Anti-Trump illusions
I confess that last week the results of the midterms –the midterm elections– made my day. Donald Trump is a disastrous president for the United States and catastrophic for the rest of the world, besides being an exhaustive compendium of attitudes that I consider intolerable. To his vulgarity I referred recently on this very page. This does not mean, however, that I believe his final hour as a politician has arrived. In recent days I have read and heard things that contained notable exercises in self-deception (here a good pundit would use the putrid cliché "cheating at solitaire"). Despite the slap in the face, everything remains more or less where it was, but I think not in the sense that explained Slavoj Zizek last Saturday in ARA; I will return to it later. What might happen I do not know, because I am not a futurologist, but I do have clear some things that I will try to break down below.
1. The midterms are not presidential elections, regardless of whether the loudmouth Trump wanted to frame them that way or not. The President of the United States remains the same, and has two years ahead, whatever the composition of the Congress and the Senate may be. Knowing Trump's character, it seems clear who will have to adapt to whom... The rest will be handled by the killer Stephen Miller. It is not dismissible that, out of pure survival instinct, some prominent figures of the Republican Party might eventually stand up to him sooner or later; George Bush Jr. has long since lost respect for him publicly.
2. The president of the United States is a figure of global reach, not national: his fate does not depend only on Congress or the Senate. Whether he continues to be, or not, interesting to post-Soviet state terrorism or to the economic hegemony of the Chinese dictatorship, remains to be seen. For the moment –tariff numbers aside– the global imbalance remains perfectly stable, and that is not an oxymoron. Americans are becoming increasingly poor and the Russians are selling more and more oil: 200% more (as of October 4, 2026) than at the beginning of the year, according to the magazine Le Grand Continent. Here is a perfect example of this stable imbalance.
3. Trump represents a reactive mentality, not a political program. Being the embodiment of a reaction allows him to govern through sudden swerves, eccentricities, and blatant contradictions. He does not skip any program for the simple reason that he has none, beyond the obscene enrichment of his family and friends. The so-called disparagingly white trash (white trash) that voted for him a second time, and for whom he feels no respect, did not vote for him thinking about political abstractions, but because they lead an atonal life without expectations, very different from that of their parents when they made cars in Detroit or sowed corn in Iowa without the globalized world giving them a hard time. This generation has been left on the sidelines of history: it has no future with either Democrats or Republicans. Their only consolation is watching Fox and sticking National Rifle Association stickers on the windows of a battered van. The war with Iran affects them, but they wouldn't even know how to locate that country on a map.
4. The 2026 midterms have made it clear that polarization in the United States has nothing to do with political battles, but rather with genuine culture wars: the fact of highlighting only that one candidate was gay, another one Black, and the one after that Muslim, without speaking at all, not even a syllable, about the economy or international politics, makes things crystal clear. The logic of culture wars is strictly identitarian: a struggle for recognition. We have imported a few here, and without tariffs: there are clever individuals who make a living from this theater.
5. "Trump himself is a symptom of the disintegration of the liberal consensus and the failure of the left to offer a viable alternative," Zizek wrote the other day in the aforementioned article. A symptom or rather a direct consequence of this failure? It is not the same thing. The picturesque Lacanian Marxism of rock-star philosophers like Slavoj Zizek has a lot to do with this failure of the left to propose, and also with the rise, in a reactive sense, of the most extreme and Neanderthal right. That failure and this rise, by the way, respond to two different logics. If anyone expects the workers on the outskirts of the big cities of Europe or the United States to see themselves in stories that have nothing to do with them, they are in for a surprise. It seems to me that we will confirm this in just a few weeks...
