The Trump-Inspired Misanthropic Temptation

And how to resist it—with a little help from musician Nick Cave

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on following Chelsea FC victory during the FIFA Club World Cup 2025 Final match between Chelsea FC and Paris Saint-Germain at MetLife Stadium on July 13, 2025 in East Rutherford, New Jersey. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)

I don’t know about you, folks, but I’ve really been struggling. This isn’t the first time I’ve written a post like this, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

I started this Substack a little more than three years ago in order to make sense of the rise of the populist right in the United States and around the world. Thirty-seven months later, we are living in a country run by a right populist—and all my efforts to make sense of it seem to be failing. Why? I think it might be because, to a significant degree, the very effort to make sense of things is a form of idealism, of high-mindedness. It’s an expression of the conviction that understanding has value and can be at least partially achieved, that reason can help to unlock an underlying order in the world, even where it least appears to be present.

But right-populism as practiced by Donald Trump and his MAGA movement often feels as if its primary ambition is to thwart understanding and reason, to short-circuit them, with a distinctive, contrary message: We can do anything we want, even if it makes no sense to you, because we have power, and that’s what it means to have power. It means doing what we will, even if, and even especially if, it drives you sanctimonious, smarty-pants liberals completely mad.

I can assure you, I’ve not gone completely mad. Yet. Though I will also admit that as I follow the news these days it sometimes feels like that’s exactly what’s happening.