Donald Trump, High Prophet of Neoiconoclasm

At the start of Donald Trump’s previous term of office in 2017, I coined the term neoiconoclasm¹ to draw attention to the similarities between the new right’s destructive opposition to the shibboleths of the progressive left and the violent desecration of Orthodox and Catholic Churches, starting in the 8th and 16th centuries respectively and historically referred to as iconoclasm. I introduced the idea of neoiconoclasm through a satirical portrayal of a tirade against it by a contemporary progressive leftist.

My intention at the time was not so much to characterise Trump as to highlight the sanctimonious religiosity of the progressive left, a subject I elaborated on in a 2019 essay asking Is Progressive Liberalism a New Religion? This observation about the progressive left has been similarly made by a number of authors since, for example Andrew Doyle in his The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World (2022). But unexpectedly the moniker of neoiconoclasm looks now to be a very fitting characterisation of the policy direction being pursued by the second Trump administration. The one caveat is that the concept has now to be seen as encompassing not just the woke left but the entire globalist world order, which Trump and his team appear to have set their face against. Allow me to explain what I mean.

What I would look to argue here is that Trump is not so much a cause of the loss of stability that is observed to have occurred since his ascendance to the throne of power as a symptom of preceding instability. This argument is more difficult to make than might appear, not because of any dearth of evidence that might be adduced to support it, but because his supporters and opponents alike are true believers in the agency of Trump in the unfolding events; not to mention the view of the man himself.

But if we step back for a moment, we see that for at least a decade now populist movements across the European and American continents have been expanding fast on the back of a growing sense that not only are the voices of ordinary people being ignored but, increasingly, people are being vilified for holding and expressing what they see as common-sense views and self-evident truths. Why is this? The reason, I would argue is that there has arisen a cultural hegemony of the progressive left over societies in the West, in particular but not exclusively Anglophone. This has grown out of the insight provided by postmodernists that people’s worldview and consequently their morality is born out of the narrative they adopt and that societal narratives have historically been controlled by the most powerful in society. So explicit efforts have been made to harness the power of the institutions which serve to shape the narratives people imbibe (most especially in the educational sphere) to propagate progressive leftist and globalist agendas, at the expense of legacy, more conservative agendas which previously enjoyed cultural hegemony. This has reached a point where being “on the right”, i.e. not being explicitly on the left, is routinely portrayed as a moral failing.

This leftist takeover of the narrative and the institutions through which it is propagated appears to have been a huge success story for its proponents. But there remains a fatal flaw. This is that, just as they achieved hegemony by deconstructing the self-serving narratives of the leaders of the old order they have displaced, and exposing, like with the Wizard of Oz, the exercise of power on which it was based, so those who have inherited the mantle of power in the new order must inevitably be vulnerable to the same critique of their narrative by those at whose expense they exercise their hegemony. This is what we have been seeing in the UK from Brexit to the rise of the Reform UK party, but most especially in the 2nd presidency of Donald Trump.

The insight which I believe is driving Trump and his team is that the global world order and the consensus prevailing among the United States’ progressive élites is essentially self-fulfilling: the world in which they operate behaves in accord with their beliefs because those beliefs are shared by the great majority of those who exercise power and influence and they all have a vested interest in seeing those beliefs validated. Remove, defund or marginalise the institutions through which the hegemony is exercised and use the power so liberated to push an agenda more aligned with what voters want, and the illusion that the narrative peddled by the élites explains the world and the rules which govern it, rather than giving rise to that order in the first place, and the Wizard’s spell is broken.

This may at first blush sound an extreme and cynical perspective. But is it not the consensus view both of Trump’s supporters and of his opponents: that he is undermining the foundations of the world economic system, the commitments and alliances on which the current international order depends and the expectation that the United States will continue to act unconditionally as the world’s policeman, irrespective of the criticism and disdain it faces for the actions it takes? And if, with a few flourishes of his pen, he is really able to destroy irreparably the foundations of the existing world order, was that order ever really as stable and well-founded as we were led to believe?

Numerous examples can be adduced from the few short months that Trump has been back in the White House: disparaging the much-feted Volodymir Zelensky and appearing to blame him for the war with Russia; the ending of all US foreign aid; the imposition of mouth-wateringly large tariffs on imports from (supposed) allies as well as hostile states like China; the suggestion to turn Gaza into a US-controlled holiday resort and to annex Canada and Greenland; and an ultimatum that European states, not NATO, needed henceforth to guarantee (and pay for) military security on the European continent and in its environs.

Both Trump’s denigrators and his supporters have struggled to respond coherently to these deliberately outrageous gambits. The former have fallen into the trap of expressing the outrage which was being elicited. Then, when these initiatives are seen not to be workable long-term policies and Trump reverses course (as they have been proposing), they accuse him of inconsistency and incoherence. In this way they continue the failed strategy they have been pursuing for a decade now to defeat Trump by denigrating him (and his supporters). What they seem unable to grasp is that the main result (probably intended) of these gambits is to expose the weak foundations of the globalist narrative and demonstrate where the real levers of power are located, i.e. with the great powers; and in the world today, that means USA, China and Russia. This he has done most effectively in relation to the EU’s delusion that they, rather than NATO and the US, have kept the “peace” in Europe for the last 75 years, conveniently forgetting that, in the only significant conflict on mainland Europe in that period, peace in Bosnia was only secured when the US agreed to intervene after four years of European failure. What his detractors also fail to realise is the degree to which, by their unwillingness to see anything favourable in the Trump agenda, they solidify the conviction of his supporters that the only way forward is to sweep them away and ensure they never get their hands on the levers of power again.

Trump’s supporters on the other hand tend to fare only slightly less badly in terms of retaining their credibility. There is a tendency for them to rush to Trump’s defence and to justify and praise each new initiative as being just what was needed to bring about the stated goal. His spokespersons are then left looking foolish when he changes tack and dissociates himself from his own policy initiative and even the narrative which was used to back it up. What they probably do understand is that they are the necessary fall guys needed for his strategy to work; and they will be praised for taking on this unenviable role. The important point is that Trump himself is not ultimately wedded to any particular policy strategy; nor are his colours nailed to any particular mast. So he is free to try things to achieve a certain effect then to pivot when problems start to arise. Only his opponents whose loyalty tends to be to the narrative which sustains them, rather than to the results flowing from the policy mandated by that narrative, tend to see the flexible policy approach he adopts as fundamentally problematic.

So, just as with Brexit when remainers spread abroad a narrative that the sky would fall in and the economy collapse if we voted for Brexit (and still persist in a narrative that huge harm has been done to the UK economy by Brexit, despite UK GDP growth since Brexit being at least comparable to that of the Eurozone), Trump dispels the myths peddled by the globalists about the fundamental importance of international and intranational bodies by challenging them one by one, taking advantage of the ensuing chaos, then pivoting to a compromise approach where he typically gets a lot, albeit not all of what he wanted and/or promised. Like it or not, his strategy appears to be working for him thus far in terms of securing the interests of his core supporters. But even more, he is making inroads in his adopted role as High Prophet of Neoiconoclasm with his mission to shred the credibility of the progressive globalist agenda and of its advocates worldwide.

1. This is to be distinguished from the other recently coined term Neo-iconoclasm, sometimes used to refer to modern instances of iconoclasm. ↩︎