Trump‘s second act begins with a lie. The ceremony is being held indoors not because of the cold, but because not even a dog would show up, and there’s the added risk of troublemakers. His followers are lazier than the old-school militants, while the place is crawling with gun-toting lunatics. Crowd size is an obsession for Trump—he always wants his to be the biggest and can’t risk starting with a global embarrassment. This is just the appetizer: the world will once again revolve around the whims of that old narcissist’s toxic ego. Trump will be sworn in at the very building his goons stormed because he refused to accept the election results. Lives were lost during that event, but while his foot soldiers rot in prison, Trump returns as the victor, dangling the promise of pardons. Most of his legal troubles are fizzling out, and this is one of the key reasons for his comeback—to stay out of jail. The other reason is to feed his pathological narcissism: to exact revenge and convince himself, above all, that he isn’t a pompous fraud but the greatest president in U.S. history. The United States couldn’t have produced a better figure to symbolize its egocapitalist decline and continue the empire’s monumental fall.
Ahead of the inauguration, preventive protests have begun in Washington. Half of Americans despise Trump and everything he represents. Even mainstream institutions and media are gearing up for battle, with predictions of a civil war—hopefully not an armed one. American society is deeply divided. The two factions blame each other, failing to see that they are both victims of the same egocapitalist system. That is what they should be addressing: building a state that ensures social justice and heals the wounds caused by lives reduced to business plans, communities turned into markets, and human rights treated as commodities. Yet, any mention of the European model is taboo, while the two-party system blocks the emergence of a genuine opposition to the status quo. Citizens tear each other apart over empty campaign debates, and then nothing changes.
Trump does offer something new compared to the late Biden and the hopeless establishment behind him. Trump is the boss of MAGA, a personalist movement that has taken over the old Republican Party, radicalizing the right and trampling its traditional leadership. Even former presidents disdain him. Instead of founding a new party, Trump leveraged his fame and wealth to hijack the existing system. As for his rhetoric and policies, he’s essentially the American version of the right-wing nationalism spreading elsewhere: anti-immigrant nationalism, plastic crucifixes, guns, and flags. Fear of change and material struggles breed frustration, which turns into anger and then blind loyalty to a so-called strongman. Blame is shifted to newcomers rather than to the system that exploits everyone. Egocapitalism is a marketplace jungle—survival of the fittest—with some individuals and countries drowning in excess while others languish in poverty. This injustice deepens divisions and heightens tensions. But because politics, and by extension democracy, have been bought by capital, instead of challenging the system, increasingly oligarchic governments fuel the war among the poor, exploit fears, and stoke division.
Trump is egocapitalism personified, but he has one notable advantage: as a businessman, he sees war more as a commercial tool than a military one and seems less inclined to spill blood like his predecessor or the insufferable establishment. Nations become customers, the world a marketplace, profits the ultimate solution to every problem—with his personal and collective ego, and its petty interests, at the center of it all. Trump’s inauguration isn’t the rise of the leader of the free and advanced world; it’s the crowning of the boss of a divided country, the Caesar of a crumbling empire, the narcissistic old man searching for peace, and the champion of a failed system. Yet Trump, along with his Western peers, is too shortsighted, arrogant, and compromised to grasp the real political challenge of our time. That challenge, which unites us all, is to move beyond egocapitalism and create a smarter, more empathetic system that can save us from self-destruction.
