13 min read
Aug 29, 2025
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
-Antonio Gramsci
Trump played us, but we shouldn’t be surprised. Trump is a product of an unregulated market, a desperate people, and a crumbling system holding on to whatever power it can before it dies — another link in a lengthy chain of populist pseudo-fascists across the globe. He’s no isolated incident, but he’s worthy of analysis on his own, especially given his election should tell us something quite concerning:
The American system is slowly and quietly collapsing.
He’s nothing new historically, nor is he anything new ideologically, but he’s unique in how severe an example he is. He’s an inevitable and brazen mutation of American late-stage capitalism, and a sign of oligarchic control emerging all across the world. He’s a new kind of authoritarian — softer, less overt, and perfect for the 21st century.
But, strangely, this should give us a vague feeling of hope: Trump is no Hitler, and he’s far too old to continue on through a third term. What he mirrors is a working class longing for any amount of power, representation, or recognition — in other words, class consciousness.
By analyzing him and his ideology, we can understand how authoritarianism has adapted to the modern world — if it even needed to do so. I’d like to explain in three parts how Trump manipulated us ideologically, is a symptom of a diseased system, and why he’s symbolic of something much deeper. In two parts, with a more so journalistic structure; in the third part, on a theoretical basis, using Marx and Hegel specifically.
Part I: MAGA Ideology
America’s “Golden Age”
Trump ran promising a fresh golden age, an American Pax Romana. A time of flourishing and newfound comfort in which America would once again be a bastion of freedom and power.
It’s clear no such thing has happened.
Economists, even before he was elected, knew his economics would fail;¹ and he stated he would be “a dictator on day 1.”²
As of August 2025, the economy is wretchedly volatile, much more so than before. GDP, job, export and import growth has either stagnated or stayed the same.³ Yet, Trump’s inauguration was populated with among the richest men on Earth, who were given the keys to the government, able to purge those charged with regulating them to their hearts content.⁴ Plus, extensive tax cuts to the most wealthy classes.
His 2024 campaign, even some of his behavior now, displays an affinity for authoritarianism. He recently deployed the national guard to combat crime in Washington, D.C. despite declining crime rates.⁵ He sent 2000 national guard troops and 700 marines to L.A. to combat protesters⁶ — a move that likely only contributed to further rioting among otherwise peaceful protests.⁷
Despite this, it wasn’t just the electoral college that won him the election — he won the popular vote. Meaning that, despite his projected policy failures and the historical detriments of policies like protectionism and excessive tariffs, people still voted for them.
This should tell us that, during Trump’s rise to power, policy was far from the main focus — it was Trump himself.
Trump’s Cult
Trump maintains his cult of true believers. While his approval rating continues to tank, it rests at a consistent 37%.⁸ 37% of Americans, despite his extensive policy failures and a nonexistent “Golden Age,” still support him. But this isn’t surprising: objections to Trump’s critics are baked into his ideology. Faux populism, anti-intellectualism, “fake news,” and so on, each churned to become a vicious cocktail of willful and extremely active ignorance. He has a fan base within which ignorance is considered a virtue, not a failing.
So, even if the world seems against him, it’s not because Trump’s policies are poorly thought through, historically illiterate, and deeply authoritarian. It’s because the world is out to get him as he strives to challenge existing power structures.
This attitude comes from the fact that Trump, during both terms, identified himself as an outsider against the elites, dedicated to purging the world of its most corrupt people. We were asked to disregard who he actually was — a felon and a member of the wealthy elite known for his deeply corrupt business practices. Through this, he created a sort of ‘honest corruption’: he was obvious, but to his supporters such corruption was the defiance necessary to bring about meaningful change.
Paired with a vulgar charisma quite unique to him, he cultivated a downright religious following. According to the European Consortium for Political Research,⁹
…self-professed ‘forgotten men and women’ are willing to subordinate themselves to an authoritarian leader who defies social rules and legal orders. Trump promises to ‘make America great again’ (mission), attacks internal and external enemies (Manichean demonisation), exhibits a strong personal presence, and uses derogatory language against opponents (makes supporters feel part of the in-group).
Trump doesn’t come across as a politician. He looks like a fool, but in that same sense, he doesn’t hide much, at least as far as we can see. He doesn’t sugarcoat or speak in neutral, egalitarian terms as many politicians do; he doesn’t talk down to people or use words none can understand; and he’s as far from pretentious as it gets.
However, this ideological satire isn’t always directed at the political elite, which would be nothing unsurprising on its own, given he’s a populist. What turns his persona from charisma into something far more dangerous is his use of minorities as the satirized. Through this, Trump can both direct blame from the institutions he’s protecting, e.g., corporate interests, and towards those who genuinely need protecting, i.e., minorities and oppressed groups. Then, by calling his administration an American “Golden Age,” he cultivates an ideal, an illusion, which all of his followers hope for, long for, and will do anything for. This permits even the most atrocious of crimes, given they contribute to the cause.
With all of these, Trump becomes a cult figure. Loyalty to him and his ideology is paramount, given he is the only mechanism by which his utopia can be realized.
Part II: Trump is a Corporate Tool
Politics is Money, Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus
Trump isn’t the cause, as some liberals may make him out to be. He’s a symptom. As in, his election tells us of a disease hidden beneath the surface. In this case, widespread systemic failure.
America is the wealthiest it’s ever been, but that wealth seldom makes its way down to the middle and lower classes. It’s stuck on top, with inequality widening, and with it a drastic shift in the distribution of power.¹⁰ Through lobbying agencies, campaign funding, and so on, the wealthy can control who is elected and the policies they enact. Corporations control the news and the media, alongside the machinery by which information is spread.
In essence, because the democratic process is infested with financial interest and legalized bribery, and because the economy controls the distribution of resources and information, the interests of the market often help determine the dominant ideology. And, while we are free agents who can decide on our own who to vote for, we are free only insofar as we interpret: If the information itself is tainted ideologically, one can only exercise their agency by understanding and interpreting already biased information. Thus, one’s ideology, or at least the information leading to ideology, can be predetermined by the market.
For example, if I am raised in the Cold War United States, and all I’ve been told about the Soviet Union is that they’re a horrific, evil, totalitarian regime, and I’m allowed no access to alternative information, I would be irrational to think they’re anything but terrible. The only rational conclusion based on the information given to me is that they’re evil. So, whatever group is dominant, because they control what we see, can control what we believe. It’s why indoctrination often entails the careful control of information alongside active efforts to persuade.
When applied to America, we can see how capitalist ideology flows through each crack and crevice of American society; and, how the worst products of that ideology inflate, absorbing everything.
For example, viewership of right-wing news network, Fox News, directly correlates to Republican Party popularity and election success, by about a 0.5% increase in votes with every 0.05% increase in Fox News viewership.¹¹ Rupert Murdoch, who founded Fox Corporation, is among the world’s richest media figures and a deep-seated free market libertarian. He has a net worth of $24.6 billion, having founded Fox News to be an exclusively right-wing media outlet.¹² In other words, to disseminate ideologically biased news — i.e., propaganda.
Or, the rise of Christian conservatism in America — a demographic instrumental in Trump’s election. According to Politico,¹³
Soon after his arrival in Los Angeles, Fifield founded Spiritual Mobilization, an organization whose mission was “to arouse the ministers of all denominations in America to check the trends toward pagan stateism, which would destroy our basic freedom and spiritual ideals.” The organization’s credo reflected the common politics of the millionaires in his congregation: Men were creatures of God imbued with “inalienable rights and responsibilities,” specifically enumerated as “the liberty and dignity of the individual, in which freedom of choice, of enterprise and of property is inherent.” Churches, it asserted, had a solemn duty to defend those rights against the encroachments of the state.
Soon after, the aforementioned organization became a national political force, encroaching on a religious-political territory once dominated by socialists,
Many wrote the Los Angeles office to request advertised copies of Friedrich Hayek’s libertarian treatise The Road to Serfdom and anti–New Deal tracts by Herbert Hoover and libertarian author Garet Garrett. Armed with such materials, the minister-representatives transformed secular arguments into spiritual ones and spread them widely.
While the movement died out in the 1960s, they flooded the American government with religious imagery justified using elitism, anti-communism, and libertarian deregulation, associating the American state and economic system with Christian ideals. This would give rise to American Christian nationalism and conservatism, then Trump.
And that’s just two examples that in-themselves justify essays. Let’s not consider the 52 billionaires who poured hundreds of millions into Trump’s campaign¹⁴ for whom he’s performing political favors right now.¹⁵ However, I won’t disregard the campaign funding given to Harris: she received more than Trump.¹⁶ This should be a sign — perhaps the two party system is failing to represent anyone except the most wealthy among us.
This tells us that Trump’s ideology, alongside his policies, are made to pander to an elite class of billionaires; that the elections are meddled in hugely by the billionaire class; and that American liberal democratic institutions are losing their democratic edge and descending into oligarchy, implying what is called “systemic decay”: defined by The Climate Sustainability Directory as:¹⁷
…the gradual weakening of an institution’s core functions and its capacity to deliver on its stated mission or societal role.
If the stated mission or societal role of the American state is to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” then on all fronts the American system is decaying.
Part III: The Working Class Remains Alienated
Marxist Alienation and Hegelian Dialectics
The working class is alienated and has been for quite a while.
On an economic level, the federal minimum wage hasn’t changed since 2009, yet inflation in sectors like housing, education, healthcare, and food, continues to increase, raising costs of living to unlivable levels.¹⁸ As I’ve stated, inequality is expanding at alarming rates, while increased economic activity benefits none except the wealthiest few.
On a more theoretical level, Karl Marx, whose body of work originated over a century and a half ago, had insights into human labor, capital, and oligarchical society that still resonate today. In particular, his concept of alienation, as described throughout his work:
Because the individual is understood as a laborer only in terms of their productive potential (because under wage labor, an individual is only rewarded as per their productive potential); and because the rewards for that labor are extracted from their wages as profit; and because they are laboring only as operators of instruments of production, as opposed to directly interacting with the end product of their labor, labor and life under capitalism becomes unrewarding, miserable, and repetitive.
For example, an office worker, whose labor involves crunching numbers or making periodic calls to clients, doesn’t see the fruits of their labor. Those fruits only mean more profit for their boss or financial security for people they’ll never meet. All they get is a monotonous job and a periodic paycheck.
Then, because of increasing inequality and higher costs of living, they spend their life worrying — about whether they’ll have somewhere to live in the next few months, if they can feed their kids, if they can afford to have their car fixed, and so on.
But Trump can’t just be explained by a sense of material anguish. He needs to be understood according to his mass ideological appeal. We also need to apply the theories of philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. In particular, his theory of recognition — the master/slave dialectic.
To have any sense of identity, it’s important that we surround ourselves with other people. Other people, when they see us, confirm to us that we are something other than a ‘floating consciousness’. That we are, in fact, really what we think we are. But to be recognized there has to be another entity recognizing. And if that entity recognizes me, then it is an entity like me: it is another human, another consciousness. Therefore, it also wants to be recognized, so it likewise labors for recognition. Eventually, a ‘dialectic’ begins: two parties fight to be the one recognized (the master), and not to be the one recognizing (the slave).
When applied to politics, a pattern emerges: Populism is appealing during times of systemic decay because during such times the working class is at its most alienated. Conditions are the worst for them, therefore they are the entity slaving away, recognizing the ruling class while the ruling class doesn’t reciprocate.
When a populist leader emerges, riding in as a savior for the masses and claiming to use immense authority to rebuild a broken nation, they’re of course highly appealing. They’re a magnet for recognition. At the same time, they’re an entity recognizing an unrecognized group. Therefore, they seem to even things out: the working class feels recognized, and the person ruling them seems to labor for them.
Despite this, the working class remains a class of slaves.
Right-wing populist policies rarely benefit the working class. However, because the figurehead is the source for recognition and policy isn’t, policy no longer matters — all that matters is the figurehead.
Through this a sort of idolization occurs, and with it, fetishism: a cult of personality.
In this case, the figurehead is the master. They direct the gaze of the slave (the working class), thus they continue to dominate and misrecognize those beneath them. They see them, not as a class, but as tools for recognition; the working class sees itself as a class, the figurehead as a tool. The dialectic stalls because neither side correctly recognizes the relationship they’re engaged in.
Trump, for a time, was that leader, that master, that figurehead.
Trump and most totalitarian leaders share a major similarity — they direct the gaze to them, then to an out-group (Mexicans, Jews, Kulaks), and to an elusive external enemy (immigrants and liberal social policy, the Treaty of Versailles, the bourgeoisie). By doing this, the figurehead can make the population feel like masters themselves. Not simply equals, but like they’re the recognized group others are laboring for. And the figurehead takes the position of the savior (Trump as the only path to the Golden Age). The working class submits to a master to feel like masters themselves.
Because of this fetishism, and because of the vapid pleasure brought by this feeling of superiority, ideology becomes enjoyable. Trump represents a new world that hasn’t yet come. Trump’s ideological power comes from this, thus, as long as the ideology has power over a given group, that new world hasn’t come. Therefore, they keep pushing and pushing, and if that new world is greater than any immediate issues — such as mass deportations or authoritarianism — then anything is justified if it contributes to the cause. This includes suffering: if one suffers or if conditions are bad now, all of it will pay off at some point.
Religion has a similar effect: even while a person suffers, because someday they’ll be somewhere better and because God truly cares for them, they’ll prevail. They’re able to endure immense hardship. In that same sense, a German during WW2 may have suffered massively because of bombings, personal losses, and so on, but the ideal Hitler gave them motivated them beyond horrendous material conditions.
The feeling that one is fighting for a new world and belongs to the right group is a satisfying one. It satisfies desire, while the ultimate goal — say, a communist utopia, racial purity, or a Golden Age — gives an elusive, unquenchable desire. Thus, an unparalleled sense of meaning and purpose in life.
MAGA ideology isn’t just something people believe in — it’s something people live for.
Yet, this doesn’t make Trump a totalitarian. Maybe he wants to be one, maybe he doesn’t — I can’t read his mind. But there are immense similarities between MAGA ideology and totalitarian ideology, and the ways people are enamored and hailed into each system are nearly identical.
He’s a spectacle: Trump’s power comes from his persona, his behavior — not the invisible hand of policy and economics. He’s someone to be watched, just like the fascists and communists of the 20th century. With his vulgar sensibilities and overwhelming irony, alongside the primal simplicity of his rhetoric and style, he brings a new type of oligarchical authoritarianism fit for the digital age. Unlike past totalitarians, he doesn’t use grandiosity to create such a spectacle: he uses blunt simplicity. But, in the end he’s an oligarchic tool, thus a symptom, whose most obvious properties all branch from this one point.
We shouldn’t focus anymore on Trump, only on what he symbolizes: a desperate move from a desperate system, a ruling class dedicated to maintaining power, and a dying country ready for something new. When a given system begins failing, it can’t be justified by its own merits — it has to convince people of them. At this point, we get populists like Trump, who create paradoxical ideologies to justify continuing a broken system.
To address the quote located above, our culture, as divided as it is, has outpaced our state and economic structures. But the old world still clings to life. It is at this confrontation with the absurd, the clash between our need for something new and the world’s refusal to progress, that we get people like Trump; and, with it, a new world, good or bad.
¹https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/
²https://apnews.com/article/trump-hannity-dictator-authoritarian-presidential-election-f27e7e9d7c13fabbe3ae7dd7f1235c72
³https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-tariffs-immigration-spending-cuts-reduce-us-economic-potential-by-laura-tyson-and-lenny-mendonca-2025-07#:~:text=Most%20forecasters%20–%20from%20the%20Conference%20Board,3.3%25%20in%202024%20to%202.3%25%20in%202025.
⁴https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-20/billionaires-worth-1-3-trillion-embrace-trump-at-inauguration
⁵https://www.npr.org/2025/08/21/g-s1-83915/national-guard-dc-deployed
⁶https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvg7vxx888kt
⁷https://securityanddefence.pl/Military-protester-relations-Insights-from-nonviolence-research,141545,0,2.html
⁸https://news.gallup.com/poll/692879/independents-drive-trump-approval-second-term-low.aspx
⁹https://theloop.ecpr.eu/explaining-the-trump-loyalty-cult-phenomenon/
¹⁰https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide-to-statistics-on-historical-trends-in-income-inequality#:~:text=Federal%20Reserve%20data%20show%20that,is%20best%20for%20all%20purposes.
¹¹https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047272724001920
¹²https://theconversation.com/rupert-murdochs-empire-was-built-on-a-shrewd-understanding-of-how-media-and-power-work-214218
¹³https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/corporate-america-invented-religious-right-conservative-roosevelt-princeton-117030/
¹⁴https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/11/04/billionaires-backing-trump-harris-2024/75936100007/
¹⁵https://campaignlegal.org/update/have-wealthy-donors-bought-trump-administration
¹⁶https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/11/04/billionaires-backing-trump-harris-2024/75936100007/
¹⁷https://climate.sustainability-directory.com/term/institutional-decay/
¹⁸https://www.technomads.io/blog/cost-of-living-vs-salaries-us
Aidan Vanhoof 
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