Let's pray that Donald Trump survives the next few years, says Slavoj Žižek.

Liberal critics often accuse Trump of having a dictatorial style full of improvised contingent decisions: Trump proclaimed a state of emergency that allows him to govern through executive orders, bypassing Congress and the Senate, as well as debates with members of his own party... It is true that he runs the show like a monarch, but I don't think this is a problem: the problem is the nature of the measures he is dictating . In our time, in which typical multi-party liberal democracy shows again and again its inability to cope with the catastrophic prospects we all face and in which more and more people escape into an apolitical depression, a dictatorial figure is needed, a new Master:

“The master is the one who helps the individual become a subject. That is to say, if we accept that the subject arises in the tension between the individual and universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs mediation, and therefore authority, to advance along this path. The crisis of the master is a logical consequence of the crisis of the subject . The position of the master must be renewed. It is not true that one can do without it, even and above all in the perspective of emancipation. This capital function of leaders is not compatible with the prevailing “democratic” climate, which is why I am engaged in a fierce struggle against this climate (after all, one must begin with ideology).”(1)

We must fully accept this fact: left to ourselves, we are not free but slaves to our spontaneous prejudices, manipulated by the mass media. A master is needed not so much to tell us what we want, what is truly good for us, but to convey a simple message: “You can do it!” You can go beyond yourself and do what seems impossible. The vast majority—including me—want to be passive and simply rely on an efficient state apparatus to ensure the proper functioning of the entire social edifice, so that they can continue working in peace. Walter Lippmann wrote in his Public Opinion (1922) that the herd of citizens must be governed by “a specialized class whose interests extend beyond the locality.” This elite class must act as a knowledge engine that circumvents democracy’s primary flaw, the impossible ideal of the “omni-competent citizen.”

This is how our democracies work: with our consent. There is no mystery in what Lippmann said; it is an obvious fact; the mystery is that, knowing it, we play along. We act as if we were free and decided freely, not only silently accepting, but even demanding that an invisible order (inscribed in the very form of our freedom of expression) tell us what we must do and think. This is why a true politician not only defends people's interests: it is through him that they discover what they "really want." For individuals to "reach beyond themselves," to emerge from the passivity of representative politics and engage as direct political agents, reference is necessary to a Leader, a Leader who will allow them to emerge from the swamp like Baron Munchhausen.

Wasn't Franklin Delano Roosevelt precisely such a leader? He largely ignored Congress and made decisions by relying on a narrow circle of advisors ; he sought to address and mobilize the people directly (recall his nightly live radio addresses). While there are commentaries pointing out the vast differences between Roosevelt and Trump (2), I believe they acted in similar ways, each imposing a radical break in the functioning of American society: Roosevelt's New Deal, Trump's MAGA. The two obviously moved in opposite directions: what Trump is doing now is largely dismantling the welfare state . The result was huge industrial growth, as well as aid to other countries (the Marshall Plan after World War II), which made the US even richer.

Roosevelt was also a “militarist” who, contrary to majority opinion, dragged the US into the war, and the rapid growth of military investments was in no way a step towards the fascistization of the US (incidentally, the same could happen now in Europe: rearmament could also help shake Europe out of its inertia and kick-start its economic renaissance). The US truly overcame the Great Recession only after 1940, through military mobilization, so that by 1945 even non-military production was at its highest level... The US and Europe today need a mobilization like Roosevelt's, and today's pacifists are dangerously close to the pacifists in the US just before 1942, who received massive funding from Nazi Germany: the aggressor is always against the militarization... of its victim.

While we must continue to oppose Trump more than ever, we must be fully aware of what he is doing . In the four years he was out of power, he learned the Leninist lesson: organize a movement, develop a plan, and gradually fill positions, following Stalin's motto: "cadres decide everything." Take the tariffs imposed by Trump: they are not as far-fetched as they may seem. Yanis Varoufakis and others clearly demonstrated that they are part of a long-term plan: to lower the value of the dollar and reindustrialize the country to boost exports, while ensuring that the dollar remains the universal currency. Trump thus heralds the third stage of post-World War II capitalism, following Bretton Woods in 1944 and the neoliberal era in 1971, when Nixon relaxed the gold backing of the US dollar. We must always remember that these two stages were also imposed by the United States . In the neoliberal era, American prosperity was based on the US's negative trade balance: importing from lower-wage countries guaranteed low prices and also allowed the US to benefit from dollarization: the dollars other countries earned by exporting to the US largely stayed there (foreign countries bought property and invested in Wall Street).

After the 2008 financial crisis, the neoliberal model became unsustainable. Trump understood this correctly and conceived a way out that will not necessarily fail. Only a concentrated effort by other major economies can break US hegemony, but Trump's "chaotic" tariffs aim to prevent this by negotiating lower tariffs with each country separately. (((One detail worth noting is the expression Trump used when he claimed that China "played badly" when, in retaliation for US tariffs, it raised its own import tariffs by 35% (3). "Played badly" means precisely that it refused to succumb to US blackmail and accept the game of separate negotiations. Unfortunately, more than 50 countries have already agreed to "play nice" and enter into separate negotiations. In this way, they agreed to compete with each other instead of joining forces against the common enemy.)))

All that can be said now is that the non-economic biases of Trump’s tariffs are clear: on April 2, 2025, Trump unveiled tariffs of at least 10% on virtually the entire world , even an Arctic island that is home only to penguins, with one notable exception: Russia, while Ukraine was slapped with a 10% levy… But what should worry us no less than potential economic chaos is the disintegration of the global ethico-political order consciously sought by Trump. The US and many other states are serially committing (or participating in) war crimes that they try to justify with false excuses: you do it because you can, and so the whole world slowly becomes Trumpized, normalizing unprecedented brutalities.

Here’s a “minor” example. On March 24, 2024, Israeli settlers brutally beat Hamdan Ballal, one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land , outside his home in the West Bank village of Susiya . When the incident was over, the Israel Defense Forces unit that was there and even assisted the settlers in their act of terrorism detained Ballal but none of the settlers. According to Ballal’s lawyer, Lea Tsemel , the police told her he was being held at a military base for medical treatment, but she said that the next morning she had not been able to speak to him and had no further information about his whereabouts. After 20 hours of detention (without medical treatment), Ballal was released without explanation…(4) The lesson is clear: a reign of terror without any public authority that can be relied upon for protection.

The Israeli-occupied territories are just the tip of the iceberg: the spirit of lawlessness is slowly spreading across the globe. Some 7,000 people have recently been freed from scam centers run by criminal gangs and warlords operating along Myanmar 's border with Thailand, where many are held against their will and forced to work, and where ordinary citizens, mainly but not only from Europe and the United States , are tricked out of their life savings. The people featured in the statements are a small fraction of the estimated 100,000 trapped along the border. Criminal groups use artificial intelligence to write scam scripts and exploit the increasingly realistic deepfake technology to create personas, pose as lovers, and mask their identity, voice, and gender.

Criminal groups have been quick to embrace cryptocurrencies and are investing in cutting-edge technological developments to move money faster and make scams more effective. More than $43 billion is lost each year to scams by regional criminal groups in Southeast Asia—nearly 40% of the combined gross domestic product of Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar . Experts and analysts argue that the industry will re-emerge stronger...(5) While the US administration would undoubtedly condemn such acts, its international policy is creating a world where such acts are quietly tolerated if they are not perceived as a threat by a major power. China only put pressure on Myanmar when it discovered that these gangs were also defrauding many Chinese citizens.

But if Trump announces such a state of affairs, what do I mean by the title of this commentary? It's quite simple: if Trump dies soon, J.D. Vance will take over, and I believe Vance is, in the long run, a far more dangerous figure than Trump . In what sense, precisely? Let's go back in history: recall the relationship between the SA and the SS during the rise of Nazism. An SA member was a thug, a dirty, vile man who enjoyed torturing his victims; an SS member, on the other hand, was a cold professional who performed his duty impersonally, out of a desire to do his duty:

“Behind the blind bestiality of the SA, there was often hidden a deep hatred and resentment against all those who were better than them socially, intellectually, or physically and who now, as if fulfilling their wildest dreams, were in their power. This resentment, which was never completely extinguished in the camps, seems to us to be the last remnant of a humanly understandable feeling. However, the real horror began when the SS took over the administration of the camps . The former spontaneous bestiality gave way to an absolutely cold and systematic destruction of human bodies, calculated to destroy human dignity; death was avoided or indefinitely postponed. The camps ceased to be amusement parks for beasts in human form—that is, for men who really belonged in mental institutions and prisons. The opposite happened: they became “training camps,” in which perfectly normal men were trained to become full members of the SS.”6

As exaggerated as it may seem, the same goes for Trump and Vance. Trump remains human in his very vulgar-obscene brutality, while Vance is a cold, manipulative, manipulated robot, created and dominated by Peter Thiel . This means that Trumpian obscenity is not here to stay forever: it takes a clown (Trump, Musk) to establish a new feudal regime, and once that regime begins to fully function on its own, the cold robots (Vance, Thiel) could openly take over. We will no longer have oppression as a clown joke, but oppression pure and simple.

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

© Slavoj Žižek and Ñ Magazine.

1) Alain Badiou / Elisabeth Roudinesco, «Appel aux psychanalystes. Entertain with Eric Aeschimann,” Le Nouvel Observateur, April 19 2012.

2) See What FDR built, Trump wants to tear down | CNNPolitics.

3) Trump says China 'played it wrong' in retaliation against US tariffs | Reuters.

4) Hamdan Ballal: 'No Other Land' co-director detained after attack by Israeli settlers | APNews.

5) Global scam industry evolving at 'unprecedented scale' despite recent crackdown | cnn

6) Hannah Arendt, “The Concentration Camps,” in Partisan Review, July 1948.