The Triumph of Will in Donald Trump

The duplicity of the contemporaneous Republican Party has never been so apparent. On one hand, we see the public carrot of luring their base into ‘free market capitalism’. Aspirations of exorbitant wealth as evidenced in the lavish, luxury clad life of Donald Trump. On the other hand, the real engine of Republican ideology has been shown in the stick. Potency and virility show themselves in the cameo phrase “your fired”. Discussion and cooperation find its limit in the determinative declarative where indeterminacy gives way to sheer unrelenting power. Will overcomes contingency. Here, then, is the gravity which defines all possibility: autocracy.

Donald Trump symbolizes the sheer resolve of Nietzsche’s ‘of the past, I willed it thus’. In Trump, his devotees are freed from their daily tedious lives and vicariously share in the reward of an untethered affirmation of existence. As is always true of the heroic, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Never mind his inherited blue blood privileges, he is a business genius. Never mind making sense of his inherit verbal nonsense and contradiction, he is a “stable genius”. Never mind his ‘pussy grabbing’, ethnic posturing xenophobia, he is simply expressing boldly and freely his joyous reign in absolute freedom. The heroic of Nietzsche is reawakened in the existential brut-ness of aspirational phantasma. In Trump, finally, the damned are redeemed and ushered into virginal bliss.

There has never been a time that so clearly exemplifies the gospel of unabashed greed and tyranny. Trump sees friendship, allies and international cooperation as ‘weak’. He sees kleptocracy, dictatorship and authoritarianism as ‘strong’. It is not just Trump; Republicanism since Barry Goldwater has suckled its sweet milk at the nipples of ‘strong leadership’, patriarchal Reagan-ism, the jubilant triumph of ‘supply-side’ massaged, ‘free-market-capitalism’. The ‘good ol boy’ has been elevated to CEO and private ownership. Monopoly and market manipulation have found new owners in government regulation and corporatism. Thus, the burden of inefficiency has been replaced with the bureaucracy of federalism. In all of these subtleties the metaphysic of unhampered will has replaced collectivity, cooperation and even more, language.

Language no longer need be obligated to the oppressive lord of logic, rationality and facts. Facts are free whims and desires of power not symbols which point beyond their sheer signifier. Trump has said the most ludicrous babel which gets re-appropriated as mystic, untethered assertion. Assertion as asserted-ness in itself, sufficient from within, hermetically jubilant in self-same-ness. Identity is finally achieved in ‘nothing but’ tautologies where true is replaced by ‘is’. Sheer-isness is the eternal desire for godhood, released from mortal bonds, and ready to find its fascist moment in history.

The latest refinement of this from Republicanism is Donald Trump. His base has cleverly ascertained the implicit meaning of Republicanism since Goldwater. They are the fulfillment and completion of the promise of the triumph of will over merely-human and all the while they live on the hither side of the moat beside the castle as the grass grows under their feet.