Team Trump – The Real Behind the Veil of Appearances

On January 20th, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States. His (re)election is probably the most significant political event since World War II. What its ultimate significance will be, we do not yet know. "Life is lived forward but understood backward" (paraphrasing Søren Kierkegaard).

It is good to learn to endure this uncertainty. It is not a sign of greatness for a person to always be certain; it is a sign of humanity to remain serene in the presence of uncertainty. In a certain sense, it is even an ethical duty to embrace uncertainty. Trump is human, and like all humans, he is complex and dynamic in nature and, as such, intrinsically unpredictable—at least for the human mind. I am therefore somewhat skeptical of both those who are certain that Trump will save the world and those who are certain that he will destroy it.

That said—Trump has won the election. And Kamala Harris has lost. Harris' loss has been interpreted in many ways: she made tactical errors, she lacked rhetorical skill, the "deep state" wanted to push forward someone easily manipulated but it backfired, or she underestimated Trump’s sophistication and intelligence, and so forth.

Here’s another possible explanation: Kamala Harris and the people behind her underestimated how much (a segment of) the population is tired of their hollow political rhetoric and hypocrisy. Clinton, Obama, Biden—a pretty façade masking the opposite of what it pretends to show. Bill Clinton’s painting dressed as a woman in Jeffrey Epstein's mansion, Barack Obama pinning the Medal of Freedom on Condoleezza Rice after she turned a blind eye to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq, Hillary Clinton's juvenile spite and schadenfreude when the life of Gaddafi also marked the end of an unprecedented period of prosperity in Libya, Joe Biden going after dissident journalists and emprisoning political opponents while portraying himself as a great defender of democracy—the painful parade of grotesque hypocrisies from the Democrats is long, far too long. Not that Republicans are without blame—they too have skeletons in their closets, and perhaps I’ll write about that another time. But this is about why the Democrats lost the election.

That many people are no longer impressed when these Democrats present themselves as the great representatives of virtue—who could be surprised? Al Gore went on a tour to warn the world about rising sea levels but bought a villa near the sea in the same year. And he didn’t give up his private jets or heated swimming pools out of concern for “the climate” either. Many people believe we should take better care of nature, but fewer and fewer believe that the globalist climate crusaders are the right people for the job.

Over the past two decades, the American Democrats have become the representatives of the globalist Agenda 2030 ideology, which hardly comes across as very moral. Their moralizing about inclusivity and gender neutrality mostly seems immoral; the “One Health Policy” of the WHO reads more like a radical threat to health and respect for the population’s right to self-determination. The economic policy (naturally tied to the climate and inclusivity agenda) was largely written by bankers like Goldman Sachs, who in 2008 perpetrated what is probably the largest heist in history.

Soon, these same oligarchs will push digital identity cards and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) to save the climate and democracy. “The New Globalist Morality” is a barely concealed performance designed to lead everyone into technocracy and the surveillance state—many people believe. And, true to Aldous Huxley’s predictions, the New Tyranny sails in under the flag of Ultimate Democracy. The Democrats have become radical anti-democrats. They were not defeated electorally because the population is tired of democracy; they were defeated because the population sees them as a threat to democracy. Trump offers them more hope for democracy—hope that they, as a people, will have some say when it comes to immigration, health, or economic policy. Whether that hope is justified, we will examine later.

For many, Trump is a relief—not exactly a refined speaker, but a bulldozer crashing through the wall of deception. Against the caricature created in the mainstream, he has actually shown himself to be made of the right stuff on several occasions. Take, for instance, the case of Illinois Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was imprisoned in 2009. The man was likely the victim of political retaliation in which Obama played a dubious (and highly undemocratic) role. Trump—as a Republican—was one of the few who steadfastly supported Blagojevich. In 2020, he ultimately granted him clemency.

You must credit Trump with something else as well: he shares dialogue with his geopolitical adversaries, including the ever-demonized Putin and Kim Jong-un. This points to a minimal form of ethical awareness that Biden lacked. It is widely known that while the world was hurtling toward World War III under Biden’s administration, Biden did not speak with Putin even once. If even the threat of nuclear war does not suffice to walk the path of words, what does?

It wasn’t until Biden completely exposed himself in the debate with Trump that even the ‘mainstream’ turned against him. Suddenly, you’d read that he had narcissistic tendencies. And that he was already showing signs of mental decline in 2020. Personally, I know quite a few people who saw that back in 2020. It wasn’t so much Kamala Harris who lost the 2024 election; it was the mainstream media. Personally, I’m not sure what I find worse: that the mass media turned a blind eye for four years to the highly problematic characteristics of Biden, or that they are now dropping their former protégé like a stone because they can no longer use him.

Totalitarian systems eventually devour their own children—Hannah Arendt taught us that. I suspect Biden is starting to realize this himself. Not that it stops him from continuing down the same path. He is now rushing to pardon a few hundred people, primarily his son and Anthony Fauci—both almost certainly guilty of criminal acts, one on a larger scale than the other.

The belief that Trump can truly bring about positive change for the first time in a long while is widespread and justified in some respects. The likelihood that he could end the war in Ukraine with a few conversations with Putin is real—so real, in fact, that some are scrambling to undercut him, urging Zelensky to end the war quickly before Trump can do it. If the war ends now, it’s Trump who will get the credit. Anyone who fails to appreciate that should urgently check the state of their heart.

There is indeed a chance that Team Trump will address some real societal problems. That’s also why they tried to assassinate Trump and why he still faces significant risks today. The Democrats, through their constant demonization of Trump, are also trying to build support for such an assassination. Can someone explain to me what’s democratic about a party that massively censors the media (see the Zuckerberg story), prosecutes dissident journalists, imprisons political opponents (see Biden’s record), and works tirelessly to create public support for assassinations of competing presidential candidates?

Trump is indeed not safe yet. Just like other members of his team, by the way. Robert Kennedy Junior will—if he gets past Congress, that is—take on Big Pharma and the food industry. This is unprecedented, without a doubt a revolution of historical proportions. There is indeed something fundamentally wrong with those industries. While the amounts invested in medical research and healthcare have spectacularly increased, public health has declined just as spectacularly every year. The work of Casey and Calley Means is recommended in this regard. The mentioned industries are undoubtedly a disgrace to humanity, most likely responsible for an unprecedented decline in public health over the past 50 years and for millions of victims. There are two culprits in this: Big Pharma itself and the population that keeps going along with their stories and continues to buy into the idea that the pains of the human condition can be solved with a pill.

It will be hot days for RFK. The biggest problem will likely be the academic-medical world, largely sponsored and brainwashed by Big Pharma and Big Food. There is a good chance they will produce one study after another, using highly sophisticated statistics to "prove" that RFK's policies are a disaster for public health. He will be responsible for the loss of numerous lives, you know! Turning the truth upside down is a characteristic of the New Lie that has taken control of our rationalist society.

Fortunately, Trump has nominated Professor Jay Bhattacharya as the future head of the NIH to assist Kennedy, a man with a warm heart and a sharp intellect, a rare combination of qualities. A man who also took responsibility during the coronavirus crisis and, with the Great Barrington Declaration, put his intellectual weight in the balance to protect the population from the destructiveness of (among others) Big Pharma. He paid the price of a mud-slinging campaign in the media. I’ve talked about it with him—he’s only become a more beautiful soul because of it. Whether Kennedy and Bhattacharya succeed or not, for my part, I am sure they will make a sincere and downright heroic attempt.

Team Trump is also going to take on one of the greatest scourges of Enlightenment culture: the burgeoning bureaucracy. Elon Musk—the most prominent member of Team Trump—should prepare for that (and who knows, maybe Mark Zuckerberg too, the world is going crazy these days). This too could become a revolution unlike any in modern history. And if anyone is capable of actually pushing this through, it is Musk. When he arrived at Twitter, he fired 80% of the staff and it ran better than before. I assume the numbers could be even more spectacular at the state apparatus level.

Musk is a special case. On one hand, he opposes the ideology of the malleable human, especially since his son is tired of being male and wants to become female, and he encountered a few people in his environment who—let’s put it mildly—didn’t feel too healthy after the COVID vaccine. As an energetic entrepreneur, he doesn't sit idly by. He declared war on transgenderism and woke ideology, and he bought Twitter to provide a haven for the stifling contemporary censorship.

On the other hand, he is a technophile and a prototypical example of someone who is sensitive to the arrogance of human intellect. With his SpaceX project, he aims to conquer Mars, with his Starlink project, he is laying the foundation for a radical digitalization of society, and with his Neuralink brain chip, he plans to ensure that people can communicate flawlessly with each other without words or language. In this sense, he is a pioneer of the malleable human idea, the practical implementer of Harari’s transhumanism, and the "internet-of-bodies" society.

Musk is indeed advocating for a far-reaching digitalization of society. For instance, he announces that soon almost all cars will be self-driving. No need to limit your alcohol consumption anymore, no more problems with Sunday drivers—Big Computer will deliver you to your destination perfectly via its digital signal, just like a package. Can you object to that?

Maybe, yes. Every further digitalization and automation of society may initially seem to make our lives easier. But it exacts a barely visible yet very real toll on a psychological level. Take digital conversations as an example: they connect us in terms of information exchange, but they also disconnect us in another way. When people talk to each other, they don’t just exchange information. Their embodied bodies also resonate with one another.

This is clearly observable on a physical level. When someone talks to another person, there is an inner imitation of muscle tensions, facial expressions, and brain activity. On a psychological level, this is accompanied by a spontaneous feeling of empathy and unity, and the person realizes their primal longing: fusion with the Other. It is this fusion with the Other that forms the basis of all ethical awareness. Replace real conversation with digital communication, and society will also lose the last remnants of ethical awareness (except for a small group of people).

The unrestrained pursuit of ‘convenience’ through digitalization and the technologization of humanity and society is ultimately incredibly naive and shortsighted. As soon as you view humans as embodied beings, you see that the digitalization of humanity and society is strangling the human Soul. Humans are becoming more and more passive, soulless cogs in a vast technological machine. This kind of progress optimism aligns with a mechanistic view of the human being: the human is a machine that can be technologically optimized.

Elon Musk is one of the leaders of this idea. With Neuralink, he takes it to its ultimate consequence: the human, the quintessential speaking being, will no longer have to speak. They will exchange information perfectly via a brain chip. As much as I appreciate Musk on certain levels, and as much as I understand that he is ‘searching for hyper-intelligent people’ to help him clean up bureaucracy, I would still like to ask him: how much will you consider the Soul in this world?

Even Joe Rogan—member of Team Trump and, in many ways, a man with the right heart—ultimately shows himself to be a believer in transhumanism. He explains in this podcast that the Neuralink chip can create the paradisiacal experience that arises when you take certain psychedelics: the intense pleasure one experiences from viewing certain colors and forms, the experience of unity with other people and with the whole cosmos, the experience of intense love for everything that Is, and so on. The Neuralink chip will thus open the long-closed door to paradise. The machines want the code to Zion, they’re sick of the matrix—something like that.

Joe Rogan sees a brain chip as the way to eliminate lies and manipulation from the world. We will finally transcend our ‘violent monkey’ past. Natural evolution is too slow for that. With the chip, communication will be flawless in a universal language. Every form of lying and deception will be immediately detected and eliminated by A.I. Everyone will be able to see instantly, via the brain-chip interface, whether the other is driven by hate, anger, greed, or malice. I am not making this up: A.I. is considered no less than God, the God who will undo the reign of lies and sin.

Musk is a human being, and as such, he is a divided being, as we all are. In his case, the contrasts may be even sharper. He believes in freedom of speech and enterprise, but he also fanatically strives for technological control of the human condition. This tension extends to his loyalties: on one hand, he opposes globalist institutions and, by extension, the entire establishment and the ‘deep state’; but on the other hand, he owes much of his success as a tech entrepreneur to his connections with the ‘deep state’ and the military-industrial complex. You don’t just send 6,000 satellites in an orbit around mother earth.

Undoubtedly, Elon Musk will energetically and decisively tackle over-bureaucratization and rid the world of injustices arising from hypocrisy, sentimentality, and cronyism. But what will he do about the tech world and the military-industrial complex? And how does he actually see the future of humanity? Will all children in his worldview soon have some kind of license plate sign as their name?

The core issue is actually here: however much Team Trump may address some real problems, to the extent that they seek solutions within the same rationalistic worldview as their predecessors, they will ultimately reinforce the problems inherent in that worldview and may even make them (much) worse. As far as I can assess, the origin of the avalanche of crises, both individual and collective, of our time indeed lies in our rationalistic and mechanistic worldview.

If one considers the universe as a large machine and humans as small machines trapped within that great machine, one will ultimately always reach for more control as the solution. And for more technocracy. From the rationalistic-mechanistic worldview, the technocratic surveillance state is the ultimate societal model.

There is a non-negligible (but not absolute) chance that the Trump-Musk duo will ultimately opt for radical technocracy. Here’s a possible scenario: Trump and Musk will initially be a true breath of fresh air. They will decisively address real issues, make the state system more efficient, end the war in Ukraine, and so on. But what will they do once addressing these issues makes them extraordinarily popular?

After the Walmart shooting in 2019, where a gunman killed 23 people and injured 22, Trump sent a few messages to the world urging that profiling via social media should be urgently implemented. This would allow algorithms to predict when someone might resort to violence. With Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Trump certainly has the right connections for this. My two-cents opinion: such ‘profiling’ is just a step further towards a digital surveillance state, which is not the solution to but rather the cause of the ever-growing aggression in society.

Will Trump be able to resist the temptation of seeking the solution to the problems of human living together through increasingly extensive control and surveillance? What will prevail in Musk: the non-conformist and free-thinker, or the technocratic control freak? The temptation to choose control and ultimately coercion will be great. Especially since the alternative solution asks the most difficult thing of humanity: to accept that humans ultimately do not have control and are, in a sense, always dependent on a grace that comes from outside themselves.

I am going to make a strong historical comparison, not to demonize Trump—those who do usually have more reason to demonize themselves—but to teach us through history. Mussolini and Hitler became extraordinarily popular and acquired a savior status by decisively tackling real societal issues. But they ultimately succumbed to the temptations of power and ideological fanaticism and created problems that were (much) worse than the ones they had solved. There were several parties equally responsible for this: those before them who had created the problems, themselves, and the part of the population that supported them.

I hope that Trump and Musk are aware of this danger and truly learn from history. A real solution to the current profound crisis of humanity does not lie in more surveillance and control; it lies in the steadfast and humanly compassionate application of the law and in reducing bureaucratic rules and surveillance. Such a solution requires, among other things, breaking free from a worldview other than the rationalistic-materialistic one within a sufficiently large group of people. Only under those conditions can a Leader with a capital 'L' truly achieve something.

I will add a reflection on Truth. Trump won the election because he is less hypocritical than Harris and the political culture that pushed her onto the stage. Does his direct and unpretentious way of speaking make Trump a truth-teller? In one respect, yes: Trump occasionally reveals something that others keep hidden behind a wall of appearances. Truth shatters illusions and the façade.

But for example, the ancient Greeks didn’t consider that enough to regard someone’s words as Truth – in Greek, Parrhesia. There must also be something like a unifying intention. The Parrhesiast speaks his words for the common good; he speaks from a concern for the well-being of everyone, including all minorities in the 'polis.' As the French philosopher Tocqueville rightly pointed out, a democracy is not just a form of government where the majority rules; it is a form of government where the majority rules with respect for the fundamental rights of minorities.

So here we encounter an important question: Will Trump use his popularity to grow into a decisive but also unifying leader, or will he continue to try to increase it by appealing to the lowest sentiments of his base and making minorities and the weak into scapegoats? And in the same vein: will Musk ultimately prioritize the free speaker in himself over the techno-control freak?

I could go on, but I’ll conclude. Quite a few people – myself included – had had enough of the false discourse of the Democrats. Behind their constant whining about democracy, they were feeding the most undemocratic of all forms of government: a globalist technocracy run by a group of oligarchs and their ‘experts.’ That is the Real hidden behind the curtain of the façade of the 'democratic' discourse.

But to the extent that Trump and Musk themselves are caught in the grip of the mechanistic and rationalistic worldview, their spectacular rise could turn into this: the open appearance of the Real behind the curtain of democratic appearance. It is this point that will be decisive in determining whether Team Trump places a negative or positive mark on the complex formula of his historical démarche.