There is tyranny in the womb of every Utopia.

Bertrand De Jouvenel

We’ve had about four months of Trump 2.0 now, and the most staggering thing about his new term is the sheer volume of damage he is able to do, mostly just from speaking and tweeting off the cuff. The overall sense is of a bloated and bored sultan, lying on a mountain of tasselled velvet pillows, double-clapping his hands whenever the breezes of fancy drift through his brain. But instead of wine, olives, and harem girls, Trump’s demands are the products of his narcissistic, messianic fever dreams, where he can command and control all the forces of the earth, simply by uttering his unhinged proclamations. As he said in a recent interview, “I run the country and the world.”

One major difference this time around, as many have observed, is that Trump was ready to assume power, unlike his first term, which kind of took him by surprise. And though he denied it, Project 2025 was teed up and ready to roll after his election, and much of the velocity of the change happening now is simply due to Trump plugging and playing both the personnel and the platform planks of Project 2025.

But what holds Trumpism together in general, beyond just Project 2025, the Federalist Society, and Fox News? How is a fundamentally lazy man, a guy who would rather play golf and watch TV than read a book or a policy briefing, able to rapidly enact such broad and sweeping change, seemingly at a finger’s snap? What is the architecture that enables this lightning-fast dismantling of the American system?

Trumpism is a pyramid, a multi-layered system of ideology and action. At the top level is Trump himself. And while the damage he is doing is complex, he himself is not. He’s a common type in the psychological literature: a malignant narcissist. He is a run-of-the-mill dictator, certainly one given hugely swollen impact due to the sheer size of the American economy and its cultural influence. He has the regular profile of a tinpot strongman: egomania; born on third base syndrome; a long history of sexual exploits and peccadillos (possible only because of his inherited wealth); a hyper-inflated sense of his own intelligence, sexiness, and importance; thin skin due to a deep suspicion that he’s been handed everything and is thus really a fraud; consummate tackiness, constantly showing off with fake golf tourney wins, ridiculous NFTs, and gold-plated everything; and the overwhelming urge to line his own pockets via any means necessary, likely caused by the suspicion that he will be living in some non-extradition country someday.

All of these characteristics are classic despot stuff, smacking of North Korea, Hungary, and Russia, coincidentally some of Trump’s closest buds. But to make this tyrant-tackiness more socially acceptable in the US, which hasn’t normally taken to embracing such reprobates, a second layer to the pyramid is needed. These are the government functionaries, apparatchiks in the executive branch who continually praise Trump for his greatness, normalizing his glaringly abnormal egomania and narcissism by assuring him that his brain belches are actually real, substantive ideas, the fantastic notions of a stable genius. This ego-laundering is not particularly sophisticated, revolving around just a couple concepts. The main lifting is done by the anti-woke agenda, with its stock list of catch-words: DEI, Marxist, radical left lunatic, etc. Another assurance of this functionary layer is to tell Trump that his tariffs are strong, powerful, and savvy, evidence of a brilliant long-term strategy to…. well, it’s not actually clear what the goal is, depending on what day it is (maybe it’s just a negotiating tool, maybe it’s to force American companies to downsize their profiteering, maybe it’s to renationalize factory work?). Finally, this second layer of the pyramid has the task of reassuring Trump that’s it’s fine to hire billionaires for all the important jobs and still pass yourself off as a man of the people. No problem there. It’s the libs that are out of touch, not a bunch of rich d-bags who are befuddled at the term “groceries.”

The third layer of the Trumpism pyramid is made of careerist Republican politicians. Over the last decade or so, all anti-Trump Republicans have been purged, either by primary ouster or by self-elimination via retirement. What is left is a corrupt, toadying group of GOP ass-kissers, the worst kind of sniveling, morally bankrupt assholes you could possibly imagine. On the one hand, it is hard to blame them for their complete prostration. After all, if you defy Trump as a Republican, you’re likely done in politics, probably forever. So what’s the point of standing up for something, if you’re just going to lose your next race and be out of a job? But still, there have been opportunities over the last few years for Republicans to grow a backbone and put together a message and a voting bloc that could challenge Trump’s supremacy, and they have shown no desire to actually do anything of the kind. The key moment was the aftermath of January 6th, when Trump’s approval rating was rock bottom. That was the time to embrace a message that left behind the conspiratorial, polarizing, hate-filled rhetoric of Trumpism. But the GOP did nothing with that opening. The sugar-high of pandering to people’s prejudices and rage was just too easy and lucrative. So now, Congressional Republicans are in a spot where they just have to give Trump what he wants, and hope that the people don’t catch on to how royally they are getting fucked by the policies being enacted by their own party. As things continue to deteriorate, they will likely try to blame the Dems and Biden, but that can really only work for so long. At some point, they’ll have to deliver something good for their constituents, which really isn’t possible with the faulty set of ideas being implemented right now.

This brings us to the base of Trumpism, the true source of its power: the Quasi-Christian masses who have bought the master motif of Good-vs-Evil, embracing the idea that tens of millions of their fellow citizens are traitors, pedophiles, and godless Marxists. This base is buttressed by every reactionary grievance: anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-science, anti-intellectual, and anti-establishment. And it is strengthened by information ghettos, where everything get run through the polarization filter, coming out completely unrelated to truth and reality.

Ultimately, the whole Trumpian pyramid is a reaction against change, combined with a resentment that a particular group is being left behind purposefully by the leftist elite wokesters. Trump is the response to an anguished cry, a desperate hope that one person can fix everything that is wrong with the world, that a single man can overcome systemic historical change by sheer force of will, using the ancient tools of aggression and cruelty. Trump embraces this role, simultaneously lining his own pockets while issuing tweeted edicts about everything he can think of, as if he has become the Oracle at Delphi, pronouncing divine judgment directly through his thumbs. Remember the Trump-as-Pope meme that he re-posted, supposedly as a joke? My bet is that he talked to some of his peeps about how he could actually make that happen, just to kick the tires.

But for all of Trump’s flexing, his true power comes from the bottom layer of the pyramid, the tens of millions of people who vote for him, donate to his campaigns, buy his bibles and cryptocurrency, and who punish heretics in the primaries. That popular power has nothing to do with Trump the person. It exists because he is the perfect weapon against their perceived oppressors, the libs. As he said on the campaign trail: “I am your justice…I am your retribution.” If Trump changed course tomorrow, and suddenly embraced liberals, immigrants, trans folks, and wokism, he would be out of a job in a fortnight. His supporters would turn against him, likely blaming it on (what else?) demonic possession. Trump is only useful at the top of the pyramid as the cosmic scourge of liberalism.

In a somewhat different light, Trump’s success is a story of winning, victory achieved only by leveraging the support of those who sense that the whole system itself is lost. In essence, Trump has won the office of cruise director on the Titanic, and he’s going to make sure that he and his cronies not only get the best champagne and beluga while the music is still playing, but also that they get the lifeboats.

But inside the pyramid, the whole point is to set up Trump’s success, in hopes that it will trickle down to the layers below, mostly monetarily, but also delivering popularity and power. But this is a mirage, and it will eventually sour into either a full-blown rejection of Trump (maybe Vance employs the 25th amendment?) or a full-blown fascist cleansing of all domestic scapegoats (yes, it can happen here).

The supposed strength of Trumpism, which is strength itself, is its fatal weakness. When everything has to be funneled through the whims and desires of one man — a man who thinks he is the expert on everything, and more importantly, thinks that winning an election makes him the leader of everything — is fundamentally flawed. How can the incredible complexity of the modern world be strained through the filter of a messiah, an archaic concept from the Bronze Age? Also, as with any religion (I generally avoid the word “cult” to describe Trumpism, but that caution is becoming more questionable by the day), a key hurdle is how to transfer power to the next messiah. It will be hard to plug and play a Trump successor, unless he just drops his head into a jar for eternity, like Nixon in Futurama.

At some point, Trump’s followers will have to acknowledge the sloppy, diverse, savior-resistant nature of reality, that massive social, ecological, and technological changes and trends cannot be tamed by a single person, idea, or political movement. History is filled with collapsed empires, and with rulers who believed they had established the eternal city. But so far, collapse is undefeated.