US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 18, 2026. (AP/Yonhap)
By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee UniversityOn April 1, 2026 — quite appropriately known as April Fool’s Day — Trump’s spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain compared the president to Jesus Christ during an Easter lunch at the White House.“Jesus taught so many lessons through his death, burial, and resurrection. He showed us great leadership, great transformation requires great sacrifice. And Mr. President, no one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life,” White-Cain said. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.” It is crucial to read this ridiculous elevation of Trump to a quasi-divine status as the obverse of his regression to public vulgarity. On Sunday, April 5, 2026, Trump wrote: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”How did we reach this point at which the leader of the strongest country in the world is, at the same time, conferred a divine status and acts like a vulgar, obscene guy? The answer resides in the structure of today’s populist wave. Referring to a recent book by the political philosopher Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti (“Twenty Years of Rage”), Sergio Benvenuto analyzes the origins of today’s populist wave, both on the left and the right. He sees it as a consequence of the failed liberal-democratic promise: since ordinary people — those left behind — feel they no longer matter in modern society. Hence, a deep resentment has grown toward the political elites, and above all toward that segment of the population the author calls the “running ahead”: the culturally advanced classes who inhabit the great cosmopolitan metropolises. In short, populism is not a revolt driven by economic hardship, but rather a “struggle for recognition” in the Hegelian sense. This frustration over a lack of recognition is leading to the decline of democracy and the looming prospect of a demagogic autocracy — a longer quote is needed here:“Invernizzi has proposed a new socio-political category that deserves wider attention: lo sfigato, the loser, something between the jinxed and the uncool. This cosmic-historical figure is the protagonist of the last two decades of politics and the subject of his book ‘Twenty Years of Rage: How Resentment Has Replaced Politics.’ Losers are also called the left behind, even if today they are political winners — especially after Trump’s election as President of the United States and the spectacular electoral successes of populists across Europe,” Benvenuto writes.“According to Invernizzi, these losers are the source of what has, for years, been called populism. He focuses on populist champions such as the anti-globalization movements around the turn of the millennium: Occupy Wall Street, Grillo and the grillini in Italy (Five Star Movement), the uprisings in French banlieues, the Spanish Indignados, radical environmentalists, #MeToo, the gilets jaunes, the increasingly large far right (Le Pen, Salvini, Meloni, AfD, Farage, Trump, etc.), and other electoral or street movements, which he sees as connected by a common thread. Importantly, he disregards whether these movements are considered to be left or right. His analysis even includes so-called red-brown parties, such as Sahra Wagenknecht’s Alliance in Germany. Today, in fact, the left/right divide does not seem to be the most relevant lens for understanding the polarization in our societies,” Benvenuto goes on.“Invernizzi gets straight to the point: the fuel of populism is not poverty or economic downgrading. He points out that the grillini electorate of the Five Star Movement, which governed Italy from 2018 to 2022, at its peak, cut across all social and income groups. Similarly, the gilets jaunes who shook France were not poor but mostly middle-class residents of urban peripheries or provincial areas. He writes: ‘[Populist movements] rarely refer to material claims, but instead often invoke concepts such as ‘value,’ ‘greatness,’ and ‘dignity,’ hinting at a hypothetical universal hierarchy of prestige.’ In short, the dogma held by much political science, whether left or right, that economic factors are always the key to political phenomena, has been invalidated. Today, many intellectuals assume that, in order to understand the strange sentiments behind such animosity, one must always know who is making or losing money and why. But, as Ernst Bloch once said, people do not live on bread alone — especially when they do not have it,” Benvenuto concludes. Such a rage is abstract, not triggered by a specific program. As a rule, it focuses on detailed acts or demands which can be easily replaced with others — they have no inherent value. One should also bear in mind that the 1968 protests exploded at the precise moment when the welfare state was at its peak, i.e., when the material conditions of the majority of people were at their best. Along these lines, Peter Sloterdijk proposes an alternate history of the West as the history of rage. The Iliad, the founding text of the West, begins with the word “rage”: Homer appeals to the goddess to help him sing the song of the rage of Achilles and its dire consequences. Although the dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon concerns the erotic — Agamemnon took the slave Briseis from Achilles — she is not an object of intense erotic investment, but in herself totally irrelevant; what matters is not frustrated sexual gratification, but hurt pride.And it seems quite appropriate that at our moment, a moment perceived as the “end of history,” rage has exploded again — the end rejoining the beginning. Already in the late 1960s, we had two forms of rage: the Western student protests and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; a decade or two ago, with big leftist anti-establishment protests in Turkey, Greece, and in the so-called Arab Spring, the protesting crowds, although many of them suffering extreme poverty, insisted that their main demand was to be treated with dignity by their masters. And does the same not hold for the war between the US/Israel and Iran that began in March 2026? While Iran suffers poverty and destruction, its political elite makes it clear that it is not really about oil but about Iran’s dignity, Iran’s refusal to accept a humiliating peace. This is why Bloch was deeply right: especially when people do not have bread, they want to make it clear that it is not really about bread.And in a similar way, neither does the opposite side simply want higher profits. Did the Nazis really persist till 1945 just so their heavy industry could profit? No, their persistence when it was clear that the war was lost was “ethical” in a perverted sense. And what of the present moment (as of writing, April 7, 2026) when Trump is threatening to return Iran to the Stone Age — is he really acting as he does, with the prospect of a catastrophic larger war and unpredictable economic crisis, just to give a new boost to the military industrial complex? Obviously, no; he is acting with the clear goal of erasing a civilization. In November 2025, the White House released the 33-page document known as the National Security Strategy of the United States of America. This document articulates a global ideological vision that effectively amounts to what he accuses Europe of: civilizational erasure. The document notes Europe has economic problems, but it insists that they are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure” within the next 20 years.But Trump now moved to a higher level of madness, threatening to erase another civilization. On the morning of April 7, he wrote: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!”So let’s be clear: we are not dealing here with a case of the so-called “clash of civilizations.” In spite of all the well-documented violence by the Iranian regime, Iran as the victim of the US-Israeli attack stands for civilization as such. The US and Israel act as non-civilized barbarians planning to destroy civilization as such. What we should absolutely avoid here is the claim that Trump just used crazy, exaggerated expressions as part of a long-term strategy to achieve his goal. No — as Timothy Snyder pointed out, when the leader of the strongest country in the world talks about annihilating a civilization, this is already the end of civilization. The very fact that we are not sure how Trump meant it is a clear sign of the end of civilization: we are in the domain where lies and truth, words and facts, become indistinguishable, in a new pre-modern magic universe structured by myths and narratives that no facts and no argumentation can affect. Trump’s threat of civilizational erasure is a sign from the future, an indication of where our world is headed. So, again, such a threat cannot be accounted for in the terms of economic interests, which is why — back to Ukraine — it is ridiculous to claim, as some leftists do, that the West supports Ukraine in its war with Russia to guarantee the profits of its arms industry. The underlying logic is that of dignity, humiliation, recognition — terms used and misused by all sides in today’s conflicts.Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
