There’s a strange admission at the heart of Dugin’s latest dispatch: that Trump, the great Western hope of Eurasianism, is now a “faltering” figure. But it’s less a break with past Duginist myth-making than its mutation. The narrative no longer needs Trump to be heroic. It only needs him to be weak enough to make apocalypse feel inevitable.
What we are watching is not political commentary but continued eschatological drift. In Dugin’s hands, geopolitics becomes prophecy constantly deferred. The ‘fifty days’ motif is revealing. This is not a timeframe for policy, but a fevered half-biblical pause. In this imaginary, the world teeters on the edge of nuclear war not because of structural imperialism or inter-capitalist competition, but because one man dithers in his messianic duty.
“Now I loudly proclaim that I proclaim nothing.”
This could be a line from Waiting for Godot, but Dugin means it as a revelation. Trump’s indecision is framed not as cowardice, but tragic grandeur. We have the antihero failing to choose, and thus guaranteeing the apocalypse’s eventual return. The structure mirrors earlier Dugin pieces: tension, betrayal, inevitable war. But this time the betrayal is personal. Trump hasn’t just failed geopolitically; he’s failed to name Epstein’s clients. The conspiracy of paedophiles and the threat of Armageddon are collapsed into a single moral frame.
Dugin’s trick is to cast the MAGA base as both betrayed flock and righteous army. Not the victorious vanguard of American collapse, but a bitter, abandoned militia left muttering about a false prophet. This isn’t a swerve. It’s the natural next stage. Duginism was never about material forces; it was myth from the start. Now it’s just mysticism, with delay, deferral, secrets not yet revealed. The war’s always just over the horizon, the truth always behind the next curtain.
But who is Dugin even talking to in English? Not Trump. Not the MAGA faithful. Not Russians. His Substack is read by a mix of alt-right cosplayers, conspiracy influencers, and bored post-left mystics looking for a new daddy figure. It’s the background noise of decline. All posture, no politics. The kind of thing that passes for strategy in corners of Telegram where quoting Evola is mistaken for thought. He’s not shaping policy; he’s feeding a delusion. A soft-theocratic death cult of spectators, not actors.1
That’s the danger: not that Trump will start a war with Russia, but that people like Dugin are constantly preparing the ideological terrain for when someone does. The call is not to analyse power but to await revelation. While Dugin claims to scorn liberalism, his entire worldview now hinges on the liberal idea he pretends to detest, that history is made by the sovereign will of one great man.
If Trump is that man, and fails, then history’s only response (in this cosmogony) is fire.
Footnotes
- Julius Evola (1898–1974) was an Italian fascist philosopher and esotericist whose writings — notably Revolt Against the Modern World and Men Among the Ruins — reject democracy, equality, and modernity in favour of a mythical, hierarchical order rooted in spiritual elitism and authoritarian rule. A favourite of postwar neo-fascists, his work remains influential among today’s far-right ideologues, from Traditionalists to Telegram shitposters. ↩︎
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