Françoise Thom explains the intellectual origins of Trumpism and describes its principles. She also explains how the mythology of the deep state and elite betrayal has been exploited by Kremlin propagandists to install chaos in the United States. In her view, big tech bosses have also played a nefarious role in the dismantling of the American state. Finally, she proposes urgent measures to be taken in Europe to avoid suffering the same fate as the Americans.
“Those who practice wisdom have no use for violence; rather, such behavior is characteristic of those who possess strength that is not seconded by intelligence1.”
Socrates
“I saw these men make, in a short time, the old order of things seem like a golden age2.”
Plato
The frenzy of self-destruction that has taken hold of the United States has literally stunned those Americans who sense the danger they are in, but watch helplessly as their democracy sinks. In Europe, the stupefaction is no less, and minds are petrified. Yet we Europeans cannot afford the luxury of waiting passively for the storm to subside. We need to analyze and understand how the United States came to this point, because we are undermined by the same forces we see at work on the other side of the Atlantic. We need to learn from the American experience. We need to be able to spot the warning signs in good time, diagnose the threats before it is too late, defuse the time bombs placed under our democracies, and urgently build the safeguards that the United States lacks today. The rearmament undertaken by Europe must not only be military, it must also be intellectual and moral. For the American disaster is above all a defeat of intelligence, the result of the de-Europeanization of the country, without which the triumph of Russian influence would have been inconceivable. This de-Europeanization is also actively encouraged by the Kremlin in Europe itself. Now that they have eliminated the American guarantee of European security, the Russians are making no secret of their intention to resume their “age-old war against Europe,” as Russian TV presenter Vladimir Solovyov put it, which is above all a war of civilization.
Solovyov: “The time of the strong has come”.
What is Europe in the eyes of the Kremlin? Above all, it is a group of countries where the rule of law reigns, where the law of the strongest is not recognized, and where rules are respected. Putin’s hatred of Europe stems from the fundamental anomy that Russians have inherited from the Slavophile tradition and Russian Orthodoxy. In this tradition, law is opposed to grace; the Russians being a “God bearing people” have no need of law, whereas the degenerate Latin peoples resort to it because they have distanced themselves from Christianity and spontaneous Christian love; without laws, they would be at one another’s throats. Putin has repeatedly expressed the contempt for law that lies at the heart of his ideology. Thus, in his speech at Valday on October 5, 2023, he said: “What kind of order is based on certain rules? What are these rules, who invented them? It’s not at all clear. It’s pure nonsense… It’s always the same manifestation of colonial thinking. […] And as for those who advocate them, perhaps it’s time they got rid of their arrogance in the face of the world community […], of their mentality dating back to the era of colonial domination. I’d like to say: rub your eyes, those days are long gone and will never, ever return.” Note that for him, “colonial” means “European”.
Understandably, the Trump administration was greeted in the Kremlin with rapturous applause. “What a fantastic team, Solovyov exulted. If we let them, they’ll demolish America in half an hour, brick by brick.” Tipping the United States into the outlaw camp is seen as a huge success in the Kremlin. Solovyov is jubilant: “Europe is in a panic. America has completely demolished the rules-based world.” On the same set, Guenrikh Sardarian, an expert invited by Solovyov, rejoices: “It’s no longer a question of democracy, freedom, human rights. Now it’s enough to say: “We need [such and such a country] for our security.” And that’s all there is to it. This approach suits us just fine. We need a lot of countries for our security – lots of countries. And we can only welcome the disappearance from the world of this rhetoric invoking the norms of law…” Solovyov swoons over Trump’s plans to annex Canada, Panama, and Greenland: “Trump isn’t joking when he makes these statements, any more than I am when I say that Finland, the Baltic provinces, Warsaw, and Moldavia must return to our fold… All of this must be reincorporated into the Russian empire. The People’s Republic of Paris can ask to join Russia…” Solovyov is ecstatic that Trump is trampling on rules that once seemed sacrosanct. “Who decided that borders should be intangible? When Trump announces that he’s going to conquer Canada, he means: you Russians take the Baltic States. What Trump is doing is very useful for us, because it destroys any illusions that some might still harbor about the solidarity of democracies, about taking into account the opinion of NATO allies. He says to the NATO countries: ‘Who do you think you are? You’re nothing, and I’m going to talk to Xi and Putin. As for you, give us Greenland.’ He’s a great guy.” General Guruliov makes his point: “Everyone will grovel before the strong.” As a result, Russia could claim Spitsbergen, which “[was] indispensable to them,” while Solovyov suggested that Russia should hurry up and “occupy Greenland.” Another “expert,” Dmitri Koulikov, adds that those who are economically dependent on other states should be annexed. “The national states created after the Thirty Years’ War as alternatives to empires have proved historically unviable. We’re going back to empires,” explains Koulikov. “The past 500 years have been nothing but an aberration.”
Thus, Moscow’s main target is the state, since it is the repository and guarantor of legality, the backbone of the law. The empire is perceived in Moscow not as a European-style monarchy, on the model of the Habsburgs, but as the Golden Horde, a lawless territory where invaders pillage, devastate and go further, acting as they please. It’s worth noting that Trump’s aspirations to power are of no concern to Russia’s leaders. For them, the most important thing is that he tramples on legality and destroys the American state, which was founded on the heritage of the European Enlightenment.
The intellectual origins of Trumpism
How did the Americans come to destroy their state with their own hands? This is what we need to understand without delay if we are to escape the same fate, only worse, because the destruction of our states and the European Union would mean our incorporation into the “Russian world” and the occupation of our countries by the Russian armed forces.
Let us start with the intellectual origins of the Trumpian revolution. The MAGA cult is based on a gnostic substratum comparable to the one French historian Alain Besançon identified at the heart of Leninism. According to Besançon, Lenin’s doctrine took on certain characteristics of the gnoses widespread in the ancient world in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, notably the perception of the existing world as intrinsically evil (a position contrary to Christian dogma, for which everything that is cannot be evil in itself, since it was created by God; there is an intrinsic goodness in things, and evil, ontologically, is nothing). In the gnostic vision, salvation can only be obtained through the intermediary of those who are initiated and are among the chosen ones in possession of knowledge. All these elements underlie Bolshevik ideology: the oppressive bourgeois world doomed to destruction, the revolution led by a small group of initiates ushering in a new era. For Alain Besançon, the Bolshevik party is a counter-plot to countless imaginary plots.
The same ingredients go into Trumpism. “American carnage ends here,” Trump said in his January 2017 inaugural address. Evil is concentrated in the omnipresent “deep state,” preventing the advent of the golden age of which Trump is the theurge: as he himself says, didn’t he miraculously survive an attack because Providence destined him for this saving mission? “God’s hand is on my father’s shoulder,” said his son Eric Trump in a right-wing Christian podcast, describing the 2024 election as a battle in a “constant war in this country against God.” Converts to the MAGA cult see Trump as a messiah: “For 20 years, I knelt every morning and prayed that God would put me in a position where I could end the epidemic of chronic childhood diseases in this country. On August 23 of last year, God sent me President Trump,” said Robert Kennedy on the day of his confirmation as Secretary of Health. Tucker Carlson, Trump’s favorite journalist and one of his go-betweens with the Kremlin, also considers himself a committed fighter against Darkness. He claims to have been attacked and scratched by a demon in his bed. For him, “Satan himself” ran the White House under President Joe Biden.
Thus, the deep state and its agents, the “elites,” must be destroyed from top to bottom, so that on the ruins of fallen America a regenerated America worthy of its glorious ancestors may rise again. As his tweets and words testify, Trump’s world is permeated by conspiracy through and through. He sees only his enemies in ambush, and dreams only of ways to eradicate them. His posture of innocent victim persecuted by villains hidden in every nook and cranny of the state apparatus has prodigiously popularized the idea of a conspiracy with immense ramifications. He was able to communicate to his cult this obsession with enemies lurking in institutions, animated by evil intent, thinking only of harming the United States. The expression “enemy of the people” has become commonplace in the United States. Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, brandishes a list of his enemies, proclaiming, “The manhunt begins tomorrow.” As in the Soviet case, the Gnostic vision of a fight against the forces of evil infused into the world leads to the disappearance of ethics: for Lenin, anything that promotes revolution is good. When you are fighting absolute evil, you do not have to quibble about the means. This logic is echoed in Trumpian America. “He who saves his country violates no law,” Trump tweeted on February 15, making it clear that he is above the law. Today, Jake Broe, an anti-Trump Republican blogger, receives these kinds of posts from his friends who have become Trumpians: “It’s time to grow up, Jake. When you’re trying to save your country, you use any means possible. Survival comes first.”
America’s unilateral disarmament
Partisan fanaticism carried to the point of incandescence leads to an acceptance of collusion with the enemy, which in normal times would have qualified as high treason. On the occasion of the Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard hearings, Democratic Senator Whitehouse reiterated that the Russia-Trump connection was not a fiction invented by the Democrats to harm Trump, as Trump claims: “there was plenty of evidence.” Today, there is no room for doubt. Whitehouse explains: “We hear Kash Patel announce that he intends to destroy what he calls the ‘intelshops’, the FBI agency that monitors Russia and is responsible for counter-espionage; he wants to close the Washington office and leave only the regional offices. But it’s precisely the Washington office that’s responsible for counter-espionage. By eliminating it, we are opening our arms wide to Russian espionage. Let’s move on to the Office of the Attorney General. The first thing Pam Bondi does is close investigations into Russian oligarchs and their assets. She disbands the group that successfully confiscated the assets of Putin’s oligarchs. […] A Russian publication declared that “Tulsi Gabbard’s appointment as head of intelligence should make the CIA and FBI tremble” […]. Who is defending us against Russian intelligence operations? It’s the FBI, it’s the Justice Department, it’s the intelligence community. The new appointees have clearly sent signals that we are eliminating our defense against Russia. And at the Munich conference, we saw how the author of The Art of the Deal gave up all the leverage we had against Russia for Ukraine. We are in the midst of unilateral disarmament when we hand Ukraine over to Putin… The Trump-Russia connection is going to overwhelm us if it hasn’t already.” Whitehouse continues, “The appointment of Tulsi Gabbard strikes me as part of a general line of unilateral disarmament by the Trump administration vis-à-vis Russia. One may wonder for what reasons these things are happening, but one cannot deny that they are happening. […] Russian television called Gabbard “Our friend Tulsi” […]. We just found out that Kash Patel received $25,000 from a Russian filmmaker with ties to the Kremlin to contribute to a documentary attacking the FBI…”
Observers agree that Trump is sowing chaos in the United States. But there is a logic to this madness: most of the measures adopted are in Moscow’s interests. Just imagine the intoxicating feeling with which Russian agents will flood into the United States now that they no longer have to fear the FBI; what a rich harvest of agents they will be able to recruit from among the American intelligence officers sacked by Patel, who will tell themselves that, after all, they can do as their superiors have done, go over to the side of the enemy. In addition to the measures mentioned above by Senator Whitehouse, we should mention the closure of Task Force KleptoCapture, which targeted Russian oligarchs and their assets. The organization, set up under the Biden administration, tracked the finances of Vladimir Putin’s wealthy associates and punished those who facilitated sanctions circumvention and export control violations. We should also mention the closure of USAID, the instrument of American soft powerthat Moscow feared most. Add to this the sabotage of the transatlantic relationship, the daily attacks on America’s allies, their exclusion from negotiations with Moscow on European security, Trump’s demand that Russia be reintegrated into the G7, as its exclusion is allegedly a “mistake,” the dishonorable betrayal of Ukraine, Trump’s complacent participation in Putin’s operation to eliminate Zelensky under the guise of elections imposed before the peace settlement, the ostensible support of Trump’s cronies for pro-Russian parties in Europe – and the list goes on. Sophie Primas, the French government spokesperson, was astonished by Trump’s violent attack on Zelensky. In fact, the American president is simply regurgitating the Kremlin’s propaganda, confirming his close relationship with Moscow. The method is the same: brazen lies (Zelensky is responsible for the war, he’s a “dictator who’d better hurry up or he won’t have a country any more”), vile allegations (Zelensky is furious at being deprived of his feeding trough), the desire to dismiss the Ukrainian president (he is illegitimate, with 4% of favorable opinions). In recent days, the American president’s ‘putinitis’ has become acute. Trump would not look out of place on a Solovyov TV set. One senses that Moscow is in a hurry to make the most of the situation as quickly as possible and inflict irreversible damage on America while this dream president is in power. The advice of caution previously given to Trump by his Kremlin mentors, reflected in his unusual reticence and secrecy about his contacts with Putin, no longer applies today. John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman, speculates that Putin “has something on” Donald Trump. “There’s something nefarious between them, secret phone calls, hidden meetings.” We can only agree with historian Eliot A. Cohen: “In politics, one should never attribute to evil will what can be explained by incompetence and stupidity. This precept has become difficult to maintain in the case of the Trump administration. But there is another possibility: both explanations work simultaneously.”
Psychological warfare against the United States
How did the United States get there? For years, it has shown an astonishing passivity in the face of Russian interference in its political life. Let us listen to Margarita Simonian, the boss of Russia Today, who knows what she is talking about since Russia Today has served as an incubator for the current Trump administration: “We’ve been working [in the US] for a very long time – it will be 20 years in May [2025]. […] Now, the [American] public no longer cares that we’re Russian. They see us as a channel offering an alternative point of view. We don’t make a channel about Russia. It wouldn’t make sense: how many people in the world want to watch news from Russia? We’re creating a channel about America in America… In 2023 alone, our projects attracted almost 14 billion views. […] We imagined many ways to continue our activity [after Russia Today was banned in September 2024, Editor’s note]. They closed the door on us – we came in through the window. They closed the window – we went through the skylight. They closed the skylight – we snuck in through the chimney and it turned out that from there our activity was even more effective. When [the Americans] discovered all this, they were horrified and covered it up as best they could.”
Thus, Americans have tolerated a media that for decades instilled in the American people that they were being lied to from all sides, that their political class was totally corrupt, that democracy was tantamount to decadence. Donald Trump made no secret of his affinity with Russia Today during his 2016 election campaign. Russian propaganda fully exploited two sensitive themes: uncontrolled immigration and wokeist delusions. It systematically instilled doubt in the mainstream media while whispering that there was no truth. It stired up conspiracy and partisan passion. It played on people’s emotions with a regular bombardment of incendiary news stories supposedly hidden by the mainstream media. In the United States and elsewhere, the anti-vax movement gave rise to an extraordinary breakthrough in conspiracy theory, skilfully exploited by Moscow. It could even be said that the antivax networks have served as a conduit for a Kremlinophile movement with multiple ramifications in our societies. The demise of Covid did not mean the disappearance of this movement: the very people who were demonstrating against vaccines will find themselves in groups supporting the pro-Russian Donbas.
The mythology of the deep state and the betrayal of the elites was bread and butter for Kremlin propagandists, even if they did not invent it. For the Russian leadership saw at once that this was the way to induce the Americans to do with their own hands what they had been dreaming of since Stalin: demolish the American state under the guise of “deconstructing the administrative state,” as Steve Bannon puts it; undo at the same time the whole system of alliances woven by successive administrations since 1949; discredit the United States worldwide.
Supporters of the European nationalist right – at least those who are not agents of the Kremlin – would do well to meditate on what is happening in the United States. Those who claim to defend nations are blindly embracing the toxic slogans which, when put into practice, are leading to the liquidation of the institutional framework of the state and its replacement by a Putin-style “power vertical”. The aim is to wipe out the old nations of Europe and turn them into vassal provinces of the Kremlin.
Russia Today also fulfilled another function that is now coming to the fore. It was a headhunting organization, tasked with spoting personalities in Western countries who could be recruited into pro-Russian networks, or even propelled into political careers with a view to the future formation of Kremlin-oriented governments. The profile of these personalities is now quite clear from the Trump administration officials once pampered by Russia Today. They are characterized by venality (Russia Today paid well), amoralism, extravagant ambitions, and limited intellectual capacity. The Russian channel was particularly fond of frustrated eccentrics, such as Robert Kennedy Jr., who complained a few years ago that the only media he could express himself on was Russia Today. The Russian services have always known how to use idiots. But the Lubyanka has long understood that there are also useful crackpots. Many of the assassinations of émigré independence fighters organized by the GPU in the 1920s and 30s were entrusted to unbalanced individuals. The Kremlin’s choice of the deranged Gamsakhurdia as the first president of independent Georgia was a similar move: Moscow was sure he would compromise Georgian nationalism. The KGB’s propulsion of Zhirinovsky onto the Russian media scene in 1990 was designed to discredit democracy. Russia’s initial interest in a Trump candidacy was driven by the same aim: to compromise American democracy. “Donald Trump is like our Zhirinovsky,” said Margarita Simonian. Today, the Kremlin’s choice of Călin Georgescu for the Romanian presidency is inspired by the same calculations. Let us bear in mind that this staunch Putin supporter claims that big business, the UN, and the World Health Organization allegedly aim to kill 7.5 billion humans and turn the remaining 500,000,000 into robots, that humanity allegedly is not free but locked in a matrix, and allegedly lives in this false illusion of freedom – and that the UN is allegedly linked to a global network of pedophile oligarchs.
With Russia Today and social networks, the Kremlin wins every time. Either democratic states turn a blind eye and tolerate subversive influence, with the result we are seeing today in the United States, or they take belated action, allowing Russian agents disguised as journalists and their Western accomplices to cry foul and denounce violations of freedom of expression in democracies. “The American system is generally an illusion of democracy,” claims Margarita Simonian in the article quoted above. A complaint echoed by JD Vance in his Munich diatribe, this time directed against European democracies, which faithfully reproduces the themes and methods inoculated by Russia Today. Margarita Simonian can proudly state: “First we were ignored, then we were laughed at, then we were fought and finally we won.”
The United States was being worked from below and above. MAGA sectarianism would probably not have been enough to topple American institutions if it had not received the decisive support of a second force, the big tech bosses. Like the Russian oligarchs, they have realized that their lives would be infinitely more pleasant in an anomic atmosphere like the one in Russia, where an oligarch can quietly run over a little old lady in the street and get away with a bribe paid into the right hands. Many tycoons in the West are enviously eyeing their Russian colleagues, free of unions, frustrating legislation, and the cumbersome conventions of civilized life. Like the Putin oligarchs, they feel they are above the law, and see attempts at state regulation as intolerable encroachments on their omnipotence. Like them, they despise the people and believe they can be manipulated at will. A piquant detail: these super-elites manipulate populism by brandishing anti-elite slogans. Plato clearly saw the two facets of the rejection of the law underlying Trumpism. Gorgias’ Callicles states that “laws are made for the weak and by the many. It is to […] frighten the strongest, those who are capable of having the advantage over them, to prevent them from obtaining it, they say that it is shameful and unjust to aspire to more than one’s share and that it is in this that injustice consists, in wanting to possess more than others […]. But I see that nature itself proclaims that it is right for the better to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the weaker3.” For his part, Thrasymachus, a teacher of rhetorics, believed that it is the strong who impose their law on the weak4. For him, “justice is nothing other than the interest of the strongest5». To obey justice is to go against one’s own interests: “Injustice is more profitable than justice6.”
What to do?
Today, Europe has no longer to withstand the sole onslaught from Russia, it must also face a joint Russian-American offensive aimed at its destruction. Russia is discovering to its surprise that Europe can become a problem even once the United States has been neutralized. “The question for us is what to do with this fiercely anti-Russian Europe,” asks Sergei Mikheev, a regular on Solovyov’s talk shows. “It’s going to get in our way. Europe must review its positions, or its contacts with Trump’s team must activate its internal divisions […]. We have to make the Europeans understand that now we can really bomb Brussels, Paris, and London. The Americans won’t help you.”
Europeans have to face up to this challenge on all fronts. The priority, of course, is to build an army capable of keeping at bay the thugs who are ganging up on us. We also need to make sure that our local pro-Russian oligarchs do not get their hands on media and publishing houses. Last but not least, we urgently need to defuse Russian-American propaganda by depriving it of its breeding ground and countering it with a humanist vision of the world, free from the excesses of wokeness. We also need to restore the authority of the state at all levels, starting with state schools. To unite Europe, the EU must get down to business and stop being synonymous with laxity.
The American experience shows that it’s not enough to patiently dismantle the Kremlin’s lies and refute the fake newsthat floods our social networks faster than we have time to respond. European citizens need to be trained upstream. They need to know how to identify the venom made in Moscow by its intended effects: the discrediting of the very concept of truth, the encouragement of white-hot partisanship, the suppression of reason and morality under the guise of “realism,” the inability to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, the exacerbation of chauvinism, parochialism, national egoism disguised as “national interests,” provincialism: anything that prevents cooperation between people, and cuts them off from universalism. The very concept of “traditional values” peddled by the Kremlin implies relativism, since these “values” are different in different peoples. All the media that systematically cultivate a dark vision of humanity, inspired by the formula “all are bastards, all are rotten,” are preparing the ground for the subversion of representative democracy that we see unfolding before our very eyes.
Russian propaganda is working to narrow the world right down to the ego. Trump speaks only of himself, and represents that degree zero of humanity that the Kremlin is trying to propagate because it can only rule over such primitive men. Egocentricity withers intelligence as surely as inculture. Moscow is waging a relentless battle against universalism, quite simply because it is the bedrock of European civilization, because awareness of the universal is inseparable from ethics, and because universalism feeds intelligence. It has been said that Russian propaganda is woke in reverse. This is not untrue, insofar as wokeness also rejects the universal, feeds on false science, divides humanity into various allegedly hostile categories and stirs up a partisan spirit that destroys intelligence. The breeding ground of Trumpism, like that of wokeness, is stupidity. The best way to combat Russian subversion is to train free minds. With a clear vision of what is at stake will come courage.
Our European humanist culture is the best way to protect us from excesses that are by no means new in the history of mankind. In the tragic story of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides showed us just how fatal the doctrine of “the law of the strongest” is to those who profess it. The Athenians, believing they could do anything after their victory over the Persians, began to exploit their allies and became unbearable, inciting a coalition of smaller cities against them, which eventually toppled Athens with the support of Sparta. The Greeks learned their lesson. “Rather than undermine justice with violence that makes people hate, it’s better to deny ourselves a decried victory,” sings the Chorus in Euripides’ Andromache. In an anonymous fragment from the end of the Peloponnesian War, we read: “If it is true that men […] cannot coexist and share their existence in the absence of laws… all these reasons necessarily impose that law and justice reign among men and cannot be abolished: this is a powerful bond, which has to do with nature.” Even a superman would lose out if he faced men organized “thanks to their use of laws and their numbers […]. Superiority is assured only by law and justice7.” As we can see, the Ancients also give us reason to hope. Socrates observed that unjust men are divided by dissension and hatred, and that a society that chooses to live according to “the law of the strongest” is condemned to paralysis: “Those who are totally depraved and absolutely unjust are incapable of action” because “injustice leads […] to the impotence of undertaking anything in common8“.
She has a degree in classical literature and spent 4 years in the USSR from 1973 to 1978. She is an agrégée in Russian and teaches Soviet history and international relations at Paris Sorbonne.
Footnotes
- Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 2.10.
- Letter VII, 324e.
- Gorgias, 483b-e.
- V. Jacqueline de Romilly, Les grands sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périclès, Editions de Fallois, 1988, p. 166.
- Republic, I, 338c, 339a.
- Republic, I, 344a.
- Anonymous of Jamblique. Quoted in: Jacqueline de Romilly, Les grands sophistes dans l’Athènes de Périclès, Éditions de Fallois, 1988, pp. 229-230.
- Republic, I, 351e, 352c
