what he does to tolerable outcomes because, with him in the Oval Office, they have a constant, nagging reason to darkly wonder what\u2019s going to happen. This is in part because he doesn\u2019t exhibit much concern with such things himself.<\/p>\n

From the beginning of his first presidential run, it was clear that\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0lived in his own world, made up his own rules. There was indeed a glaring moral dimension to this. He happily got away with being an all-around scumbag, someone who stiffed contractors and cheated on his wives and groped women. The Trumpist rebuttal to those who dwelt on these vices often sounded like posturing, the chest-thumping of people wanting to present themselves as\u00a0mas macho<\/em>\u00a0than\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s wussified critics. Anton and others mocked \u201cNever\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u201d conservatives for their namby-pamby quailing about \u201cnorms\u201d, but\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s indifference to norms was most worrying because it was part of his indifference to and incuriosity about anything<\/em> that might condition his will and constrain his action. The most decorous of these conditions and constraints, and the easiest to point out in public discourse in an election year, were indeed the moral ones, the norms.<\/p>\n

But the most important of them concerned the empirical realm, the world, the possible actions of other actors, about which\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0was just as cognitively closed off. Charles Kesler invoked Machiavelli\u2019s concept of statesmanly\u00a0virt\u00f9<\/em> \u2014 which denotes a mix of willful boldness in action and practical insight and foresight about the world of action \u2014 in making his case for the morally imperfect\u00a0Trump<\/span>. And\u00a0Trump<\/span> is obviously willful, but he\u2019s more impulsive than bold, while his practical insight and foresight are mainly limited to a certain narrow zone: people he might bully. He does hungrily seize the obvious advantage. In more ambiguous and demanding practical realms, however, his foresight reliably fails him, perhaps because it doesn\u2019t occur to him to exercise foresight; he often seems surprised by the obvious consequences of his actions. This is the deep source of the recurring phenomenon now acronym\u2019d as \u201cTACO\u201d:\u00a0Trump<\/span> Always Chickens Out.<\/p>\n

His Iran debacle adheres to this broader dynamic all too well, with\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0forced into partial surrender and blustery face-saving after brushing aside caution about well-understood consequences of his actions and \u201cboldly\u201d going ahead anyway.\u00a0Reporting\u00a0by\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0on the lead-up to the war describes a high-level meeting in which\u00a0Trump<\/span> listened as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the operation would cause the Iranian regime to fall. Regime change was indeed a necessary condition for success in any serious attack on Iran. It was the only way the US might cause an end to Iran\u2019s nuclear program without triggering the disaster that everyone has always known to expect: the closing of the Strait of Hormuz. Everyone understood this. It was also a pipe dream, which (almost) everyone understood as well. To their credit,\u00a0Trump<\/span> and his advisors also understood this. They said Netanyahu\u2019s regime-change case was \u201cfarcical\u201d. They said it was \u201cbullshit\u201d.<\/p>\n

But they went ahead anyway. Why? According to the\u00a0Times<\/em>, \u201cEveryone [in the meeting] deferred to the president\u2019s instincts.\u201d But\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s \u201cinstincts\u201d are indistinguishable from his vain ambitions. His understanding of the world is totally occluded by his desire to be glorified as its most famous and respected guy. What could these intuitions possibly consist of? They would have to consist of something supernatural, something teleological, something about Higher Fate and Divine Purpose. That people in\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u2019s inner circle bought into this vaguely mystical nonsense at such a crucial moment just shows they\u2019d put no thought into where such nonsense came from in the first place. They convinced themselves a\u00a0Trump<\/span>\u00a0presidency would be guided providentially, by forces that transcend\u00a0Trump<\/span> himself, because, well, it better be.<\/p>\n

Read more Can Modi crush the cockroaches?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The epic disaster that followed Donald\u00a0Trump\u2019s air assault on Iran was the expression of two extreme likelihoods. One concerned the assault itself, which almost everyone knew would empower the Iranians by handing them pretext for shutting the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 which is why prior administrations, however much they hated the mullahs, didn\u2019t do it. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":214,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"yoast_head":"\nDonald Trump: false prophet - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=215\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Donald Trump: false prophet - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The epic disaster that followed Donald\u00a0Trump\u2019s air assault on Iran was the expression of two extreme likelihoods. One concerned the assault itself, which almost everyone knew would empower the Iranians by handing them pretext for shutting the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 which is why prior administrations, however much they hated the mullahs, didn\u2019t do it. 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\u0421ity Flow Journal","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=215","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Donald Trump: false prophet - \u0421ity Flow Journal","og_description":"The epic disaster that followed Donald\u00a0Trump\u2019s air assault on Iran was the expression of two extreme likelihoods. One concerned the assault itself, which almost everyone knew would empower the Iranians by handing them pretext for shutting the Strait of Hormuz \u2014 which is why prior administrations, however much they hated the mullahs, didn\u2019t do it. 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