The orange emperor and his recipe for global disaster
Trumpians have a plan - sort of - to recreate the warring states of ancient Greece and Rome. And it could lead to a mass human extinction. By Adam Jezard.
It’s time to look behind the racism and far-right ideology driving the current US administration of Donald Trump and at what their supposed policies mean for societies, businesses, economies and ordinary citizens.
I’ve previously examined the current disruptors’ use of ancient philosophy, often seemingly lifted from translations of the likes of Thucydides, Plato (and therefore Socrates) and Aristotle, almost without a comma having been changed in some instances, and how the fascists of the 1930s adapted these beliefs for their own vile usage. This time, however, we need to consider the far-reaching aims of what I shall call Trumpians, for want of a better term, as many of the people seemingly pushing these policies are not particularly right-wing, some come from the far-left, and some seemingly have no ideology other than being anti-establishmentarian, no matter what the establishment may be.
However, they all conspire to get behind the Trumpian view of the world, so the noun and adjective Trumpian applies.
Background briefing
I’m not going to dwell too much on the organisations and people pushing these. Millionaires (or richer) tech-bros, dodgy internet influencers and strange self-styled philosophers and institutes abound and you can research into these at your leisure, if you don’t find them making you feel like physically vomiting (some links below).
Briefly, however, a group of self-styled “philosophers” have come up with a bunch of half-cocked theories that many rationalists link to racist ideology and tropes about the intelligence of people of different ethnicities that date back to the pre-abolition of slavery era and 1930s’ fascism. Perhaps only someone with a classical education or who’s fascinated enough by the psychology and philosophy of what’s driving this incoherent garbage parading as philosophy and policy comes from, and determined to do a bit of digging, would know that even this 1930s’ hatred was a retread of thinking that goes back millennia, otherwise you could be tricked into thinking this neocon messaging is somehow new and innovative when in fact it’s retreading the hate and bigotry of that’s continually been repurposed and repackaged for over 2,500 years.
“Blame someone else!” The art of making people feel bad
It's easy to tell people who feel neglected by society, whose incomes have been stuck since the 2008 financial crisis, who aren’t able to get jobs that last more than a few years, whose educations have cost a bundle but delivered not as much as they hoped, that somehow it’s all the fault of minorities, or migrants, or some “elite” of rich people somewhere who are taking it all away from you.
The fact that it’s a group of mostly very wealthy people who run, or own, or studied in the companies and institutions and universities that they’re telling people have failed them seems to pass many by. As does the incoherent messaging of this new Trumpian movement, that claims to hate fascism yet pumps out propaganda evidently inspired by fascists, that claims to be for the small people while taking away their benefits, healthcare and pensions and destroying the fabric of society that was meant to care for them – and has much worse in store for them.
It would take a book to examine every policy, and elsewhere I’ve discussed the racism and its history, so this time let’s look at what the Trumpians have in store for the world order, if they are successful.
Welcome to Ancient Greece, 2025-style
One of the key tenets of the Trumpians is they want a return to a group of city or small states, as in the pre-industrial age. Instead of trade and defence alliances such as the World Trade Organisation, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the World Health Organisation, the Trumpians envisage groups of small states where there are no presidents or prime ministers, but Chief Executive Officers, whose job it is to run their fiefdoms for the good of shareholders.
There would be no “democracy” as such. Only people who have property or significant wealth would be allowed to have any say over the control of society as the Trumpians deem democracy to have failed. Black or non-whites are deemed to not be able to govern themselves properly and Europeans and their descendants are only marginally better able to do so.
For something like half a century the far-right has worked to undermine science, the standing of NATO, the WHO and the EU, and spread myths repurposing anti-Jewish and pre-abolitionist era race-hate propaganda that, thanks to the virus-like nature of the internet, now spread like a cancer through society. Leapt on by internet trolls funded by Putin and in turn Xi, looking to undermine western democracy and markets for their own purposes, and backed by strange groups like the Atlas Network and the Taxpayers Alliance and others, these voices have become dominant in the discourse of mainstream media, as well as online. They shout out that they represent the “will of the people”, that they are ignored, and real science and history and philosophy have no bearing on the Trumpians’ misuse, misunderstanding and misinterpretation of them to achieve their aims.
Anyone who questions the Trumpians is bigoted, biased, part of a conspiracy or otherwise blind to the Truman Show, The Prisoner, Plato’s Cave, or whatever alternative reality they allude to in order to make their case seem real and quiet their opponents, without them acknowledging the alternative universe that they have created for themselves. This is one that ignores science, statistics, history, medicine and philosophy and what happened to people when the world looked like the one they want to create: war, famine, disease, disaster and misery for most of the human population.
Not citizens, commodities: serfdom in the hi-tech age
At heart, Trumpianism is a eugenicist project. Not only do the backers and promoters of it believe that non-whites are inferior to them, they believe that most white people, especially women, are not intelligent enough to be in charge or have the same rights as them and that they should not be citizens who have a say in democracy but should be commodities. As long as you can earn your keep and pay your way, you will be able to stay. The job of the CEO-PMs and presidents is not to win your vote at election time, but to ensure that you are happy enough to remain under their protection while you are profitable.
You, as a white person, will fall into one of three categories: “Brahims” who are the elites, and Vaisya and Optimate, who represent the white middle and working classes. The other two groups, Dalit and Helot, represent ethnic minorities.
Although these groups are used to attack existing power structures in the US and the west, they also represent the neocon view of how the world should be ordered. Unless you are incredibly rich or deemed useful, you will be effectively a serf, the CEO an absolutist, a monarch, who will have absolute sway over you and the rest of society.
The Trumpians also call for the abolition of all government and all institutions. What you’re left with is what they are willing to give you.
As I wrote elsewhere of the creation of philosopher kings in Plato’s The Republic, which the Trumpian ideal so strongly resembles: the Socratic myth then sees gods creating three ordained classes: the gold, the de facto kings; the silver, the auxiliaries, or soldiers or police, who will defend the state and keep order; the iron echelon, or basically everyone else, the shoemakers, ships’ captains, medics, poets and so on.
While early on there is talk of some limited social mobility – if the child of a shoemaker shows more intellectual potential than the child of a philosopher, then the positions should be reversed – later this rubric seems to be rejected because it later emerges the philosophers should become “kings”. There were also two additional classes not much discussed: slaves…and woman. Women could however be eligible to join the highest two levels as the equals of men but those who didn’t pass the tests would be the lowest of the iron echelon, just slightly above slaves, who barely get a mention.
While this will please the useful idiots who deride ethnic minorities and universal suffrage for women, unfortunately the working classes are also not needed in tomorrow’s Trumpian world in which machines and AI will do the work. The Trumpians deem your place in society to be determined by the genetic inheritance, i.e, if you’re rich you’re born that way, and if you’re not, well, you’re no longer needed. In the new world, philosopher kings will not want to mix with the average worker: they will have more in common with other CEOs of other states, social mobility will not exist. Breeding will only be allowed among superior classes, another hangover from both Platonic and Nazi doctrine.
To many, and I know a few, who feel left behind by the world of “AI” and mechanisation, the chance to reshore work that has gone to foreign countries offers the hope some old-fashioned manual jobs will return to the once-thriving industrial heartlands. But this is a short-sighted view I suspect the Trumpians play up to. Any manufacturing that will return, be that in the US or elsewhere, will be strictly high-tech work, the manual element performed by robots or other technologies. Upskill or die will be the name of the game. And for many, die is what they will want you to do.
The dismantling of the US healthcare system again puts us in mind of Plato’s The Republic:
The truth is that this modern system of nursing diseases was introduced by Herodicus the trainer; who, being of a sickly constitution, by a compound of training and medicine tortured first himself and then a good many other people, and lived a great deal longer than he had any right. But Asclepius would not practise this art, because he knew that the citizens of a well-ordered State have no leisure to be ill, and therefore he adopted the ‘kill or cure’ method, which artisans and labourers employ. ‘They must be at their business,’ they say, ‘and have no time for coddling: if they recover, well; if they don’t, there is an end of them.’
Who will rule? Welcome to the world of the Melian dialogue
Under the Trumpians, the world will effectively return to a series of small city states that will rule independently of one another and provide citizens with no need to leave because the CEO leaders will provide for their needs to keep the states working well.
There is the expected confusion between this desire for peace and elsewhere in their theology the notion that violence will be necessary to achieve this “ideal” state status by suppressing minorities and those who disagree. It’s also unclear how these CEOs will work together if they need to share resources and the notion of one ruler, a hegemonic leader, is not even discussed. However, if you look at the distrust of the EU by the neocons, which fear the opposition of a large rival economic power, it seems probable that the only outcome from such a world will be perpetual war. In this, the biggest bully in the playground will want to win.
Already we’ve seen Trump using the tactic of the Melian dialogue with regards to Canada and Greenland. This is so named after the Athenians turned up to the independent island of Melos and told the Melians they were Athenian now. When the Melians objected, the Athenians laid siege to the chief town, murdered all the men, killed the unborn foetuses, children and old people, and stole the women as concubines or slaves.
Such a world of microstates will be one of perpetual unease and war, in which only the voting shareholders of each state will wield any power. It will be a return to the days of the Greek and Roman empires in which the Trumpians will act as Caesars. And we know what that world was like.
How will a corporate world work? Ask H.G. Wells
Elsewhere I wrote about how science fiction authors envisaged the future. Looking back this was somewhat prescient. Here’s what I said about H.G Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come:
The world, exhausted by three decades of war, is saved from starvation by a collaboration of corporations who band together to form a global air force to bring peace and food to the starved nations of the earth. This is done by formation of an Air Dictatorship led by corporations, which limits personal ownership or means of production and distribution but somehow allows free enterprise and entrepreneurship without ownership of land or property that could belong to others (much is unexplained). This also shows a shocking waste of the world's resources as things like clothes are just thrown away after use: minus several million brownie points for missing out on the green agenda.
Also, the Air Dictatorship is a dictatorship, whose bloody path to achieve world peace (including an indoctrination programme in schools and forced acceptance of English as common lingua franca) is only mentioned in passing.
One of the worst aspects of the book, and sadly much of Wells' writing generally, is his acceptance of a belief in eugenics and the superiority of white people over all over ethnicities as fact. He assumes the extermination of the Jews will happen not because he wants it but because the eugenicists of the time saw this as inevitable in some authoritarian state, a massive problem when rereading the book today. Despite his supposedly liberal-left reputation, Wells was a man of [the equally eugenicist British] Empire and it shows.
To sum-up, the world the Trumpians foresee is a disaster for the majority of humanity. It is likely to lead to a mass extinction of humanity, who the Trumpians see as worthless, whether that be because they’re not millionaires, not white or don’t conform to the standards of humanity they desire, likely to be engineered to be part of some master race along lines set out under one of their other doctrines.
Of course, this may not come to pass, indeed one can hope it will not. But I don’t bear an overly optimistic view here. Trump’s second term, brexit, the invasion of Ukraine and the continuing, although I do believe diminishing, culture wars have all defeated any belief in deus ex machina.
This whole Trumpian world (“Drill, baby, drill”) is backed by fossil fuel execs and owners who are willing to continue to pollute the planet and destroy the environment for their own enrichment, paying for massive disinformation that must cost billions to attack green technologies and any initiatives aimed at reducing the harm they cause so they can reap a huge profit.
These people do not care if you survive. Indeed, they would prefer you do not. They may think they can escape the coming catastrophes in holes in the ground or caves on mountains, perhaps under the sea, but the truth is that they are unlikely to.
The Trumpian world may not come to pass for many reasons, not least those driving it don’t agree what it should look like, who should be in charge, or indeed on many other basic elements of their supposed policies. Any future they plan is likely to fall apart because of its complete intellectual incoherence.
The Trumpians also underestimate the fact if, once, the rest of humanity wakes up to what they’re up they may have something to say about. History is full of wannabe dictators hanged by their own former supporters.
But the world is being shaken up in a way that it has not been for almost a century, probably longer. Perhaps, if the people started articulating what they want – a stable economy, mitigation of climate change, healthcare for all, better and free education and a universal basic income, all of which could be achievable if the extremely wealthy looked to the good of humanity rather than themselves – then a better world might ensue.
But there are no heroes on white horses riding to save us. Unless we all get on them and charge at the same time.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/05/31/politics/video/curtis-yarvin-anti-democracy-blogger-maga-gold-new-digvid?fbclid=IwY2xjawKqX_RleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHjXFHIr2Ko-3_Qoa-grfJzYJQiU4ZvWVY_Id8NDSxInAnZGEAjlSnwigUR8q_aem_6FEvV01giXlz_UKAgfVK6A
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/23/big-oil-445m-trump-congress
How Nazi Race Science Conquered the White House, and is Coming for Your Democracy – Byline Times
https://adamjezard.substack.com/p/how-folk-yesterday-saw-the-future