“The book is a battlefield.”
— Constantin von Hoffmeister, Foreword to The Trump Revolution
Alexander Dugin is back, and this time he’s not content with esoteric warnings from the margins of Eurasian philosophy. The Trump Revolution: A New Order of Great Powers (Arktos, 2025) is his boldest attempt yet to legitimise authoritarian multipolarity as the world’s future, with Donald Trump cast not just as a populist disruptor but as a civilisational redeemer. This is not the careful analysis of a geopolitics professor; it is an incantation, a polemic, a quasi-religious screed. Dugin, long a mystic of reaction, has written a book that resembles a late-stage imperial prophecy: fervent, dangerous, and utterly detached from democratic reason.
If Esoteric Trumpism (2024) by Constantin von Hoffmeister was the movement’s Book of Revelation, The Trump Revolution is its Acts of the Apostles — a fevered chronicle of how the MAGA messiah has supposedly overturned the “liberal horror” and birthed a “new world order” of civilisational states. Von Hoffmeister’s unhinged foreword sets the tone: we are told the globalists are dead, the gods of Davos slaughtered, and the West is now a “whore’s perfume… sprayed on corpses in Gaza and Ukraine.” The hyperbole is deliberate. The enemy is not just liberalism but post-Enlightenment modernity itself. Trump, in Dugin’s hands, becomes less a man than a myth: “the American god of war… wielding a smartphone in one hand and the thunderbolt of Zeus in the other.”
Trump is no longer a man. He is a signifier, a vessel, a mask.
This book is not about policy. It is about vision. Or more accurately, hallucination. Dugin argues that Trump’s second term has definitively ended the age of unipolarity, with a multipolar order emerging in its place. But where others (including China, Brazil, and South Africa) envision multipolarity as a more just and cooperative system, Dugin sees it as a brutal competition between “civilisation states”: massive ethno-spiritual blocs armed with nuclear weapons and a sense of historical grievance. The small, the stateless, the subaltern have no role here. Ukraine is a “non-entity.” Palestine is never mentioned except as a prop for anti-liberal posturing. Dugin’s multipolarity is not an alternative to empire but a contest between empires, a vision of the future as sacred bloodsport.
He locates the origins of this new world in the metaphor of decoupling, a term borrowed from economics but deployed metaphysically. Decoupling, for Dugin, means the irreversible severing of non-Western states. Especially Russia. From the universalism of Western liberal democracy. It is not simply geopolitical realignment but civilisational divorce, a call to retreat into cultural purity and sovereign mysticism. “We must purge Western influences from society,” he writes approvingly, framing Russia’s exit from global norms as a form of spiritual cleansing. The logic is eerily familiar to anyone who has studied fascism: the notion that liberalism is decadent, cosmopolitanism corrupting, and salvation lies in roots, blood, and fire.
Trump, in Dugin’s telling, is no longer the buffoonish property tycoon who lucked into office in 2016. He is now the herald of a new metaphysics, a “cyber-Kaiser” born to battle the twin monstrosities of postmodernism and global finance. Gone is the chaotic, transactional presidency of old. In its place stands Trump 2.0: world-historical, principled, and driven by Logos. One can only assume Dugin wrote much of this before Trump called for bombing Iranian cultural sites or confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. But consistency has never been the goal. The Trump of this book is not a man. He is a signifier, a vessel, a mask.
There is, however, something worth taking seriously in Dugin’s diagnosis of liberal collapse. He recognises, far more clearly than most centrists, that the old consensus has disintegrated. The illusion of a benign globalism, spread by markets and backed by force, no longer commands legitimacy. NATO, the IMF, the UN, even the European Union — all appear as spent forces in The Trump Revolution. But Dugin’s answer is not international democracy or economic justice. It is reactionary civilisationalism, forged in the fires of war. It is a vision where Elon Musk is praised as a “Faustian visionary,” Vladimir Putin as a “prophet of the new cosmos,” and Western liberalism as a zombie ideology reanimated only to be ritually executed.
Multipolarity, in Dugin’s hands, is not about cooperation. This is civilisational cage-fighting.
At its core this is a fascist text. Not in the tired sense of online name-calling, but in its core ideological architecture. Dugin fetishises strength, hierarchy, and myth. He denigrates the weak, despises the universal, and calls for the triumph of tradition over reason. Women, minorities, queer people, and the working class all disappear in his pages. What remains is a clash of titans: white civilisations vs brown ones, sacred order vs woke chaos, Trump vs the world.
This is why it matters that MAGA has found ideological ballast in thinkers like Dugin. Not just because they share enemies, but because they increasingly share the blueprint. The language may differ. Civilisation state in Moscow, deep state in Florida. However that underlying logic is mirrored: purity over pluralism, hierarchy over democracy, strength as virtue. And yet, too often, liberal commentators meet this convergence with memes and mockery, assuming that a well-placed quote tweet or YouTube montage reveals the full shape of the threat. It doesn’t. To truly understand where this movement is going—to see how it justifies itself, mythologises its violence, and cloaks collapse in metaphysics—you must go deeper. You have to read the treatises, the Arktos editions, the self-published manifestos, and the ideological sewer-pipes they call theory. Not to dignify them, but to disarm them. You cannot defeat fascism from a distance. You have to descend into the gutter of its ideas, pull them apart, and leave them in ruins.
And for all its bombast, The Trump Revolution is an important book to read. Not for its answers. That should be obvious. But for what it reveals about the current political imagination of the far right. Dugin’s fusion of nationalism, mysticism, and technological accelerationism mirrors the mood of this new global authoritarian moment. His language, grandiose, violent, conspiratorial, is increasingly echoed in Western discourse. From Project 2025 to Tucker Carlson’s “civilisational decline” monologues, the rhetorical frame is the same. Multipolarity is not seen as a negotiation among equals, but as a planetary sorting. The strong will rise, the weak will burn.
You cannot defeat fascism from a distance. You have to descend into the gutter of its ideas, pull them apart, and leave them in ruins.
There are moments of grotesque absurdity. A debate between Trump and Biden is rendered as a literal episode of Beavis and Butt-Head, complete with imaginary dialogue and analysis of haircuts. Elsewhere, the Paris Olympics (see the X post below) are described as “a grotesque parade of degeneracy,” salvation from which came in the form of Russia’s ban. But these moments are not comic relief; they are warnings. For Dugin, as for others in his orbit, politics is not about policy but narrative warfare. They are not trying to win debates. They are trying to burn down the agora.
Drag queens mock Christianity during the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics in Paris as they attempt to recreate da Vinci’s painting of Jesus’ Last Supper.
— Shane Pruitt (@shane_pruitt78) July 26, 2024
Not only are Christians the only people that it is socially acceptable to mock… it’s actually celebrated and put front and… pic.twitter.com/xgwYz0It0x
The final chapters descend into something like theological mania. A “Tribunal is coming” to judge liberalism. “Zelensky is a nobody.” Israel is praised as a “strong ethnostate,” while Gaza becomes a testing ground for what civilisational war might look like. There is no space here for peace, nor for nuance. Only a cosmic game of Thrones.
“There is no return to normal. No return to the old America, the America of Reaganite fantasies and neoliberal wet dreams. Trump has gone too far. The empire has cracked.”
Dugin calls it renewal. But we should be clear: it’s a blueprint for collapse, dressed in myth and marching toward war.
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