Alexander Dugin wants you to believe that Donald Trump was never just a politician. Trump, in Dugin’s hands, becomes less man than myth: a sacrificial weapon hurled at the heart of the globalist machine, a civilisational prophet, the last American hope against globalist liberalism. In his latest substack post, Dugin unveils Trump’s ideological retreat. His growing proximity to neocons, his support for Israel’s latest atrocities, his failure to break with the status quo, as more than mere political miscalculation. It is cast instead as a betrayal of a metaphysical mission: the mission to resist the Antichrist.
This isn’t analysis. It’s myth-making. Trump is sanctified not for what he did, but for what he symbolised. Dugin shows no interest in confronting the record: the deregulation, the ICE raids, the billionaire tax cuts, the drift between isolationism and aggression. Trump governed like a boilerplate Republican—and now, in his second term, is edging the US toward open confrontation with Iran. None of this is reckoned with. Instead, Dugin clings to the fiction that Trumpism was a coherent worldview, a conservative revolution, even a new civilisation. That it failed is not evidence of contradiction, only of betrayal. The mission, we’re told, is still holy. Only the vessel was flawed.
Trump, for Dugin, was the American manifestation of a deeper struggle: between the multipolar defenders of tradition and the satanic agents of globalism. It is civilisational Manichaeism, but dressed in the robes of Christian eschatology and Eurasian geopolitics. Dugin calls for Russia to remain the Katechon1, the restrainer of the Antichrist, the last bulwark against chaos. The implication is clear: there is no middle ground. You either stand with the forces of order, or you are swallowed by the tide of degenerate liberalism, wokeism, cosmopolitanism, and pride parades. The civilisational enemy is everywhere and everything.
To cast Russia as the Third Rome is to indulge a centuries-old Orthodox fantasy: that after the fall of Constantinople, Moscow inherited the divine mantle of Christian empire. Dugin exploits this legend not as theology but as geopolitical branding. In his telling, Russia is not a state but a metaphysical barrier (the Katechon) holding back the Antichrist. But the Antichrist, in Dugin’s cosmology, is never named outright. He doesn’t need to be. The enemy is diffuse and ever-expanding: the West, liberalism, feminism, NATO, Netflix, drag queens, the dollar. His apocalypse has no firm edges because its purpose is not revelation but mobilisation. The vaguer the threat, the holier the mission. And so Putin’s regime (rooted in corruption, economic fragility, and brutalist nationalism) can dress itself in the vestments of cosmic war. It becomes sacred by declaring everything outside its orbit profane.
What Dugin continues to offer, in short, is fascism with metaphysical flair. A theology of power disguised as critique. Dugin borrows from a lineage that ranges from metaphysical fascism (Evola) to civilisational pessimism (Spengler) and Slavophile exceptionalism (Danilevsky). Even Guénon, though not a fascist, provides the sacred architecture for Dugin’s rejection of modernity. These references lend gravitas but provide no clarity. Dugin speaks of the West’s fall in Spenglerian2 tones, but without any materialist understanding of how capitalism actually functions. Liberalism becomes a catch-all curse. Decline is always moral, never economic. Dugin doesn’t offer a path forward, he offers absolution for decline. Putinism may fail materially, but with Dugin’s script, it can still claim moral grandeur.
“He offers no programme, no theory of change. This is not revolutionary politics. It is a liturgy for decline.”
This is not the first time I have written about Dugin, and much of what is on display here reiterates what has already become familiar. In earlier pieces I have noted the way Dugin builds ideological grandeur atop political incoherence, how he transforms failure into martyrdom and strategy into symbolism. Each iteration of his writing seeks not to clarify Trumpism but to mystify it further, offering spiritual gloss for what is ultimately reactionary drift.
Why Putinism needs the spiritual is simple: it cannot rest on economic success or democratic legitimacy. It must claim something deeper. Dugin’s metaphysics are not fringe, they do ideological heavy lifting. The spiritual narrative provides a transcendent justification for repression, expansion, and decline. When the Russian state fails to deliver prosperity, it offers instead the promise of eschatological (concerned with ultimate destiny or the end times) purpose. The war in Ukraine becomes not a brutal occupation, but a sacred defence. Support for Trump becomes not realpolitik, but resistance to the Antichrist. Without the spiritual, Putinism would have to argue on political or economic grounds. With it, repression becomes redemption.While Dugin invokes eschatology, real-world political economy disappears. There is no oligarchy, no fossil capital, no class analysis. We are left with cosmic war.
In this frame, Trump’s betrayal is not surprising. This is part of the eschatological unfolding. Dugin hints that new avatars may rise: Elon Musk3, Thomas Massie4, even Peter Thiel. It’s no coincidence that Dugin finds resonance among American technocrats. Putinism gives them theology; Trumpism gives them myth. Both want politics emptied of collective agency and refilled with revelation. These men, he suggests, might carry the torch of “civilisational resistance” now that Trump has tarnished it. But this reveals the hollowness of the project. The supposed ideology of Trumpism is so incoherent that it can be passed like a relic between a libertarian eccentric, a tech plutocrat, and a reactionary congressman. It is not a worldview. It is a brand.
Like all brands, it is designed to be flexible. That is what Dugin never admits. Trumpism is not betrayed when Trump supports Israeli airstrikes or plans regime change in Iran. It is fulfilled. Because the essence of Trumpism is not strategic coherence or civilisational integrity. It is affect: grievance, spectacle, domination. What Dugin calls tradition is just reaction. What he calls order is just repression.
“What Dugin calls tradition is just reaction. What he calls order is just repression.”
I like reading Dugin because if he really is the spiritual essence of Putinism, then it confirms just how thin that spirit is. What he offers isn’t tradition. It’s accelerationism dressed as prophecy. His metaphysics don’t slow the world down; they urge it toward collapse. Strip away the incense and icons, and what you’re left with is a rush toward ruin, justified by mysticism. Dugin still speaks of Russia as a great power, but that’s a fantasy sustained only by nostalgia and nukes. The war in Ukraine has revealed the brittleness of the Russian military, while sanctions have laid bare the regime’s dependence on fossil exports and financial opacity. His rhetoric masks decline, not strength.
The danger of Duginism is not in its mysticism, but in its utility. It provides a language for fascist internationalism. It turns war into prophecy. It turns policy failure into spiritual trial. It gives authoritarianism a cosmic alibi. And in the process, it drains politics of material stakes. The poor are not crushed by inflation, deregulation, and privatisation. They are victims of “woke ideology.” Foreign policy is not about oil, arms, or empire. This is biblical, end of the world stuff, a struggle against the Antichrist.
Yet for all its ornamental complexity, Dugin’s argument is deeply passive. He calls for study, not action. He offers no programme, no movement, no theory of change. This is not a revolutionary politics. It is a liturgy for decline. The world, he implies, must burn before it can be purified.
That is where the fascism lives: not in the affirmation of power, but in its apocalyptic suspension. Trump becomes both martyr and warning. A secular king who failed his divine mission, leaving only wreckage and prophecy behind. The real betrayal is not Trump’s. It is Dugin’s own: the substitution of mysticism for strategy, myth for critique, and theology for politics.
“If this is the soul of the Putin regime, then it’s already dead.”
And he calls it ideology.
Footnotes
- The Katechon (Greek: τὸ κατέχον, “that which restrains”) is a theological concept from 2 Thessalonians, describing a force or figure that holds back the Antichrist and delays the apocalypse. In political theology (particularly in the work of Carl Schmitt) the Katechon becomes a symbol of sovereign authority that prevents chaos. Dugin retools the concept to cast Russia as this restraining power, sacralising its geopolitical mission against Western liberalism. ↩︎
- Spenglerian: Refers to the ideas of Oswald Spengler, a German philosopher and historian who argued that civilisations follow organic life cycles of birth, growth, decline, and death. In his work The Decline of the West (1918–1922), he claimed that Western civilisation had entered its terminal phase, a period marked by cultural exhaustion, imperial overreach, and spiritual decay. A Spenglerian worldview is typically pessimistic, anti-liberal, and cyclical in its understanding of history. ↩︎
- Already the fallen angel ↩︎
- Massie represents a small but growing anti‑MAGA faction within the GOP that champions limited government, constitutional limits, and skepticism about executive power. His profile underscores tensions within the MAGA coalition between populist loyalty and libertarian governance. Tensions that are becoming especially visible in debates over war powers, federal spending, and party discipline. ↩︎
