In tonight’s Substack Live, I walked through what I believe is the beginning of the end for Donald Trump—politically, psychologically, and structurally. Not because of any single scandal, but because the scaffolding that has held up the MAGA movement for nearly a decade is finally collapsing under the weight of reality. We talked about the cultural weapons that once kept the public conversation fixated on distractions—trans panic, manufactured grievances, anti-“woke” spectacle—and why those tools have lost their potency. People are no longer turning the page. They’re reading the story. They’re noticing the tariffs, the healthcare mess, the corruption, the foreign entanglements. The simulation is losing its grip.
From there, I dug into Trump’s increasingly brittle psychology—how his need for validation makes him vulnerable, how someone like Zoran Mamdani could effortlessly manipulate him through “validation without agreement,” and why this same fragile vanity could push Trump toward something catastrophically dangerous: a short, “victorious” war in Venezuela to reclaim narrative control. We explored why such a move could fracture the MAGA coalition, destabilize our alliances, trigger global backlash, and even open a window for China to move on Taiwan. These aren’t abstractions; they’re real strategic risks that follow directly from understanding Trump’s incentives and habits.
We also talked about Mamdani’s win in New York—the shock it provoked among the centrist establishment, what it reveals about the American electorate, and why the conventional wisdom about what counts as “unelectable” no longer maps onto the world we live in. Economic populism polls far stronger than elites want to believe. So does disillusionment with Israel’s campaign in Gaza. The public has shifted; the establishment hasn’t. we choose to walk it together.
Go Deeper into the Circus
The Coward’s Bargain: How “Realism” Became a Doctrine of Submission
There exists a particularly noxious species of intellectual who mistakes capitulation for wisdom and calls the result “realism.” You’ll find them in think tanks and faculty lounges, on cable news and in leaked diplomatic cables, all peddling the same rancid formula: when confronted by superior force, the rational response is to kneel.
Liberalism Misremembered, Democracy Misunderstood
Because this is, after all, a philosophy blog, for today’s Substack Live, we went straight into the heart of the thing I keep circling in my essays: how we think about politics, why our categories have collapsed, and what that collapse is doing to our ability to govern ourselves. I tried to pull apart the confusion between classical liberalism and the h…
