Alexander Dugin is having a crisis of faith. Not in God, history, or the divine mission of Eurasia. But in Donald Trump. The philosopher of apocalypse, who once hailed Trump as a battering ram against the globalist empire, now claims the hammer has been seized by the very hand it was meant to smash. “They have taken Trump as a hostage,” he declares. “He has now totally betrayed his MAGA programme.”
It’s a familiar arc. The rebel becomes the ruler, the outsider becomes the system, and the ideologue cries betrayal. But for Dugin, whose worldview depends on clear civilisational lines, eternal antagonisms, and chosen leaders—the apostasy is more than personal. It’s cosmological. If Trump has defected to the globalists, then the script is in flames. The Third World War is not merely coming. It has begun.
In Dugin’s telling, Trump is no longer the insurgent. He is the vessel. The strikes on Iran, the (patchy) support for Zelensky, the encirclement of Russia and China—these are not contradictions, not the product of realpolitik, domestic pressure, or militarised inertia. They are evidence of possession. Trump, like the rest of the West, is now a conduit for apocalyptic globalism.
There’s something revealing in this turn. Dugin can’t abandon Trump without abandoning the mythos he built around him. So the betrayal must be reabsorbed into the narrative. Trump isn’t wrong—he’s been captured. He isn’t acting—he’s being used. The globalists have moved inside the house. The only way to preserve Duginism is to deform reality until it fits.
The fascist mind is not built for contingency. It needs mythic order, enemies beyond redemption, a timeline that always leads to war, sacrifice, and rebirth. When events go off-script (as they always do) the true believer must either adapt or double down. Dugin chooses the latter. The leader didn’t fail; the leader was stolen.
In this lie (necessary for the survival of the narrative) you glimpse the deeper structure of the reactionary right. It cannot tolerate ambiguity. There can be no tragic heroes, only martyrs and traitors. No shifting alliances, only eternal war. When Trump governs like any other imperial president ( He is violent, erratic, transactional) Dugin cannot admit the obvious. He has to escalate. If the prophet fails him, it must be the end of the world.
“Trump hasn’t changed. He’s doing what strongmen do: cutting deals, starting wars, appeasing generals.”
The Eternal Betrayal
This isn’t the first time a far-right intellectual has watched their Caesar go soft, only to reinterpret weakness as sabotage. Julius Evola (Dugin’s favourite Italian mystic) endured the fall of Mussolini with a similar mix of rage and transcendental revisionism. Mussolini had flirted with power, Evola argued, but never fully embraced the spiritual mission of fascism. His dictatorship was too worldly, too bourgeois, too compromised by the masses. “There was no lightning,” Evola wrote, “only theatre.”
The pattern is old. The fascist thinker elevates a political figure into myth, grafting onto them a metaphysical destiny they never signed up for. When reality asserts itself, when Mussolini signs armistices, when Trump launches missiles, the disappointment cannot be processed as mere politics. It must be a cosmic theft. The Führer didn’t fail. He was failed.
The American variant today runs through QAnon, where a parallel logic operates. Trump was meant to purge the pedophile elite, drain the swamp, dismantle the Deep State. But when he left office in 2021 without mass arrests or tribunals, the narrative didn’t collapse. It mutated. He was playing 5D chess. Or he had been betrayed. Or he was preparing a Second Coming. Faith never dies. It just deepens into delusion.
Dugin, for all his continental gravitas and Heideggerian references, is engaged in the same mental gymnastics. His Trump wasn’t a real man, but a vessel of world-historical purpose. Now that vessel has been “taken hostage,” and everything (the Iran strikes, support for Zelensky, the lack of tactical nukes) must be read through that lens.
Fascist ideology, in this form, is a theology of disappointment. It elevates ordinary men into prophets, demands they realise an impossible vision, and then turns on them when they don’t. The betrayal is built in. The treachery, inevitable. Dugin isn’t exposing Trump’s contradictions. He is performing a ritual. The hero has fallen. The end must be near.
The Body Snatchers Have Taken Him
Dugin’s lament isn’t a geopolitical analysis we have now entered a Cold War horror script. His Trump has been replaced—not beaten, not compromised, but possessed. Like one of the townspeople in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the man who once promised national rebirth now walks and talks the same, but something is off. His eyes are colder. His instincts dulled. The words are familiar, but the spirit is gone.
This isn’t just paranoia. It’s a specific genre of fascist anxiety, the idea that identity can be hollowed out, that the nation, the leader, the people themselves can be infiltrated, repurposed, snatched. The metaphor does its work: if Trump has been “taken,” then nothing he does can be taken at face value. Every missile is someone else’s. Every deal, every handshake, every word, it’s all coming from the Other.
That Other, for Dugin, is always the same: the globalist, the liberal, the West, the Jew, the phantom bureaucracy of modernity. The body remains, but the soul is stolen. It’s the same old antisemitic structure of feeling, recoded in metaphysical terms.
But what’s really been snatched is the narrative. Trump hasn’t changed. He’s doing what strongmen do: cutting deals, starting wars, appeasing generals. The fantasy has changed. Dugin, now faced with the evidence of political normalcy, cannot bear the thought. So he reaches for horror. He casts the president not as a failure, but as a pod person.
What Happens When the Messiah Falls?
Dugin’s denunciation of Trump isn’t just a personal crisis, it’s an ideological fissure. For nearly a decade, Trump served as the gravitational centre of a new far-right international: a patchwork of ultranationalists, Christian dominionists, post-liberal theorists, and Eurasianists who believed the post-Cold War order could be broken by one man’s ego and instinct.
From Orbán to Bolsonaro, from Le Pen to Meloni, Trump was less a statesman than a myth: proof that liberal democracy could be hijacked, that “the people” could be weaponised against the elite. He didn’t need to read Dugin, or cite Schmitt. He embodied the impulse: rupture without replacement, chaos as order, might as right.
But what now? If Trump has “betrayed MAGA,” as Dugin claims, if he has become a tool of the globalists, launching wars and striking deals. Then fascism cannot hold. The myth fractures. The movement, already splintered by defeat and infighting, begins to cannibalise itself.
For Dugin, the response is clear: double down. Accelerate the contradictions. Escalate the conflict. But not every faction will follow. The American Christian right, obsessed with Israel’s security and biblical prophecy, sees the Iran strikes not as betrayal but fulfilment. The technofascist wing (the Yavins and Thiels) may quietly cheer the projection of force. Even inside Russia, parts of the security establishment will see Dugin’s script as a liability: too mystical, too reckless, too prone to world-ending abstraction.
“Dugin dresses it up in eschatology, but his message is brutally tactical: if the Americans are busy bombing Natanz, hit Kyiv harder.”
What Dugin’s rant reveals is not just the fraying of ideological unity, but the limits of postliberal solidarity. There was always a contradiction at the heart of this axis: Eurasianism wanted to burn down the global order and rebuild it as a multipolar theocracy; MAGA wanted to loot it, isolate itself, and install Trump as king. The alliance was always aesthetic, not strategic.
What Dugin’s rant reveals is not just the fraying of ideological unity, but the limits of postliberal solidarity. There was always a contradiction at the heart of this axis: Eurasianism wanted to burn down the global order and rebuild it as a multipolar theocracy; MAGA wanted to loot it, isolate itself, and install Trump as king. The alliance was always aesthetic, not strategic.
Dugin dresses it up in eschatology, but his message is brutally tactical: if the Americans are busy bombing Natanz, hit Kyiv harder. It’s not theology. It’s a field manual cloaked in prophecy.
Dugin also collapses every flashpoint into one seamless global war. Israel bombing Iranian sites is the same as Ukraine targeting a Russian depot, which is the same as India and Pakistan trading artillery and missiles. This is not strategy. It’s ideological flattening. Every conflict is cast as proof that the world is at war with Russia. No escalation is unjustified. Everything is permission.
If there’s a threat to Zaporizhzhia, it’s not from Ukraine—it’s from the Russian troops using it as a human shield. Dugin’s reversal of responsibility is strategic gaslighting.
Calling a strike on a centrifuge array “nuclear terrorism” is like calling a cyberattack on a dam an act of biblical flood. It’s fantasy inflated to atrocity, designed to justify retaliation.
“Calling a strike on a centrifuge array ‘nuclear terrorism’ is fantasy inflated to atrocity, designed to justify retaliation.”
For Dugin, war is a gravitational law. If China does not orbit the apocalypse soon, the whole system breaks down. His vision demands it. After all, peace would be a repudiation of the prophecy.
Dugin’s Last Sermon
For all Dugin’s talk of apocalypse, the real drama may be more banal: not nuclear fire, but narrative failure. The far right’s international project was built on the illusion of coherence. A shared enemy, a shared crisis, a shared redeemer. But coherence is collapsing. Trump governs like a traditional empire, not a revolutionary. Russia bleeds resources in Ukraine while claiming spiritual ascendancy. China hedges. Iran burns. The global right, for all its war talk, has no unified plan. It only has myth, resentment, and a growing fear that history isn’t following their script.
Dugin needs the bomb not because it’s tactically useful, but because it salvages the story. If Trump has failed, then the world must end. Otherwise the failure is real. His failure. Better to light the fire than admit the prophet was hollow. But this isn’t eschatology. It’s panic. The priesthood is losing control of the myth.
This is what happens when reaction becomes dogma. It cannot adjust. It cannot compromise. And so it keeps doubling down—on war, on prophecy, on the dream of righteous destruction. But even fascist prophecy wears thin. Even apocalypse grows stale.
If this is the Third World War, as Dugin insists, it is not between nations or ideologies. It’s between fantasy and reality. And reality, for once, might win.
