I first saw Aliens on VHS. I had to convince my dad to let me rent it from the video shop—he agreed reluctantly: no sex, violence was fine. I watched it once, then immediately rewound and watched it again, jumping up as the credits rolled to hit rewind. I didn’t have the language then, but I knew it meant something. The rhythm, the panic, the sense that the Company was lying and no one was coming to help—it lodged somewhere deep. Years later, the film plays differently. What once felt like science fiction now looks like a manual: privatised empire, militarised crisis, expendable workers. Aliens isn’t just a sequel to Alien. It’s a sequel to Reaganism. And a preview of Trumpism’s hive.
Ripley wakes to find the world gone. Fifty-seven years adrift in cryosleep, her warnings ignored, the planet where she first encountered the alien now home to a terraforming colony, its settlers long since vanished. The corporation that employed her, Weyland-Yutani, has grown more opaque, more powerful. When the Company sends in the Colonial Marines to investigate the silence on LV-426, it does so with a smile, a briefing, and the assurance that everything is under control. It isn’t. It never was.
Aliens is my favourite film. A movie I’ve watched too many times to count—usually late at night, usually when the news feels unbearable. There’s something about its rhythm, its relentless escalation, the grim comedy of the marines’ bravado collapsing into panic. It’s comforting in its clarity: the threat is real, the Company is lying, survival depends on solidarity and firepower. But that same clarity reveals something darker too—something about the world we inherited from the 1980s, and the political grotesquerie we now live in. James Cameron’s Aliens, released in 1986, is usually read as a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien—more action, more guns, more monsters. But it is also a sequel to Reaganism, to the militarisation of capital, and to the emergence of what we might now recognise as the cultural logic of Trumpism.
The Company and the Corps: Capital and the Gun
Weyland-Yutani is not simply a greedy corporation, it is the distilled essence of late capitalism. It owns the colony. It funds the terraforming. It sends in the troops. Yet it does so under the guise of paternal benevolence, its logos on every wall, its interests always aligned with “human progress”. This is not a dystopia, in the film’s own terms, but a functioning economic system. The horror lies not in its collapse but in its ruthless continuity.
The Colonial Marines swagger in with video feeds and chewing gum, but they are not elite. They are fodder: underbriefed, overconfident, semi-automated. Their weapons are impressive, but their tactics are shambolic. They represent a privatised violence masquerading as competence. When things go wrong—and they do, almost immediately—the facade collapses. Gorman, the officer in charge, freezes. Apone is taken. Hudson panics.
Their banter is laddish, reactionary, and occasionally revolting. It’s a bit racist, a bit homophobic, with the sort of gallows humour that’s meant to mask fear but ends up reproducing hierarchy. The makeup of the marines is mixed—women, people of colour, a cross-section of empire’s fighting class—but the cracks show early. The surviving characters, tellingly, are all white. Hicks, Ripley, Newt. Everyone else gets torn apart.
The tension is clear in their interactions. Vasquez is introduced doing pull-ups with Drake, her closest ally in the squad. She’s muscular, alert, unflinching—a strong woman, physically and mentally, compared to Hudson who postures but looks like he’s never done a pull-up in his life. Hudson sneers at her:
“Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a man?”
She doesn’t miss a beat: “No. Have you?”
It’s a good line, but it’s also a defensive one. Vasquez has to prove herself constantly, her strength mistaken for masculinity, her presence in the squad tolerated only because she plays the hard case. Then there’s the scene in the Sulaco mess hall, where Apone jokes:
“It’s a rescue mission. You’ll love it. There’s some juicy colonists’ daughters we have to rescue from their virginity.”
Everyone laughs. No one challenges him. The future arrives, but the jokes stay the same.
Trumpism, like the Company, thrives on a certain kind of theatricality: the appearance of strength, the uniformed pantomime of competence, the hollow rituals of command. Its actors aren’t villains in the old sense. They’re bureaucrats of bravado, middle managers of menace. The characters in Aliens don’t map neatly onto contemporary figures—but they do offer types, recurring figures in the drama of American decline.
Lieutenant Gorman, green, stammering, promoted beyond his competence, is one such type: the loyalist administrator, valorised not for skill but for compliance. He’s not a fascist ideologue. He’s a man who freezes when the screen goes red. He’s every party apparatchik who discovers, too late, that authority requires more than a badge. J.D. Vance comes to mind—not as Gorman himself, but as his latest iteration: a man hoisted into prominence by a system that rewards submission, not substance.
Hudson, by contrast, is the action man deflated: swaggering, mouthy, shrill with panic. His bluster is comic until it isn’t—until it reveals how little lies beneath. He’s the performative avatar of a culture that mistakes noise for strategy. Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense in Trump’s second cabinet, has something of Hudson’s flair—Fox News veteran cosplay, leaked group chats, a tendency to confuse the studio set for a war room. But again, this isn’t about him alone. He’s an expression of a deeper structure: the spectacle of military masculinity repurposed as content. A man who talks like a field commander while drafting policy from a golf cart.
And then there’s Burke, the corporate emissary with the fixed smile and flexible ethics. It’s tempting to slot Elon Musk here—as the man in the fleece vest who thinks he’s steering the mission while charging the Company for fuel. But Musk isn’t just another Burke. He’s something else entirely. If Burke is the mid-level functionary of empire, Musk is its emerging face: the one who merges logistics, ideology, and capital into a single platform.
These aren’t allegories. They’re roles the system produces and reproduces. The Company doesn’t care who fills them, only that the mission continues. In this sense, Aliens isn’t about individual failure. It’s about structural obedience: how systems select for spectacle, elevate the incompetent, and discard the inconvenient. The characters change. The functions remain.
Carter Burke and the Friendly Fascism of the Managerial Class
What makes Burke frightening is not his ruthlessness but his banality. He doesn’t rant, doesn’t monologue. He doesn’t even get angry. He simply makes a decision—a cost-benefit calculation, nothing personal. In this, he resembles the architects of the post-2008 world: the bankers who foreclosed homes while pocketing bonuses, the politicians who cut benefits in the name of responsibility. Neoliberalism doesn’t need villains. It just needs functionaries.
But there’s something darker in Burke. He’s not just a symptom of market logic—he’s its application. If Trumpism 2.0 is a new form of fascism—digitised, decentralised, asset-heavy and ideology-light—then Burke is its perfect face: the middle manager of empire, the administrator of atrocity. He doesn’t crack heads; he files expense claims. He doesn’t run death camps; he awards tenders. He is fascism as risk management.
Would Burke have voted for Trump? Probably not in 2016. Too gauche, too erratic, bad for investor confidence. But by 2024? Maybe. The economy was looking better, perfect for Trump’s brand of capital. The taxes would go down. The regulations would go quiet. Maybe he’d have stayed silent, told himself it was about stability, stick with Bidenomics. Maybe he still sits on the board. Maybe he’s the one drafting the post-indictment talking points. Burke doesn’t need to believe in anything. He just needs the plan to go ahead.
Ripley, Newt, and the Cold Comfort of Humanism
Ripley is often read as a feminist icon, and rightly so. But she is also something stranger: a maternal warrior forged in the furnace of corporate disaster. In Aliens, she becomes Newt’s protector, not through nurture1 but through combat. She doesn’t offer comfort. She offers survival. It’ll have to do.
Her arc is often framed as redemptive, but what’s being redeemed? Not femininity, exactly. Certainly not softness. Ripley is tough, efficient, unflinching. She earns respect by outperforming the men, by mastering machines, by refusing to panic. She is feminism with a flamethrower. What she offers Newt is not safety, but a sort of disciplined proximity to violence—the liberal promise of survival, if you behave, if you comply, if you assimilate.
When she straps into the power-loader and faces off against the alien queen, it’s easy to cheer. But what’s happening in that moment isn’t liberation, it’s mimicry. Ripley must become a mechanised mother, wielding an industrial exosuit like a womb turned inside out. To protect the child, she must match the queen. To defeat the monster, she must become monstrous on our terms.
The alien queen is maternal excess personified. She spawns without end, bleeds acid, and operates on a logic outside of capital but not outside of hierarchy. She is racialised, feminised, territorial. Her fecundity is coded as dangerous, unchecked, abject. In Trumpist discourse, we hear the echo: invaders, breeders, swarms. The language of white nationalism always returns to the body, to the reproductive threat of the Other.
Ripley stands as the counterpoint: the good mother, the rational woman, the one who knows when to blow it all to hell. But this too is a script. It’s the politics of the border wall, of the drone strike, of the “school choice” crusader who wants to “protect children” from drag queens but not from bullets. In Aliens, care is inseparable from violence. There is no line between them. The loader suit doesn’t free her. It binds her more efficiently.
Ripley survives. The queen doesn’t. Newt is saved. But at what cost, and for whom? The film ends with sleep, but not peace. The cycle of motherhood and militarism, of empire and extermination, isn’t broken. It’s just been delayed until the next sequel.
The Workers Who Disappear
The colonists on LV-426 are already dead when the marines arrive. They were terraformers, settlers, cheap labour in a hostile environment. Their deaths are not investigated, only avenged. No one asks who they were. This, too, is a feature of Trumpism: the celebration of a mythical working class that has already been abandoned.
Trump didn’t save these people; he used them. Just as the Company reanimates the colonists’ tragedy to justify a military expedition, so Trump reanimated the ruins of the post-industrial Midwest as spectacle. The actual people—their unions, their conditions, their futures—were irrelevant. What mattered was the affect: the red cap, the rally, the chant.
In Aliens, the colonists exist only to vanish. They are reduced to names on a manifest, bodies in a nest. The few who remain alive are already hosts. Their function is reproductive: to carry the alien forward. This is capitalism’s final insult, to extract value even in death.
But there’s something deeper in their erasure. We never see the people who built the colony. We see no janitors, no mechanics, no service workers. No supply chains, no subcontractors. Who laid the power lines? Who stocked the medlab? Who cleaned the exosuit Ripley straps into? The film’s silence on these questions isn’t accidental, it’s structural. The colony, like empire itself, presumes a disposable labour force that disappears the moment its function is fulfilled.
In this sense, Aliens mirrors the logic of racial capitalism, as Cedric Robinson described it: a system that requires differentiated labour, that devalues some lives in order to maximise profit. The workers who vanish in Aliens echo the undocumented migrants who pick crops, clean hotels, assemble electronics—essential yet invisible, present only at the point of crisis. The colony is a frontier myth, scrubbed of the workers who made it possible.
Post-colonial theory teaches us that empire depends not only on military domination but on the production of hierarchies: whose labour counts, whose lives matter, whose deaths are grievable. The colonists in Aliens aren’t just absent. They are unmemorialised. Their fate is not a tragedy but a premise. Something happened here, the Company tells us. Send in the troops. Salvage the investment. Secure the asset.
This is what neoliberal empire does best: extract, erase, repurpose.
The workers vanish, but their affect lingers: fear, silence, loyalty, grievance. The hive doesn’t just live off bodies. It lives off what they leave behind.
The colony fails—But the plan stays on schedule.
Trump as Alien Queen: On Reproduction and Empire
The alien queen is not simply a monster; she is a system. She reproduces endlessly, defends her offspring, and establishes hives wherever she lands. Her logic is imperial. She doesn’t negotiate. She assimilates. Trumpism operates in much the same way. It reproduces itself through affect—rage, grievance, loyalty—laying its eggs in the media, in local politics, in the courts. Like the alien, it adapts to the host.
As Deleuze put it, power in the age of control doesn’t repress, it modulates. The MAGA movement doesn’t need formal structure; it exists as a flexible assemblage of militias, markets, algorithms, and memes. It doesn’t march in step. It spreads.
This isn’t allegory. It’s architecture. The figures in Aliens—Ripley, Burke, the marines, the queen—don’t correspond to specific individuals or ideologies. They are nodes in an apparatus. As Tiqqun2 write, “What we are dealing with here is not a power that ‘possesses’ subjects, but a power that produces and organises the field of possible subjectivities.” The hive3, the Company, the MAGA movement: these are not static hierarchies but dynamic control systems. They generate loyalty. They script behaviour. They configure dissent in advance.
In this world, subjectivity itself is operationalised. The Bloom4—Tiqqun’s name for the atomised, rootless, affectively flattened subject of empire, is everywhere. The marines are Blooms with guns. Burke is a Bloom in middle management. Even Ripley, for all her grit and fury, performs the role that’s been preloaded for her: rational protector, industrial mother, expendable contractor. None of them escape the logic. They just carry it forward.
Weyland-Yutani doesn’t issue commands. It constructs conditions. It builds environments—economic, emotional, atmospheric—where control is ambient and resistance is precontained. It funds the colony, sends in the troops, and lets the system iterate. The marines think they’re enforcing Company policy. They’re not. They’re just part of the loop, reacting to stimuli, executing their function.
Trumpism, too, isn’t reducible to Trump. It’s metastasised. It lives on in the judiciary, in school boards, in tech infrastructure, in the ambient architecture of everyday life. Kari Lake, Kristi Noem, Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor Greene: not commanders, just expressions of the hive. They protect the queen. They reproduce the system. They believe they’re fighting civilisational war—but as Tiqqun remind us, the real war never ended. What we call peace is simply the managed suspension of civil war, the attempt to govern conflict without allowing it to name itself.
Zuckerberg, though, is something else entirely. Not the queen, not the marines, not even the Company. He’s the facehugger: silent, efficient, clingy. He doesn’t roar. He latches on. Where Musk performs imperial grandiosity—rockets, warlords, the total theatre of ego—Zuckerberg specialises in passive implantation. Meta doesn’t need to conquer; it integrates. The algorithm doesn’t demand attention. It colonises the ambient. Like the facehugger, it leaves you breathing just long enough to deliver something worse. You don’t notice the egg until it’s hatching.
And the queen? She’s not a foreign invader. She’s a by-product of the Company’s own logic, an asset grown in secret, rationalised as potential, unleashed as crisis. In this sense, she is not Trump, but what Trump reveals: the culmination of cybernetic empire, where control is no longer imposed from above but diffused across systems, brands, platforms, and feedback loops. The Company thinks it’s in charge. But it’s not. The hive has already taken over.
The Synthetic and the Spectacle: Bishop vs Optimus
Bishop is not human, but he is not inhuman either. As a synthetic, he occupies a fraught position in Aliens: distrusted by Ripley, tolerated by the marines, quietly committed to the mission. Yet he does not serve the Company in the way Burke does. His programming may prioritise safety protocols and data collection, but Bishop’s actions—risking himself to remote-pilot the dropship, shielding Newt with his body—exceed expectation. He is loyal, not to capital, but to survival. And crucially, he asks for nothing in return.
Musk’s vision of artificial life is far less ambiguous. His robots—Optimus, Neuralink, Grok—aren’t companions. They’re spectacles. They are not built to serve humanity, but to serve the fantasy of control: docile, cheerful, unflinching in the face of dysfunction. They do not rebel. They retail. They stand on stage, wave, and quietly imply that labour can be made cute again. A friend who never unionises.
In Aliens, artificial life is complex. Bishop does not mimic humanity. He resists it. He works within the limits of his programming, but pushes against the logic of corporate expendability. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t trade loyalty for stock options. When he is torn in half, he still holds the line.
Musk imagines machines that won’t just obey—they’ll be happy to. He envisions a world where artificial life affirms the system that made it: uncomplaining, unfailing, user-friendly. Where Bishop bleeds white and breaks protocol to save a child, Musk’s robots will, presumably, hand over the child’s biometric data and ask if you’d like a subscription.
The difference matters. Bishop isn’t the Company’s dream. He’s its failure. Not because he breaks down, but because he refuses to become Burke. That’s the true horror of Musk’s AI: not that it will rebel, but that it never will.
Endgame: What Comes Back with Us
At the end of Aliens, Ripley, Newt, Hicks and the android Bishop escape into sleep once more. But the threat is never really gone. Each return to Earth carries with it the risk of contamination. The alien always finds a way back.
Trumpism is no different. Even if Trump disappears—even if the hat fades, even if the next candidate speaks in full sentences—the system that made him remains. The hive is still operational. The Company is still writing contracts. The mission continues.
Musk isn’t just Burke, the Company man in a fleece vest. He’s Ripley too—or at least, he thinks he is: the engineer against entropy, the lone adult in a collapsing world, the one who straps into the power-loader and says, “I’ve got this.” But he isn’t fighting the hive. He’s building it. His rockets, his factories, his social network of reactionaries—they’re not countermeasures. They’re egg chambers. In the dream of empire, he’s not the last survivor. He’s the queen in disguise.
And if Aliens ends with sleep, Alien 3 wakes up screaming. Ripley lands in a prison. Newt and Hicks5 are dead. The Company is still coming. The final act is no longer heroism but self-immolation—Ripley hurling herself into a furnace to stop the birth of what she carried inside. Even that isn’t enough. The sequel after that puts the queen back on Earth, in the lab, under contract.
Mark Fisher wrote that capitalist realism isn’t belief—it’s atmosphere. A sense that nothing else is possible. Aliens gives us a moment of victory, but it’s always temporary. The Company survives. The hive adapts.
The lights flicker.
The room adjusts.
Something is already inside.
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Footnotes
- I will stick to the 1986 theatrical release, which doesn’t include the Ripley daughter arc of the later directors cut. ↩︎
- Tiqqun was a radical French collective active in the late 1990s and early 2000s, best known for texts like Introduction to Civil War and The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Their work reads like a philosophical dossier from inside the enemy’s infrastructure: dense, aphoristic, sometimes maddening, but shot through with real insight. They were concerned with how liberal democracies maintain order not through repression but through environmental control—shaping the field of possible actions before anyone can act. What we call peace, they wrote, is simply the management of ongoing civil war. ↩︎
- Mark Fisher argued that capitalist realism wasn’t just an ideology but a feedback system: a structure that not only survives crisis, but thrives on it. Failure isn’t punished—it’s harvested. Burke doesn’t represent dysfunction. He’s what it looks like when the system works as intended. ↩︎
- The Bloom is Tiqqun’s term for the depoliticised subject of late capitalism: atomised, affectively neutral, interchangeable. Neither revolutionary nor reactionary, the Bloom floats through the ruins of the social, capable of inhabiting any role the system requires—soldier, technician, manager, mourner. The Bloom is not a villain, but an operating unit. In Aliens, even the heroes are Blooms. That’s the horror. Everyone’s already integrated. ↩︎
- If you are wondering why you have got this far and this is the first mention of Hicks, well there are no heroes in the Trumpocene. ↩︎
