Since the beginning of last month, one thing has been crystal clear: One should never look for anything logically understandable in the feverish and insane statements currently being made by US President Donald Trump.
Because all his statements resemble less the speech of a politician and more the semi-coherent and confusing appeals of a man who has remained for too long at the edge of a vaguely defined horizon, where meaning itself is diluted and disappears into a pale, phosphorescent fog.
In a frenzied, arrogant babble, he addressed his appeals to a circle of nations, imploring them to help the United States…forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, that narrow geographical feature [at its narrowest point, the straits are 29 nautical miles (54 kilometers) wide], known since antiquity, whose importance pulses like an invisible motor nerve beneath the visible skin of commerce and Western-American empire.
It is worth noting that as of 2019, one-third of the world’s liquefied natural gas and nearly 25% of total global oil consumption pass through the straits, making them indeed an extremely important strategic location for international trade.
The responses of the invited nations came back as clear denials, abrupt and uncompromising. Here, essentially occupied Europe reflexively imposed its own line, clearly distancing itself from Washington’s demand and signaling an increasing distance from its sovereign.
Yet, with a curious reflex, common to those who sense the collapse of their own narratives, Trump recast his appeal as a test of control, as a deliberate probing of faith, as if he had simply spread out intricate and intricate webs of ultra-fine sensors in the darkness to capture and measure the reaction of invisible entities. He insisted loudly that the United States, standing all-powerful, filled with a radiant…. self-sufficiency. It needs nothing and demands nothing.
But he nevertheless delivered a judgment on NATO – a post-war edifice long thought to possess a certain and limited structural permanence – declaring NATO’s refusal to heed his warning an unforgivable grave mistake by some cowards. His words carried the rhythm of a peculiar threat, a threat further distorted into semantic incoherence by the peculiar distortion of his pompous intention. Yet through his chatter one perception emerges with terrifying clarity: Trump’s wrath has focused on Europe, as if some dormant antagonism has emerged from beneath the post-war dregs of diplomatic habit.
The subjective core, this seething reservoir of will and resentment, exerts its suffocating pressure on events. Trump reveals himself as incurably vindictive, a tyrannical figure who recognizes fewer and fewer limits, as if the limits that once limited his uncontrolled action have now dissolved under the corrosive influence of his own inner world.
Here the timeless language of the great Heidegger intervenes with strange precision: “Dasein,” this exposed clearing in which Being is revealed, drifts when cut off from the authentic foundation into a state of irregular projection, where the world appears as a shifting field of arbitrary possibilities [Dasein is a fundamental philosophical term of Heidegger, which literally means “giving-Being” (Da=here, sein=Being) and refers to human existence.
It is not a static object, but a being characterized by “Being-in-the-world”, that is, by the direct, experiential relationship and engagement with the world and others. Dasein is not isolated, but always “in” the world, relating to things and other people. It can live authentically, taking responsibility for itself, or inauthentically, lost in the “crowd” (das Man) and everyday life.]
Trump is the purest expression of a commercial logic unleashed on power. He governs as he used to trade: deals without limits, leverage without principles, greed without restraints. This is not political art. It is the market elevated to government and empire. Everything is negotiable and transacted. Even truth becomes a bargaining chip.
Trump believes in his charm. Trump is not just a businessman. He is a businessman who believes too much in his own charm. He is not self-made, but self-confident. His legacy is mistaken for genius, his privilege is renamed bravery.
From this emerges a theatrical right: a man who vacillates between egomania and complaint, between grandeur and paranoia, convinced not only that he is right but that reality itself must yield to his claim to it. He does not describe reality. He performs it. His statements are not based on facts. They are designed to impress, to overwhelm, to dazzle.
Consistency does not matter. The result does. If reality resists, he escalates. If facts contradict him, he replaces them. If the world questions him, he redoubles his efforts – because he believes that repetition can substitute for truth.
A man who proclaims that he can do whatever he wants with an island nation like Cuba, who idly contemplates bombing Iran’s Kharg Island “for fun,” inhabits a realm in which possibility and reality intertwine like vague shapes discernible through a … veil of cosmic vapor.
Such a figure would not hesitate to inflict humiliations on allied nations, if given the chance, for on his horizon the “Other” appears as an expendable configuration within an increasingly limited field of concern. Whether this will happen in the immediate future remains unclear, like grim and malevolent cyclopean figures lurking just beyond the threshold of perception.
Meanwhile, Trump is sinking, step by step, into a fetid swamp that seems less political than worldly in its fetid density. The quick and glorious victory he had envisioned against Iran is receding like a fleeting illusion seen in a foreign desert, dissolving his approach into a shapeless distortion. Each day of continued bombing of Tehran deepens the losses suffered by his Arab partners in the Persian Gulf, losses that are accumulating with a terrible inevitability, as if dictated by powers that treat such plans with utter indifference.
The global economy is trembling, its intricate web of dependencies vibrating under the strain, reminiscent of those vast and dizzying structures described in forbidden religious or fantasy texts, reminiscent of monstrous non-Euclidean architectures whose scale dwarfs human comprehension, whose foundations are based on principles that no mind can fully grasp.
Yet, in a way that is both chilling and entirely predictable, such consequences seem to weigh little on the megalomaniac President. Even more worrying is the unrest within the MAGA movement’s base: a restless unrest born of the rising costs of war and fueled by the relentless rise in fuel prices. What once seemed like a unified body of the American population is now beginning to crack, like a once-solid edifice whose hidden supports have long since rotted away (for more analysis on this issue please read the article titled “Trump is considered a traitor to MAGA“).
The war in Iran itself reveals an even more disturbing dimension of it: For Martin Heidegger, conflict – war – is a primordial conflict through which a world is revealed. Here, war ceases to be merely strategic or economic. It becomes a place where Being itself reveals its inner tension. Nations and leaders appear as “Dasein”, collectively thrown into a historical situation, bound by this strange “throwing” that places existence in conditions that have never been chosen.
However, what unfolds in this conflict bears the mark of a deeper oblivion, a “Forgetfulness of Being” / “Seinsvergessenheit” so profound that all participants move within a closed circuit of calculation, domination and technical manipulation. In this oblivion, the question of “Being” recedes into darkness and the action becomes increasingly frenzied, increasingly disconnected from any real – authentic basis. Thus the escalation acquires an almost ritualistic quality, as if every act of violence were an offering to an invisible order whose logic transcends human comprehension, dragging all further participants into its relentless evolution.
The resignation of Trump’s counterterrorism chief, the great man Joseph Kent, emerges as a distinctive signal, clear and full of significance, like the first faint tremor that precedes a tectonic rupture. For the American establishment, the diffuse and shadowy constellation of power tolerates incoherence only as long as it is accompanied by results. The chatterbox can chatter as long as it delivers. When performance fails and when its performance makes the nation seem absurd in the eyes of the world, tolerance evaporates with alarming speed. Then the surrounding atmosphere thickens, charged with a tension that resists articulation, as if various ominous invisible presences have approached.
In response to the unfolding problems, Trump seems to instinctively seek escalation, as if greater tension could dissolve the vacuum that is being created. He seeks to overturn the situation through ever-renewed conflict, to impose direction on a reality that increasingly resists his predictions. However, the effort yields little. Success remains elusive, receding ever further into an incalculable distance. One is reminded of those doomed figures who, having glimpsed the deeper structure of existence, persist in their efforts to assert their dominance, only to discover that the universe does not retreat, but simply remains vast, indifferent, and fundamentally alien to human desire. In such a context, the current course of events takes on an ominous tone.
For when action continues in defiance of its futility, when escalation replaces understanding, the consequences unfold with a gravity that surpasses any previous imagination. And so, what now seems like a simple failure may in time be revealed as the threshold of something much deeper and much more terrible.
