The Invisible Armada

2025/08/25

1- The political figure of Donald Trump, said to be unclassifiable, has reconfigured the paradigms of contemporary geopolitics by elevating incoherence into a method of governance. His two presidencies are marked by a permanent tension between an isolationist discourse, the apparent heir to the American tradition of withdrawal, and a bellicose, aggressive, and unilateralist practice. On the one hand, the slogan “America First” seems to renew with George Washington’s founding warnings against “entangling alliances” [1] and the Monroe Doctrine aimed at protecting the American continent for the benefit of U.S. imperialism [2]. On the other hand, every tweet, every decision, and every negotiation betrays a logic of confrontation where peace is never an ethical horizon, but a simple, momentarily favorable power dynamic.

2- This structural ambivalence raises a fundamental question: how can a rhetoric of disengagement coexist with a diplomacy of perpetual belligerence? Far from being a simple calculated inconsistency, this double discourse reveals a complex strategy of destabilization where war is waged as much on the economic, cultural, sociopolitical, and military fields as it is on the semiotic battlefield of symbols and words. To grasp its scope, it’s necessary to deconstruct this pacifist facade, analyze the reality of his policy of confrontation, and decipher the profound nature of a strategy that has made the irresistible death drive a weapon of domination.

3- The rhetoric of disengagement is merely a pacifist construct for the domestic arena, and “America First” is the expression of a performative isolationism. Trump built his success on a simple diagnosis: the exhaustion of the American people with “endless wars” and their exorbitant costs. By violently criticizing the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, he captured the frustrations of a deep America. This discourse reactivated an old isolationist streak, but in a perverted way. The isolationism of the founding fathers was a doctrine of prudence; Trump’s is an instrument of resentment, a rhetorical weapon turned against the “elites” accused of having sold out national sovereignty.

4- More profoundly, the Make America Great Again (MAGA) philosophy is intrinsically warlike. It’s not just a nostalgic slogan, but a narrative of reconquest. It posits the existence of a original—or even unique—“great” America that was betrayed and weakened by internal enemies (the deep State, globalized elites, the media) and external ones (China, immigrants, unfair competitors). In this worldview, politics isn’t a space for debate or compromise, but a permanent battlefield to restore this lost greatness. The MAGA philosophy is a declaration of cultural and political war against the present. This internal belligerence, this need to purge the nation of its traitors, inevitably projects onto the international stage, where every nation is a potential rival and every treaty a possible capitulation.

5- In doing so, he seems to embrace the role of the Trickster, that ambivalent figure from folklore who transgresses rules to reveal hypocrisy. But beneath the guise of the Shakespearean buffoon lies a cold populist rationality. The style, intentionally outrageous, direct, sometimes vulgar, recalls the “little music” of Louis-Ferdinand Céline [3], that syncopated prose designed to convey a raw, visceral truth and reject the pretenses of polite language. Trump, like Céline’s Bardamu, seems to be telling his people: the world is a scam, and only cynics survive: “Let’s screw ‘em all!”, to parody Denis-Robert Dufour [4].

6- Donald Trump’s “straight talk”—direct talk—so prized by his supporters, isn’t just a lack of filter. Behind this displayed frankness lies a strategy of concealment of formidable effectiveness. Far from revealing a truth, this direct and provocative language serves to hide the true intentions of power [5]. La Rochefoucauld had already written in his Maximes that “falsehood is but a poor imitation of truth, and dissimulation is an imitation of sincerity.” [6] Trump’s politics fit perfectly into this logic. He uses the mask of sincerity to better conceal his project: the apparent destruction of the liberal order and the reactivation of (latent, invisible) conflicts. By constantly denouncing the “lies” of the media and the elites, he arrogates to himself the monopoly of truth while allowing himself to manipulate facts as he sees fit. “Straight talk” then becomes the instrument of a deeper dissimulation.

7- More than just a tactic, Trump’s “straight talk” and that of his chorus leader is a variation of the “saying it all” of the Sadean libertines. For Sade, the crude enunciation of desires and acts considered perverse isn’t a liberation but a tool of enslavement. By forcing the victim to listen to and acknowledge the horror of his words, the Sadean tormentor exercises absolute power over them, depriving them of their moral and psychological autonomy. The “saying it all” is a theological and performative act: it creates a new reality where the will of the dominant is the only law. Trump’s discourse functions in a similar way. By imposing outrageousness, insults, and blatant lies, he doesn’t seek to convince but to subordinate. He demands from his supporters not rational adherence, but an unconditional and servile acceptance of his word, regardless of its incoherence or violence. The constant repetition of these alternative truths aims to transform them into indisputable facts, establishing a despotic and unilateral relationship with his audience.

8- Trump’s politics, in its very essence, is a logic that escapes dialectics. Far from a confrontation of ideas leading to a synthesis, we are witnessing a perpetual forward flight fueled by incoherence. Each decision, far from being a calculated masterstroke, seems to be the result of a drive, an instinct that deviates from the rational path to throw itself into a spiral of impulsive reactions. His tariff policies against China, for example, far from strengthening the United States, provoked retaliations that weakened his own economy. This policy of punitive tariffs applied particularly to India, far from serving his interests, threw Modi into Xi’s arms. These errors aren’t accidents, but the sign of a logic greater than his intentions and projects.

9- This paradoxical approach also evokes the philosophy of Laozi. The Taoist sage advocated wu wei, the principle of non-action, which is in reality a subtle and effective form of action, acting in harmony with the natural flow of things to achieve one’s goals without apparent effort [7]. Trump, for his part, practices a perverted wu wei. His withdrawal from treaties and alliances, his refusal of diplomatic conventions, far from being passivity, is a form of radical action pushed to its paroxysm, even if it must lead to the apocalypse. It’s by ceasing to act according to established rules that he destroys the existing order and imposes his own game. The “non-action” of withdrawal is a weapon of deconstruction, a way of letting old structures collapse under their own weight, the better to replace them with chaos and then with his power. In any case, that’s what he believes.

10- Trump’s politics, in its very essence, is a reversed Hegelian dialectic, where cunning reason doesn’t lead to progress, but to systematic destabilization. According to Hegel, history progresses through the confrontation of a thesis and its antithesis to arrive at a higher synthesis [8]. Trump’s politics is such a confrontation: the isolationist discourse and the bellicose practice aren’t simple incoherencies, but two conflicting forces that generate a new political reality, a new chaos.

11- Can Donald Trump’s politics be seen as a simple art of chaos? Or can it be seen as a modern manifestation of the art of war of great conquerors? Are his methods a matter of disorder or a strategy of domination that recalls that of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Napoleon? These historical figures weren’t mere brutes, but implacable strategists who knew how to turn their reputation for terror into a political weapon. Does Trump, on his scale and with contemporary tools, apply a similar logic, without understanding that the era is different?

12- Like Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, or Napoleon, Trump uses unpredictability and sometimes muffled brutality to destabilize his adversaries. Threatening tweets and provocative statements aren’t just idle words; they create an aura of madness and danger that leads nations and institutions to caution, even submission. The Mongol and Timurid emperors didn’t always win their battles by brute force, but often by intimidation, by creating such fear that the enemy surrendered before the fight. This is the very essence of Trumpian diplomacy: the threat of sanctions or economic reprisals often replaces axes and swords, but the goal is the same—to make the adversary yield by a simple demonstration of force.

13- These conquerors based their power on their person, their will, and total loyalty, rather than on institutions or treaties. They broke free from the rules established by sedentary empires to impose their own order. Trump, in the same way, has shown a deep contempt for institutional norms (trade treaties, the press, universities, NGOs) which he considers to be obstacles to his power. His objective is to establish a direct and personal power dynamic, where the word of the leader is the only law that counts. The “deal” replaces international conventions, and personal loyalty takes precedence over legality. It’s a reactivation of imperial logic, where domination is exercised not by law, but by force and allegiance.

14- Behind the rhetoric of “law and order” actually lies the cult of hybris. Hybris, in ancient Greece, designates the excess, pride, and arrogance of a mortal who defies the gods and the natural order. Trump, by presenting himself as the sole guarantor of law and order, claims absolute power and frees himself from the rules he claims to defend. The order he promises is not that of democratic institutions, but one that emanates from his sole will. He celebrates chaos as a force of creative destruction, a way of breaking the old to impose a pseudo-new. In other words, he doesn’t seek stability, but permanent crisis, because it’s in the tumult that he can assert his role as a providential leader. The thirst for hybris is the engine of his politics, an incessant quest for personal power that can only be expressed in a state of maintained chaos—the stasis.

15- War as a principle—that’s the reality of this politics of confrontation, where deterrence by force is based on an exacerbated neo-realist doctrine. Behind the discourse, the actions testify to a logic of systematic confrontation. The massive increase in the military budget, the desire to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, the withdrawal from the Iranian nuclear agreement (JCPOA), the targeted assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, or the trade war triggered against China are all manifestations of a posture that falls under the hardest realism in international relations. This vision, theorized by authors like Kenneth Waltz, postulates that in an anarchic international system, states are condemned to maximize their power to guarantee their security. Trump pushes this logic to its paroxysm, adding a dimension of spectacle. His foreign policy evokes the “Big Stick” doctrine of Theodore Roosevelt, but without the restraint of “speak softly.” It is a brutal and literal application of Machiavelli’s The Prince, according to which it is better to be feared than loved [9]. But where the Florentine thinker sees fear as an instrument of stability for the Prince, Trump seems to make it an end in itself, a joyful performance of domination. In the series Game of Thrones, Tywin Lannister embodies this ruthless rationality of power. Trump is a more boisterous version, but the philosophy is the same: power is not to be shared, it is to be exercised, even in permanent agitation.

16- His absolute support for Netanyahu’s policy in Gaza and the Middle East is part of this same strategy. The promotion of a permanent conflict in the Middle East is not aimed at peace, but at profitable regional destabilization. By validating Israeli expansionism and imperialism and disengaging from any multilateral diplomatic solution, he encourages a logic of belligerence that feeds his own narrative of hybris. This unconditional support for an ally, far from being solely an act of traditional diplomacy, is a display of force and a catalyst for chaos, reinforcing the image of an America that, under his leadership, operates outside international norms and laws to serve—as always but now without a mask—its own interests. The similarity of their impulsive behaviors and their constant forward flight is proof of a death drive that animates and overwhelms them.

17- This logic of permanent war is also translated by the systematic re-actualization of reactionary methods and ideas, of an ideology with fascist overtones. We are then witnessing a major reversal where, to paraphrase Pierre Clastres, the State no longer positions itself for society, but against it. The state apparatus no longer aims to defend the entire people, but a fraction of it: the “patriots,” transformed into the only legitimate “partisans” in the Schmittian sense of the term.

18- There is also the manifest imperialist will at the heart of the MAGA ideology, taking the form of territorial conquest: repeated statements about Greenland, making Canada the 51st American State, or transforming Gaza into a Middle Eastern riviera, even if this means killing or deporting the inhabitants of the enclave with the Israeli armed arm: what they euphemistically call “voluntary departures.” We also have proof in the demonstration of force by sending aircraft carriers into the Caribbean Sea to intimidate governments, particularly Venezuela. This behavior is in fact part of a long American tradition of permanent war on both the domestic and foreign fronts. First against the indigenous peoples, then against non-whites and non-Christians, a regional war through the Monroe Doctrine and its variations in other forms, and finally a war through proxies or directly after World War II: Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc. Trumpism is not a rupture, but a noisy continuation of a latent militarism.

19- This internal belligerence has a precise function: to test the limits of counter-powers and the foundations of the rule of law. Each controversial decree, each contested appointment, each attack against justice or the press is not a simple blunder, but a deliberate assault against institutions aimed at measuring their resistance. The goal is to create, through permanent crisis, what Giorgio Agamben calls a “state of exception” [10]. By constantly invoking urgency (security, migratory, economic...), the sovereign power authorizes itself to suspend the legal norm to act outside common law. The objective is to make this exception no longer a temporary measure, but a permanent mode of government, where the leader alone decides what is legal—because the king’s order and will should always prevail. This relationship to power plunges society into a Kafkaesque situation [11], where rules are arbitrary and where uncertainty becomes an instrument of domination.

20- This war, this state of permanent war—which functions as a kind of mania—is translated by a permanent logomachy. Language—also a victim of this constant escalation of a cult of controversy—thus becomes a battlefield, notably through the semiotic diplomacy of the tweet.

21- Trump’s most striking innovation lies in his transformation of communication into a strategic weapon. His Twitter—now X—account or his Truth Social network has become a theater for diplomatic operations, where threats of “fire and fury” against North Korea or insults against his allies aim to create a state of permanent uncertainty.

22- Michel Foucault would have analyzed this practice as a “microphysics of power,” where each statement, each tweet, is a technology of control aimed at shaping behaviors [12]. But it is more: a true governmentality through discourse, which seeks to impose an alternative reality. As Foucault specifies in his lectures at the Collège de France, this war is first and foremost a “war of races,” a matrix of discourse where the dominant justify their privileges by the idea of an existential struggle [13]. In Trumpian America, this war takes several faces: that of the rich against the poor, as illustrated by the budget America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again, which dismantles social safety nets for the benefit of military and security reinforcement; that of “real Americans” (whites) against migrants, where the obsession with borders and walls becomes an instrument of national purification; that of the “normal” against the “abnormals,” whether they are transgender, sexual minorities, or “deviant” figures, designated as threats to the biological and moral order. This "war of races" thus functions as a eugenic enterprise, seeking to purify America by eliminating its internal otherness. It also unfolds in the economic sphere, in the form of a trade war erected as a method of government: sanctions, punitive tariffs, constant diktats, where predatory logic replaces any lasting cooperation.

23- Jean Baudrillard would have spoken of hyperreality [14], a state where the simulation—the tweet, the shocking image—becomes more real than the event itself, abolishing the distinction between the sign and the real. Diplomacy dissolves into its spectacle. This semantic blurring recalls the “Newspeak” from George Orwell’s 1984, a language designed to restrict the scope of thought [15]. By saturating the media space with provocations, Trump has made any rational political debate almost impossible. In this cacophony, one finds the comical horror of Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove, where the madness of a single man, amplified by technology, can lead the world to its ruin [16].

24- This is a strategy of destabilization that has civil war as its project. The synthesis between pacifist rhetoric and warlike practice lies in a strategy of permanent destabilization. This logic is rooted in the thought of Carl Schmitt, for whom the essence of politics resides in the distinction between the “friend” and the “enemy.” But Trump goes further: he imports this logic of war into the very heart of the American state and society. Reversing Clausewitz’s formula, Foucault posited that politics is the continuation of war by other means. Trump’s art of governing is an illustration of this thesis: it is not about pacifying society, but about organizing conflict, pitting factions of the American people against each other (“patriots” against “corrupt elites,” rural America against cosmopolitan cities) in a state of simmering civil war.

25- Trump’s double game responds to a demand from his electorate: the thirst for a strong leader who puts an end to distant wars while restoring America’s (supposedly) lost greatness. This articulation stems from the performative populism brilliantly analyzed by Ernesto Laclau. For Laclau, the populist leader succeeds by creating a chain of equivalences between heterogeneous popular demands and unifying them against a common adversary—the “elite.” The slogan “Make America Great Again” functions as an “empty signifier,” capable of absorbing all frustrations [17]. The staging of this conflict is essential. Trump’s rallies, with their quasi-religious fervor, are not unlike the collective rituals described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World [18]. They function like a social drug, the soma, offering an emotional escape and a sense of belonging that bypasses critical thinking. This political theater finds a disturbing literary echo in Philip Roth’s novel, The Plot Against America, which imagines the election of a populist and isolationist aviator to the American presidency, showing how an “America First” rhetoric can quickly cause a state of law to topple [19].

26- Trumpian ambivalence, far from being a flaw in vision, is therefore the very core of a new art of war. A total war, waged on all fronts: economic, diplomatic, ecological in the broadest sense of the term, semiotic, and, crucially, internal. The displayed pacifism is not the opposite of war, but its mask, a weapon intended for domestic public opinion while permanent confrontation aims to destabilize the global order and the American constitutional order itself.

27- The figure of Trump can also be analyzed through the lens of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle [20]. In this 1967 work, Debord posits that the spectacle is not a simple set of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by images. In this model, reality is replaced by its representation, and authentic life moves away in favor of passive contemplation. Trump’s politics fit perfectly into this logic. His rallies, his television appearances, and especially his tweets are not just communication tools, but the spectacle itself. Politics is no longer a place of substance, of debate of ideas, or of concrete actions, but a permanent performance where truth is subordinated to the effectiveness of the staging. The “deal” has no intrinsic value; it is a sign of victory to be displayed before an audience. Political action is reduced to its simplest and most dramatic version, creating a world of pseudo-events where what matters is not what happens, but how it is perceived and staged. The Trumpian spectacle does not seek to inform, but to fascinate and entertain, making substantive issues bland in the face of the allure of controversy and personality. It’s a theater of the absurd, where spectators are invited to become fans, and where the only reality that matters is the one that is staged. This approach has the consequence of emptying the rule of law of its substance, transforming the citizen into a simple consumer of prefabricated images and narratives.

28- By blurring the lines between peace and war, true and false, ally and enemy, Trump isn’t really leading a policy of rupture: he is clearly part of a fascist-leaning libertarian lineage. He doesn’t truly attack the foundations of the liberal order inherited from the post-World War II era, but reactivates its hegemonic dimension, which had previously been presented in the velvet of soft power.

29- From Thucydides to Clausewitz, from Machiavelli to Foucault, the conceptual tools exist to understand that power is always a matter of force, discourse, and staging. But the Trump era may mark a tipping point, where the spectacle of power has become more important than power itself. His gesticulations are proof of a leviathan that pretends to ignore its fragility. Thus, against his own will, Trump tries in vain to escape the fatum of his predecessors by launching his tentacles in all directions, even though confidence in the so-called and natural Western, let alone American, superiority has long been broken and alliances weakened. The question then is: have we entered a lasting era of generalized confrontation, a global dramaturgy oscillating constantly between grotesque farce and potential tragedy? Is Trumpism, like other fascist-leaning movements, condemned by its own death drives, the same ones that led Hitler to his ruin, or will we witness a new endless tragedy?

30- What takes precedence in Trump—in Trumpism in general—and all other neo-fascist and far-right ideologues and leaders, is Thanatos at the expense of Eros [21]. While Eros is the life drive that gathers and builds, Thanatos is the death drive that disintegrates and destroys. Rather than seeking unity and cooperation (Eros), Trump’s rhetoric and actions seem to be animated by a desire to dismantle alliances, fracture institutions, and pit communities against each other. The “America First” discourse is not just isolationist; it is also an expression of this Thanatos. It rejects multilateral cooperation in favor of a confrontation with external and internal “enemies.” The politics of the “wall” and the attacks against migrants are not simple security measures, but manifestations of a drive for separation and hatred.

31- This death drive is manifested by institutional dismantling, a language of war, and a drive for self-destruction. The objective is not to reform democratic institutions, international treaties, or legal norms, but to destroy them or render them powerless, establishing a state of permanent chaos. Trump’s “straight talk,” with its insults and provocations, doesn’t serve to build, but to demolish. Each tweet is an attack, a verbal deflagration that aims to humiliate and silence the other. This permanent logomachy is the sign of a desire for fragmentation. He forgets that Thanatos can also turn against the subject itself. Trump’s inconsistent policies and forward flight, which lead him to make counterproductive decisions (like imposing tariffs on allies or opposing nations that could help him), are expressions of a self-destructive process, a march toward the abyss that recalls the madness of the Third Reich and Hitler’s Blitzkrieg.

32- Trumpism, in short, far from being a political project of construction, appears as a manifestation of a generalized death drive, which destroys what has been built, violates the rules, and pushes society toward disintegration. It is the triumph of hatred over love, of chaos over order, of Thanatos over Eros. This ideology of destruction, by relying on fears and resentments, threatens not only geopolitical stability, but also the social fabric of nations.

33- This logic of permanent war, at the heart of neo-fascist ideologies, inevitably relies on the figure of the enemy. However, for the imperial mindset, the distinction between “enemy” and “friend" must be constantly reaffirmed, even if it means inventing the adversary from scratch, however awkwardly. This visceral need for an “other” to fight is what gives meaning to the “war of races” and justifies the state of exception. The designated enemy—whether it is the migrant, China, the free press, or the globalized elite—is not always a rational or geopolitical adversary. It is above all a projection of resentment, a necessary scapegoat to channel popular anger and reinforce the unity of the “people” behind their leader. The awkwardness of his choices only fuels the forward flight, reinforcing the conviction that the entire world is conspiring against the “chosen nation.”

Notes

[1] George Washington, Farewell Address (1796).

[2] Monroe Doctrine, message to Congress on December 2, 1823.

[3] Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (1932).

[4] Denis-Robert Dufour, Baise ton prochain: Une histoire souterraine du capitalisme, 2021.

[5] This is therefore neither parrhêsia nor alethurgy. Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres II. Cours au Collège de France, 1984.

[6] François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes (1665).

[7] Laozi, Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE).

[8] Georg W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).

[9] Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1513).

[10] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (2003).

[11] Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926); The Trial (1925).

[12] Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (1975).

[13] Michel Foucault, Il faut defender la société. Cours au Collège de France (1976).

[14] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation (1981).

[15] George Orwell, 1984 (1949).

[16] Stanley Kubrick, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964).

[17] Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (2005).

[18] Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932).

[19] Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (2004).

[20] Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (1967).

[21] Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).