The Return of the Great MAGA King

Read my essay from the first issue of Islander Magazine, on the promise and perils of a second Trump term

“This is still fascism—only worse,” cried a headline from the New Republic, back in December. No prizes for guessing the subject of that screed. For liberal commentators, it’s not enough now, apparently, for Donald Trump to be as bad as Hitler, to be an orange-hued, golden-haired version of the failed painter from Branau am Inn with the funny little moustache. Trump has to be even worse.

Never mind that everything Matt Ford, the author of the article, accuses Donald Trump of wanting to do has already been done by the Democrats or is currently being done. The Biden regime has already used troops to control and direct immigration, has already weaponised the justice system, has already immunised its key supporters, including the president’s own deadbeat junkie coombrain son, and is prosecuting its opponents for “crimes” such as the creation of memes that upset Hillary Clinton. But the fact that Donald Trump says he wants to do similar things himself is enough to warrant comparisons with a man who is, for many, the avatar of ultimate evil, of an infernal power so great that the mere mention of his name is enough to bring almost any conversation to a grinding halt. In the liberal imagination, Trump has displaced Hitler as the Devil incarnate.

Here we see Carl Schmitt’s famous “friend-enemy” distinction at work—when we do it it’s right, when they do it it’s wrong—and the Democrats are masters in its use. The right needs to pay attention and do the same, at least if it actually wants to rule effectively—although that’s far from a given, as we all know. I’ve said this before.

There are at least some indications that Trump really means what he says this time, and that he’ll reward his friends and punish his enemies, but his ability to do so depends on being able to identify who his friends and his enemies are in the first place. He didn’t do that very well the first time around. But if eight-plus years of the most intense vilification, sabotage, slander and persecution won’t tell a man who his friends and his enemies are, I don’t know what will.

We’re getting a little way beyond the subject of today’s essay, which is historical precedents. Historical precedents are very important in politics. For today’s American liberal, their importance lies in establishing that Trump represents a unique threat to American democracy, something unseen in the nearly 250-year history of the nation. And a unique threat demands a unique response.

That’s certainly what Robert Kagan, husband of the now-retired “diplomat” Victoria Nuland, was trying to say when he compared Trump to Caesar in a rambling, hysterical piece for The Washington Post, before Christmas. Kagan referenced Caesar twice. He claimed that “indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective”, and that Trump, like Caesar, “wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government.” The piece was accompanied by an image that spliced the bottom half of Trump’s head with the top half of a statue of Caesar. Every schoolboy knows what happened to Julius Caesar—or, at least, every schoolboy used to know what happened to Julius Caesar—and so it’s hard to resist the conclusion that Kagan’s article, which might as well have been a missive direct from the pen of the Deep State, is anything other than a threat. No option is off the table. Not even the Brutus Option, which in this case would be an attempt on the dictator’s life before rather than after his ascension. Nothing else has worked to stop Trump so far, and the remaining options are getting slimmer by the day.

So we have Hitler and we have Caesar: two sides of the same coin. My preferred historical precedent is somewhat different: a type rather than a specific individual. I think Trump is a primitive magician-king, of the kind described by the anthropologist James G. Frazer in his masterwork The Golden Bough, first published in 1890. Biden has called Trump “the Great MAGA King,” and I like the ring of that phrase, so we’ll go with it.

In an important sense, by choosing to think of Trump as the Great MAGA King, I’m accepting the liberal premise that the entire Trump phenomenon is a regression. But where I differ in my assessment is in seeing Trump not as an agent of chaos threatening the otherwise healthy liberal democratic system from the outside, but as a product of and a reaction to liberalism’s decline, which was taking place anyway. The whole system is falling apart, and with its collapse more primitive social and political forms are naturally beginning to reappear and reassert themselves, including the kind of sorcerer-kingship Donald Trump represents. Let me explain.

Early on in The Golden Bough, a massive comparative study of the development of religion from magic and then science from religion, James G. Frazer provides a detailed account of how the very first kings emerged from the undifferentiated mass of tribal societies. Frazer believed that kingship was not the natural state of man. Rather, the most primitive societies were ruled by oligarchies of “old and influential men, who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the practical exclusion of the younger men.” Frazer calls such a system a “gerontocracy.”

The principal role of these elders or headmen was to ensure the continuing prosperity of the tribe, and their power rested on being able to do exactly that. They carried out this role in many ways, but especially through the performance of public magical rites, to make sure the natural world—wind, rain and sun—functioned as they should, bringing health and food in abundance.

In a society where every man has the potential to be a magician, some prove better than others. Whether that’s out of sheer luck or practical wisdom and cunning, or a mixture of both, doesn’t matter so much, as long as the practical effect—the apparent manipulation of the forces of the natural world to the tribe’s benefit—is visible for all to see. It is the unusually successful wizard who becomes the first individual leader, rising above all the other magicians, and therefore becomes the first king.

“When once a special class of sorcerers has been segregated from the community and entrusted by it with the discharge of duties on which the public safety and welfare are believed to depend, these men gradually rise to wealth and power, till their leaders blossom out into sacred kings.”

For the primitive tribes of Africa Frazer surveyed from the safe distance of his armchair, rainmaking prowess was the deciding factor in making a sorcerer-king. “Among the Wagogo of East Africa,” Frazer notes, “the main power of the chiefs… is derived from their art of rain-making. If a chief cannot make rain himself, he must procure it from some one who can.” In Melanesia, by contrast, the chief had privileged communication with powerful ghosts whose favour needed to be secured on behalf of the tribe.

What is America now if not a gerontocracy? It’s certainly not a democracy. Half of all US Senators are over 65. These elders govern to the exclusion of everybody’s interests but their own, manipulating the political process and managing vast corrupt concerns. They grow older and more wealthy as the lifespan of the American people—the real American people—shortens and their increasingly slender earnings are picked direct from their pockets, or don’t even reach their pockets at all. As their children are poisoned with drugs both legal and illegal. As their communities are turned over to lawlessness. As they are replaced in their own nation by a new political client-class, a vast brown stream sucked up in constant draughts from Latin America and the Third World.