Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the absurdity of Donald Trump. He even admitted as much at a recent rally when he declared, with obvious disdain, that “I can say the stupidest things, and you’d clap.” Trump wants all our attention—our adoration and our outrage.
But as we focus on him and the policies of his administration, we can lose sight of the expansive ideological agenda of those around him. MAGA seeks to remake this country. And the architects of that mission often draw on resources from a past rife with claims about the survival of the fittest, the superiority of Anglo-Saxons, and the rightness of empire.
These people want to pull up, from the root, any remnant of Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society. They reject the value of a multicultural, multiracial society. And they long for the days when people knew their place in the hierarchical structure of matter and life.
Nostalgia is one of their most cherished currencies. Not so much as a sentiment of loss or as a lament that the virtuous days of white rule are no longer available to us, but as a romance with fantasy. These people weave stories to justify their cruelties and their vision of the world, and they claim them as historical truths.
I was struck by this in Secretary Marco Rubio’s speech in Athens on October 7, 2026. He reveled in the grandeur of ancient Greece, the so-called fount of western civilization. As he put it,
Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West: fierce individuality and relentless ambition; daring exploration and invention; a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory. An insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries and grasp the secrets of the cosmos. An impatience with impossibility, chafing at all boundaries and limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown.
One could take issue with Rubio’s claim here. The history of the construction of the West is much more complicated. But the point is not about accuracy or the truth. Rubio, in a way reminiscent of 19th century forms of nationalism, is engaged in mythmaking.
The power of ancient Greece rests with its culture of contest, he declared. “The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle—to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.”
As I read those words, I prepared myself for an adolescent reading of Fredrich Nietzsche to follow, with its criticism of slave morality and an invocation of the will to power. Cue up Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries.”
Rubio did not disappoint. The world of ancient Greece sounds odd to our “postmodern” ears, he said, because “the ideal of many ideologies in our time has become a world of perfect safety, devoid of risk or failure, with neither glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often these days, we build downwards.”
The West has become shameful of the fire and passion, the strength and courage that is at the heart of great civilization. With this fire (thumos), “nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive.”
Rubio, as “the great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain,” (I guess that makes Europe his possession, too) offers here a mythological account of the vision of the world that animates the Trump administration.
A nationalism reborn.
He tells us, in no uncertain terms, who they are, and we must take him at his word. The war with Iran, the threats against Greenland and Canada, the starvation of Cuba (the place his ancestors triumphantly “settled”) provide the evidence. As with the imperialism they romanticize, cruelty has no borders. And Donald Trump is the ringmaster.
Trump is the P.T. Barnum of our political days, an old showman who tragically believes he still has the magic in his hands. Cue up Sarah Vaughn’s “Bring in the Clowns.” Even with his addled mind and corrupted soul, Trump plays his part in diverting our attention from the real dangers to this democracy and to the world.
We have much more to confront than Donald Trump, whose days in the bright sun are dwindling. We also have to contend with the likes of Marco Rubio, Russell Vought, and Stephen Miller. What will be the substance of the new humanism that will serve as a counter to their dark view of the world?
How we answer that question, it seems to me, is critical to whether, and how, we survive these difficult days.
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Because of Ole Orange's mastery of smoke and mirrors, far too many people perceived him as the virus when he is, at best, a byproduct or a symptom. At most, he is merely an opportunist who rode the rejuvenated wave of white supremacy to power and profit. Yet, he and the Neo-Confederates are only successful because most African Americans and liberal whites made the South, generally, and Mississippi, specifically, the face of American racism because it enabled them to label, hide, and foolishly think that it was contained from them. (Even today, they treat the Nolan Wells case as if it's unique to Mississippi, as they suffer from what James Baldwin called "selective naiveté," ignoring the fact that Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and Amadou Diallo were all lynched outside Mississippi.) These two groups wouldn't dare think that their East Coast, Northern, Midwest, and West Coast neighbors are all card-carrying members of the Neo-Confederacy, even when election after election said so. White Nationalism wasn't reborn because it never died. It simply bided its time, growing stronger in the dark, like a cancer, because the vast majority of Americans refused to do the necessary routine examination of our nation's soul. Now, that we are at stage four, we'll see who's finally ready to do the work needed to cure this nation.
Sadly a bungler like Rubio still has hangers on