Trump As Myth
Trump As Myth
What Myth Is, and Why It Matters If You Want to Win
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In my last article, I said that Trump is the most consequential president since perhaps Lincoln. Some readers may think this is hyperbole—in time, everyone will see that I am right. He broke with the script held to by modern politics, and this was enough to show that the emperor has no clothes. Whatever else he did or didn’t do pales in comparison. The people can’t unsee what he has shown them. He has become something more than a president.
In 2023, when a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, it spilled hazardous chemicals and prompted a state of emergency declaration. The authorities rushed in and, rather than cleaning up the mess—and in what many saw as a cover-up—decided to burn the chemicals instead. Poisonous gas began billowing throughout the small town, eventually causing widespread health problems which persist to this day. The chair of the US National Transportation Safety Board recently confirmed at a Senate hearing what many knew at the time—that the controlled burn was unjustified.1
Government mishandling of the disaster was bad enough. But something worse happened—the left began gloating at the misfortune of this small, blue-collar town. This was not just a train run off the tracks. To the left, it was it was a sign that nature or nature’s god hated Middle America, and in a feverish display of schadenfreude, it gleefully rubbed salt in the wound, laughing at their misfortune and sputtering that they deserved it, as Joy Behar did on The View.2
Meanwhile, Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine faced calls to resign over the mishandling, with the Republican party seen as a symbol of elite incompetence and indifference to the folk it is there to serve. When East Palestine residents needed help, they only saw a horde of gloating subhumans to their left, and a cabal of negligent criminals to their right. No one was on their side. Then Trump arrived.
He arrived before even Biden, the sitting president. And people noticed. Watch their response:
Amid the cries of “thank you for not forgetting about us”, Trump projects an almost mythic quality. The woman to the left of the screen looks like she’s about to burst into tears. Whatever you think of Trump’s lack of policy initiative, failure to build the wall, or capitulation to ethnic interests, does not matter. What matters is that Trump is the avatar for white America. When the system persecutes him, they persecute white America. When academics say that the “system of white supremacy” privileges white America, they mean the privilege the people of East Palestine enjoy of being gassed by our rulers. No serious person actually buys the notion of white privilege, and Trump himself simply dismisses the system for the farce that it is. He is a massive problem for the system, just by existing.
We said that Trump is almost mythic. But he is not quite mythic. The term “myth” gets overused to the point where it’s meaningless, much like the term “epic” (bro). Trump is a step toward a mythic persona. He stands for something, but he does not quite meet the qualification of mythic. And it is absolutely critical for us—as dissidents, who wish to change the system—to understand what a myth is, and why Trump is not quite mythic. At least, not yet. He could be, and at the end of this article we will say how.
First, a myth is not a fairy tale or an untrue story. This understanding is an artifact of Christian apologetics, and is misguided—as we shall argue, Christians would do well to regard Jesus as mythic. Second, a myth is not an old story. This is an artifact of Enlightenment progressivism, which has been called into question with the revival of nationalism and yet more reactionary forces today. We have not passed out of the age of myth—the canon is not closed. Mythic persons have walked the earth in living memory. We are not progressives here, and frankly, nor is anyone who is sane, normal, and healthy.
We know what a myth is not. So what is it? The best definition of a myth was given by Georges Sorel in his book Reflections on Violence:
Myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act. [...] A myth cannot be refuted, since it is, at bottom, identical with the convictions of a group, being the expression of these convictions in the language of movement; and it is, in consequence, unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions.3
There is a lot to unpack here. A myth is not merely a description. It may involve description; it may appear to be composed of propositions; it may tell you about a state of affairs in the world—but so does a scientific theory or a court transcript. Those are not myths—a myth is much more than a description.
Sorel tells us that a myth is an “expression of a determination to act”. A myth expresses a determination, which is always aimed at a goal or purpose. And a goal or purpose presupposes a will. When you act wilfully, you are aiming at something. And this aiming, willing, purposive action embodies a command.
Now, a command is a categorically different utterance than a proposition. A command cannot be true or false, only apt or inapt, legitimate or illegitimate. The command is essentially the will of the commander being imposed on the one commanded—the issuer of the command turns the recipient of the command into the instrument of his will.
What Sorel is doing, then, is making a foundational distinction between any old story or account, and a myth. He is distinguishing mythos from logos. A myth is a description, yes. But it is a special kind of description. A myth is a description that hides within it a prescription. A myth does not merely tell you what is—a myth tells you what ought to be. And it charges you with bringing “what ought to be” into being. This is why Sorel then says that a myth is “the expression of these convictions in the language of movement”. A command is not a passive depiction of a state of affairs, but a demand for action, for movement. It is no accident that Trump’s most famous utterance—Make America Great Again—is not a proposition, but a command.
And like a command—which can neither be true nor false—the myth cannot be refuted. As Sorel says, the myth is “unanalysable into parts which could be placed on the plane of historical descriptions”. A myth cannot be evaluated in terms of historical facts. A historical description could be refuted by some fact that contradicts it, but no fact can ever bring a myth into question, because a myth is not strictly true nor false.
As an example, take Marxism. Marxism is not quite a scientific theory, though it pretends to scientific status. But all of its major claims have been refuted by the facts of economic history since Marx’s time, and yet Marxists remain committed. It’s not so much the propositional claims that they remain committed to, but the prescriptions embedded in them. Marx redefines familiar normative terms (such as “value”) to exclude certain actions, and then attaches emotionally charged language (such as “exploitation”) to describe these excluded actions. What he is doing, quite straightforwardly, is giving you a command to refrain from those actions, but dressed up in the neutral and objective language of description. He does something similar with the idea of “class struggle”. By giving you an elaborated just-so story about how class struggle is inevitable given historical forces, he is in essence demanding that you subordinate yourself to those forces, and therefore to the outcome that he would have—which is class struggle.
We could give another, ostensibly less nefarious example of myth, one that Sorel himself gives—the Christian passion of Jesus.
The first Christians expected the return of Christ and the total ruin of the pagan world, with the inauguration of the kingdom of the saints, at the end of the first generation. The catastrophe did not come to pass, but Christian thought profited so greatly from the apocalyptic myth that certain contemporary scholars maintain that the whole preaching of Christ referred solely to this one point.4
The original Christians did believe that the apocalypse was imminent. This core belief was not a mere description of the world, but contained within it a command to then prepare the way for the return of the saviour god to earth, which would in turn inaugurate the kingdom of Heaven. But this did not occur, and 2,000 years later, it has still not occurred. And yet this has not proven fatal to the myth—much like Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, the fulfilment has simply been deferred. And it may go on being deferred indefinitely without any damage to the myth itself.
In fact, the failure of the myth as a description—i.e. the myth’s being challenged by some set of historical facts—far from refuting it, makes it stronger. Nick Land poetically describes the same “dialectic” with the progressive myth of the tolerant society:
That the eschatological culmination of this trend is simply impossible matters not at all to the dialectic. On the contrary, it energizes the political process, combusting any threat of policy satiation in the fuel of infinite grievance. “I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In England’s green and pleasant land.” Somewhere before Jerusalem is reached, the inarticulate pluralism of a free society has been transformed into the assertive multiculturalism of a soft-totalitarian democracy.5
The fact that the myth has not been fulfilled is in fact its strength, because a command once fulfilled (whether to tolerate infinite refugees, or to prepare the coming of the saviour) no longer has any force. The incomplete task—better still, the impossibility of the task—does not dissuade the true believer, but positively energizes him. When you point out to the progressive that what she wants is not only reprehensible, but impossible, she responds with all the ire of a god, transforming into the god’s sword and arm, no longer a person but a force of nature—she just is the myth, and you are fuel to be consumed by her infinite grievance.
No less with the first Christians who were energized by the failure of their myth to come to pass. The myth coming to pass was not the point. The point was the command embedded in the myth, which, both grammatically and metaphysically, exists outside of temporality. Historical refutation is neither possible nor even conceivable.
A knowledge of what the myths contain in the way of details which will actually form part of the history of the future is then of small importance; they are not astrological almanacs; it is even possible that nothing which they contain will ever come to pass—as was the case with the catastrophe expected by the first Christians.6
When we understand a myth as a command framed in the language of description, much else becomes clear. The myth, like the command, is fundamentally absolutist. It cannot tolerate any contravening command—as the transference of a will (our definition of a command given elsewhere), it can brook no opposition, no other will higher than itself, no contrary myth. To illustrate, we can look at the French Revolution, another example of a myth given by Sorel.
The Catholic church—with its own myth grown dusty and forgotten—attempted to refute the French Revolution, as though it were some sort of claim, as though it were a description that could be falsified by another description. This attempt was known as reaction, and it thought that it could defeat liberalism by simply pointing out its “error”. In essence, this is what the near-totality of right-wing dissidents are doing today in trying to refute modern liberalism. They are trying to debate it, trying to argue their way into power. 19th century reaction failed utterly for the same reason modern dissidence will fail—it is asking, and liberalism is telling.7
Even when the French liberal regime completely threw off any pretence of principle or belief and governed as an open autocracy,8 this did not in any way “refute” liberalism. Mark this well, O thou dissident of today. The power of liberalism lay not in its being “true”, nor even claiming to be “true”. The power of liberalism lay in the epic of the revolutionary wars which had fired the French soul, and for which that soul had sacrificed so much of its own flesh and blood.
This military epic gave an epical colour to all the events of internal politics; party struggles were thus raised to the level of an Iliad; politicians became giants, and the revolution, which Joseph de Maistre had denounced as satanical, was made divine. The bloody scenes of the Terror were episodes without great significance by the side of the enormous hecatombs of war, and means were found to envelop them in a dramatic mythology; riots were elevated to the same rank as illustrious battles; and calmer historians vainly endeavoured to bring the Revolution and the Empire down to the plane of common history. The prodigious triumphs of the revolutionary and imperial arms rendered all criticism impossible.9
Sorel’s comments here eerily echo the civil rights mythology of a century later, which elevated rioting and criminality to noble struggle.
Liberalism won and reaction lost for a very simple reason—liberalism had the more powerful myth. Even the hecatombs of corpses piled up in the Terror were as nothing compared to the heroic deeds that were sung into being by the bards of the revolution. Battles were no longer colossal games of chess with thousands of nameless pawns, but a series of heroic exploits by named men. Their deeds were exaggerated, often fabricated. Few of their lofty phrases were actually spoken, maybe none. But the genius of these mythic compositions, in the old epic mode, did “describe” one thing with perfect accuracy—it described the aspect and worldview through which they looked upon their deeds, which were thereby elevated to the Homeric.
It was this that forged the later revolutionary’s adamantine discipline, which provided the compressive force that in 1848, half a century after the revolution—and no longer just in France but all across Europe—exploded into a general conflagration. This epical and truly mythic worldview convinced these revolutionaries that the slightest failure of the lowliest private might jeopardize the whole revolution. For want of a nail we lost the horse; for want of a horse we lost… and so on until for want of a nail millions of our French grandfathers died heroically for nothing. The crushing weight of such a thought is the force of the command that myth brings.
Now, let us return to Trump.
Trump certainly has some mythic elements. He is larger than life. He stands for a whole people. He is probably loved more today by those people than Jesus. He is feared by the peddlers of the countervailing myth. He even openly issues the command to Make America Great Again. But is this enough?
Ask yourself, what is Trump’s national epic? What is his revolutionary war? What is his great passion play? What is his class struggle? What is his apocalypse?
So far, the answer to this must be silence. Trump does not have a myth. He has an injunction, a command to restore America. But this is not enough. A call for restoration, for going back, for a RETVRN—this is not enough. Myth is not about the past so much as it is about the future.
There can be no national epic about things which the people cannot picture to themselves as reproducible in a near future; popular poetry implies the future much more than the past; it is for this reason that the adventures of the Gauls, of Charlemagne, of the Crusades, of Joan of Arc cannot form the subject of a narrative capable of moving any but literary people.10
This is a hard lesson for pagans as much as it is for Christians—a myth is not about the past. A myth is a sublimated command, and a command demands action, which can only happen in the future. This does not mean myth cannot be informed by the past. All myths are. Christianity depended on Judaism; Marxism had its primitive communism; liberalism had its state of nature. But a myth is always future-oriented.
Thus far, Trump does not have a myth. At least, not yet. But only last month, the deep state has convicted Trump of the crime of “something, anything”.11 He is due for sentencing in July.
The regime must tread carefully here, for its own sake. If it bars Trump from running, or if it again massages procedural outcomes to deny him a win, it risks making him into a Jesus figure. Whether or not he actually did win will not be the point. The point will be perception. Already, the elite political class has made itself into the enemy of the American people. Already, it has telegraphed its goal of replacing them. The whole of America’s founding stock is East Palestine. The Democrats are nowhere to be seen, the Republicans are lighting a cloud of poisonous gas, and Trump is shaking hands.
If the regime does make a martyr of Trump, they will have written his myth. But they have already made him into a criminal. If they don’t martyr him, they admit that Trump is above the law. Either he is a myth, or above the law—and who else is above the law but the sovereign? This is the latest in a series of “painful catch-22s” that the regime has suffered at the instigation of Trump himself.
Our rulers are absurdly incompetent nincompoops. Consider the scope of their failure. They have taken the most powerful, secure, self-running political machine in the history of the world—liberal democracy—and in a single generation have managed to squander it. They have put themselves in a terrible position, where one man is now the avatar for an oppressed people—the numerical majority, who are descended from religious extremists and whose revolutionary blood has been awakened.
Our rulers have concocted a no-win scenario and stepped into it. This scale of incompetence can only be described as mythic. What happens next could be the beginning of a new era.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Introduction: Letter to Daniel Halevy.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ch. IV, The Proletarian Strike, I.
Land, The Dark Enlightenment, ch. 3, Untitled.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ch. IV, The Proletarian Strike, I.
We have explained elsewhere on this blog why liberalism will be defeated, but not by dissident activism.
Such as with Napoleon I, or the Law of 22 Prairial, or the coup of Napoleon III, or any number of other illiberal acts in the name of liberalism, which we have detailed in our article Liberalism, Then and Now.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ch. III, Prejudices Against Violence, I.
Sorel, Reflections on Violence, ch. III, Prejudices Against Violence, I.
This Substack is criminally underrated.
From my old notes that touched on the power of myth:
The age of gods and heroes result from the creative acts of “imagination,” while the age of men stems from the faculty of “reflection.” Nations were “poetic in their beginnings,” and their history can be understood through the study of their fables, myths, the structure of early languages, and the formation of polytheistic religions.
Summa of the ideas of Giambattista Vico, author of Scienza Nuova Prima (1725/1744)