Thinking the Unimaginable, 3: A Revolution Ready for Tyranny

This article is the last of a triptych in which Philippe de Lara analyzes the singularity of the Trumpist revolution. The author explains what the “conservative revolution” that brought Trump to power is all about: it aims to radically transform America’s institutions, economy and international role. Philippe de Lara argues that Donald Trump’s brutal, narcissistic persona and incessant reversals are a facade masking a coherent, doggedly pursued project. The alliance with Russia lies at the heart of this project, as it must dissociate Russia from China, the main enemy of the United States. To bring this revolution to fruition, the current regime is determined to hold on to power even in the event of electoral defeat, and to use strong-arm tactics against its opponents, like the Bolsheviks of old.

It would be a mistake to see Trump simply as a buffoon, the king of irresponsible deals, or as a mafioso, or as a puppet of Russia. These facts, which are part of the character, do not give us the keys to the “conservative revolution,” which could well be a more coherent project than it appears, all the more worrying for this very coherence. First and foremost, Trump intends to fight the internal and external enemies that threaten the survival of the United States (China, bureaucracy, the decline of traditional values). After several decades of error and betrayal by the American elite, a revolution is needed to recreate America and transform the world order to its advantage. The president’s chaotic hyperactivity, reversals, and setbacks are only the visible part of a methodical, dogged effort to transform America’s institutions, economy and international role. In other words, the conservative revolution is pursuing a long-term ambition that cannot be limited to the interval between two elections¹. This is the reason for Trump’s brutality, his determination to assert the absolute pre-eminence of the executive, and his contempt for the institutions of American democracy². There is a plan, a project, and one cannot count on it changing, despite the president’s mood swings and outbursts, which are a perfectly controlled caper, calculated to cast doubt on what he really wants, and to suggest that he might change his mind³.

Fear, a revolutionary passion

This revolutionary radicalism is manifested first and foremost in the persistence, once in power, of the apocalyptic discourse of the election campaign: Trump is the savior of an America threatened with collapse under the blows of its internal and external enemies. All Trump’s decisions are justified in the name of vital urgency: tariffs must put an end to the plundering of America by liberal globalization, the mass expulsion of foreigners and the drastic restriction of residence permits are indispensable to provide jobs and a decent life for Americans, the conquest of Greenland and the Panama Canal is vital to national security, etc. This rhetoric does not just come from the White House, it is relayed by countless tribunes, talk shows, and social network messages, ever more radical and anxiety-provoking, keeping the MAGA people in a state of permanent mobilization. And, as in the Fascist and Nazi revolutions, the intensity of fear and anger at America’s enemies feeds faith in future triumph. Steve Bannon is the conductor of this apocalyptic propaganda, with his War Room podcast channel – which does not prevent him from being one of the key thinkers behind the MAGA revolution, as we shall see. One of his favorite themes for months has been the fear, genuine or feigned, of civil war in the United States if the revolution does not move fast enough and makes too many concessions to Silicon Valley’s “globalist oligarchy.”

A well-prepared project

The revolution must unfold simultaneously on three levels:

• internally, to wage a cultural war to halt the decline caused by an individualistic, liberal drift, of which wokism is a convenient symbol;
• externally, to weaken China – which is why an alliance with Russia is vital, to break up the “Eurasian bloc” (China, Russia, North Korea, Iran), now boosted by Putin’s war;
• in economics, to replace free trade, once the foundation of American supremacy, with neomercantilism, which will be the foundation of renewed American supremacy.

Trump and his lieutenants have had four years to refine this project down to the last detail⁴. The paradox of this revolution is that its great leader is not its mastermind. Mussolini, Lenin, Hitler, Mao and even Stalin wanted to be intellectuals, and their stature as great thinkers, real or imagined, was the key to their authority: they embodied the meaning of history. Trump’s charisma, on the other hand, rests on something quite different: he does not read books (or even notes exceeding one page), but he intuitively perceives the aspirations and passions of the MAGA base, and he has a kind of genius for tuning into their angers and whims. From this point of view, his lack of culture and his vulgarity are assets. But around him, other people are thinking the MAGA revolution and adjusting its long-term strategy to events. Beyond the diversity of their ideologies and their rivalries, what unites them is the belief that, given the degree of devastation America has reached after fifty years of bad government, one has to be revolutionary to be conservative⁵. The word ‘revolutionary’ must be understood here in the literal sense: one has to change everything at once and, to do so, go beyond the framework of ordinary politics, prepare to hold on to power for as long as it takes and, to do so, circumvent or alter the forms of democracy – hence the founding role of the lie about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election⁶ : to believe that the election was stolen from Trump is to pave the way to contesting any unfavorable election and to enter a regime of “alternative truth,” where the cause justifies all lies and manipulations.

If we are to oppose this project effectively, we should not underestimate its coherence or the revolutionary energy that lies within it. They give it the ability to endure setbacks, to weave its way forward without giving up on its ultimate goal. The leaders of the conservative revolution combine revolutionary hubris with realistic perseverance in the pursuit of their goals, from the deportation of illegal immigrants to trade war and disengagement from Europe. They have invented a doctrine of governmental action which, while departing widely from the canons taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, is nonetheless fairly effective. It could be defined as rationalized hooliganism: it prefers brutal destruction to reform – for example, abolishing the USAID agency, cutting the budgets of universities deemed complacent with wokism but it adjusts its spectacular blows to the aim of their longer-term impact, so that even when they are followed by seemingly pitiful setbacks, they have the desired effect. The conduct of the trade war is typical of this strategy: what counts is not the immediate benefit of tariffs, but the dismantling of the institutions and habits of free trade, in favor of a new framework in which trade is recognized as a weapon of power⁷.

If this analysis is correct, we should not rely too much on failures or obstacles to put an end to the Trumpian revolution, whether it is Putin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine or a possible defeat in the mid-term elections.

The fascination of extremism

For conservative revolutionaries, the peril is existential, but the capabilities of the presidential team are limitless. These self-styled realist conservatives have a disturbing fascination for the craziest extremists.  Let me give you two examples: Curtis Yarvin’s Dark Enlightenment and Steve Bannon’s Catholic far-right.

A geek and a political philosopher, Curtis Yarvin defines himself as a “neoreactionary” – an authoritarian, elitist version of the libertarian doctrine. More radical than Elon Musk’s DOGE, he advocated RAGE (Retire All Government Employees) back in 2011. His argument is that it is impossible to change government without getting rid of democracy and bureaucracy. “Only monarchical energy, energy that comes from a single point, can be effective⁸.” Power will therefore be concentrated in the hands of a new kind of enlightened despot, a CEO-dictator, appointed by the other CEOs, who will then owe him absolute obedience. During his senatorial campaign in 2021, JD Vance referred to Yarvin and took up the idea of RAGE, claiming that this was what Trump should do if he came to power. Kevin Roberts, one of Trump’s leading strategists – he is the mastermind behind Project 2025 – is also in Yarvin’s school: “I think the biggest project, one of the best indicators of success for the political right, if we’re really at the dawn of a conservative era of governance, is to defeat the deep state⁹. Yarvin has become a marginal figure in the galaxy of conservative revolutionary intellectuals since Steve Bannon realized that his elitist libertarianism was incompatible with MAGA populism – a break that anticipated Trump’s divorce from Elon Musk.

Steve Bannon, on the other hand, remains a highly influential figure in the Trumpist galaxy, even though he has no official position. He embodies the dark, conspiracist¹⁰ side of the Catholic branch of the MAGA movement, a branch of which JD Vance is the more polished, official representative: while the latter takes care to spare the Pope, while advancing his conservative agenda in the Church, Bannon, on the other hand, flaunts Cardinal Carlo Vigano, excommunicated in 2024. Vigano is convinced that the “deep state” forced Benedict XVI to resign in 2013 and got Francis elected. In an interview with Steve Bannon broadcast in May 2025 on War Room, the schismatic cardinal notes “in passing” (sic) that the players in the plot to depose Benedict XVI and replace him with a progressive pope “all belonged to the pedophile elite (sic), from Obama to the Biden family, via McCarrick¹¹ and Hilary Clinton.” He also maintains that the same “subversive” methods were used to foment the “color revolutions¹²” and to force the Catholic hierarchy to accept “reforms that nobody asked for, such as the ordination of women, the authorization of sodomy (sic), and synodalization¹³, a pseudo-democratization contrary to the monarchical principle of the papacy, etc..” Vigano, to Bannon’s delight, declares that “this plot [against the Church] is part of a larger global conspiracy. Organized by the subversive Woke Left lobby and the World Economic Forum, it aims to destroy any form of resistance to the creation of a New World Order (…) and the establishment of a new Religion of Humanity that will provide its doctrinal and moral foundation for the globalist dystopia.” In his view, the election of Donald Trump has brought the globalist plot to a halt, but “it’s not enough to fight the most extreme manifestations of woke ideology. We need to rebuild culture on the foundation of the family, and the bedrock of morality and religion, rebuild a model of society on a human scale, in accord with divine will and the Law of the Gospels. We must teach our children to fight and die for God’s rights, not for so-called human rights.”

On this idea of rebuilding traditional culture damaged by liberalism, Vigano’s ramblings on the freemason and pedophile conspiracy converge with the realist political agenda of the conservative revolution.

Why the Russian alliance is vital to Trump

Even for some of those in Europe who feel close to Trump’s anti-elite nationalism, his alignment with Putin’s Russia is an incomprehensible scandal – the title of this series of three articles refers to this reaction, to the stupefaction that gripped and still grips Europeans. Corruption, Trump’s troubled relations with Russia over several decades, the entryism of Russian services, and his fascination with Putin: all play a part in Trump’s choices on Ukraine, Europe, and Russia. But I do not think we can understand them if we do not see their function in the revolutionary project: defeating China.

China wants to become the world’s leading power, and thus oust America from that position. The threat is economic and geopolitical. The unforgivable mistake made by U.S. governments and corporations is to have denied or minimized the danger. They welcomed China into world trade with open arms, set up their factories in China, accepted to be invaded by Made in China products, forgetting that China belongs to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that industrial, commercial, and financial dependence on China would cost them dearly. In the race for global hegemony, America is in an advantageous position economically, thanks to its prodigious technological creativity, but it is in a weak position geopolitically. China has become more openly aggressive because it is richer and better armed, and because it has taken the lead in an anti-Western alliance with Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Today’s rulers are bathed in an apocalyptic climate about the dangers threatening America, but they have good reason to fear the “Eurasian bloc” led by China¹⁴. The weakest link in this bloc is Russia: its economy and demography are at half-mast, it fears the domination of China, which it has always hated, despite protestations of friendship, and it is looking for a way to escape China’s irresistible vassalization, accelerated by the war in Ukraine.

To avoid losing global hegemony, the United States must break up the Eurasian bloc, and it can only do so by detaching Russia from the anti-Western coalition. The Chinese threat is existential because at the head of the bloc is the CCP, which, according to Trumpist geopolitologists, declared war on the United States in 2019. The Ukraine war, insofar as it consumes American resources, increases the relative power of the CCP.

We all thought, myself included, that the Russian alliance was a Trump fantasy, because ideology (the crusade against the Western order) and dictators’ preference for their peers bound Russia to China for good, and Xi and Putin had time on their side, while the power of the President of the United States was transitory. We thought that this strategy was absurd and doomed to failure, or that it was a smokescreen for something else (such as a division of the world between the three empires). In the short term, the alliance with Russia seems to be a losing proposition, since Russia does not want to stop the war, despite Trump’s gifts on the back of Ukraine. But if we look at the long term, it is rational to think that it is in Russia’s interest to join sooner or later. Rational but risky: America is condemned to succeed with the Russian alliance, otherwise the Eurasian boc will have won the day. 

That is why there is very little chance of the United States abandoning this alliance, whatever the cost and consequences for history.

The point where strategic rationality goes off the rails

This strategy is the rational core of Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine. But it is not enough to account for the genuine detestation of Ukraine among the revolutionaries mentioned above, including and even especially JD Vance, who is supposed to be the adult in the room. This anti-Ukrainian fixation undoubtedly has several origins, but the main one is the trauma they experienced when faced with the failure of the regime changepolicy inspired in George W. Bush by neo-conservatives. They believe that American hegemony has been permanently undermined by the criminal misdeeds of the neo-cons, who led the United States from defeat to defeat and created hotbeds of disorder and conflict, long before Putin attacked Ukraine. In their view, the project of exporting democracy by force did considerable, almost irreparable damage to the United States, until Trump came to power: if I may say so, a “divine surprise” that broke with “those lies that did us so much harm.” Now, the disastrous policy of regime changehas been continued in Europe by George W. Bush’s Democrat successors, in the form of US support for “color revolutions,” particularly in Ukraine.

It is this catastrophist intellectual pattern that leads even otherwise well-informed and relatively moderate people to lose their cool as soon as it comes to Ukraine. They convince themselves that the Maidan revolution was fomented by the CIA and NGOs close to the U.S. government, and that Russia could not react any differently than it did from 2014 onward. This is how historical anti-communists align themselves with the Russian narrative, while claiming they do nothing with it. They are so furiously anti-Ukrainian that they are blind to the horror of Putin’s crimes and his imperialist fight to the bitter end.

The initial rationality is then derailed into ideology, and runs straight into two pitfalls: 1) revolutionary conservatives do not see, or do not want to see, that decoupling Europe from the United States has always been the Soviets’ goal, and now Putin’s, to weaken the Western camp; 2) still under the influence of the Russian narrative, they are banking on a swift Russian victory, with or without a ceasefire, while Ukraine continues to hold the Russian army in check for over three years. A Ukrainian victory would undermine the Trump team’s grand geopolitical strategy.

Conclusion: a revolution against democracy

The most proven and worrying feature of revolutionary conservatism is its obsession with retaining power at all costs. Kevin Roberts puts it bluntly in the interview with Le Figaro quoted above: “to really change things, conservatives need to stay in power for a generation or two.” JD Vance gave the formula for revolutionary conservatism in his preface to Kevin Roberts’ book, Dawn’s Early Light. Taking Back Washington to Save America (2025)¹⁵. According to Vance, “The old conservative movement argued if you just got government out of the way, natural forces would resolve problems – we are no longer in this situation and must take a different approach.” “As Kevin Roberts writes, ‘It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.’” In other words, cling to power even in the face of electoral defeat, and use the hard way against opponents: the evocation of the conquest of the West serves here to embellish a Bolshevik concept of power.

1. This interval is particularly short in the United States: four years for the presidency, two years for Congress.
2. In an interview with Le Grand Continent (April 2025), Curtis Yarvin, one of the crazy Trumpist thinkers mentioned below, justifies Trump’s authoritarian interpretation of the Constitution as follows: “The real genius of the U.S. Constitution is that it’s a mixed Constitution. All the elements are present. But the balance between them is not fixed – it can shift. In other words: the Constitution only says that there are three powers – it doesn’t say which is the strongest.” A specious but clever argument.
3. In this area, there is every reason to believe that Emmanuel Macron’s confidence in the virtue of his words with Donald Trump is illusory.
4. The main vehicle for this preparation is Project 2025, launched by the Heritage Foundation in 2022, which will culminate in a 900-page action program in 2024, the ‘bible’ of the conservative revolution.
5. The label ‘conservative revolution’ was applied to the liberal governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but these were far less radical and respectful of their respective constitutions.
6. See my article in Desk Russie, Thinking the Unimaginable I. A transatlantic pathology, February 23, 2025.
7. This transformation of world trade rules was not invented by Trumpists. In fact, they have been able to analyze and amplify the tendency to politicize international trade flows that has been at work for several years, and turn it into a strategy. On this question, see Maxence Brischoux, Rupture dans le cours de la mondialisation?, Commentaire, n° 183, Fall 2023.
8. In Le Grand Continent, Le grand entretien avec l’intellectuel organique de la contre-révolution trumpiste, April 5, 2025.
9. Interview published in Le Figaro, May 25, 2025.
10. On all Steve Bannon podcasts, you can see the motto posted behind his desk: “I don’t believe in conspiracies, but I don’t believe in coincidences either”.
11. Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, suspended in 2019 following numerous accusations of sexual abuse, died in 2025.
12. Name given to the popular uprisings against corruption, authoritarianism and Russian influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th Century. In 2005, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution brought Viktor Yushchenko, a pro-European candidate and defender of Ukrainian independence, to power.
13. An idea dear to Pope Francis, which he promoted with the 2021-2024 synod, ”For a Synodal Church”, i.e. governed with the participation of the faithful.
14. Incidentally, the “Asian pivot” does not date back to Trump, but at least to the Obama period.
15. The Light of Dawn. Taking back Washington to save America. The book was due to appear during the presidential campaign, but its publication was postponed when Trump realized that these ideas – like those of Project 2025 –, could frighten voters.