I want Donald Trump to be Caesar. I want him to be Napoleon. I would love to see the day when he, the descendant of King Christian I of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, is crowned as Emperor Donald I in a gold-bedecked ballroom in Washington, D.C. However, I’m not sure any of that will happen. Like Victor Davis Hanson in his book The Case for Trump, I see in Trump the figure of the tragic hero. He may have his de Gaulle moment where he tears down the cultural and Big Tech barricades and saves the Republic, but many signs point to a punished and martyred hero who will only be revered by all American citizens once the true horror of neoliberal totalitarianism is revealed.

This is no “blackpill,” friends. I think that Trump will never die in any real sense. He will be a wholesome Dr. Mabuse who plagues the minds of the left and will continue to serve as an inspiration to the real right throughout the West.

First penned by author Nobert Jacques in Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1921), Dr. Mabuse was, for a time, the German equivalent of France’s Fantomas and Britain’s Professor Moriarty. An arch-criminal with grand designs to be the ruler of a tropical kingdom, Dr. Mabuse, in Jacques’s novel, is a lustful and ambitious criminal who embodies the frenzied and feverish capitalism of the newly democratized German nation. This is not the Dr. Mabuse I have in mind. My Mabuse, and the Trumpian Mabuse, is the one that is found in Fritz Lang’s 1933 film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. An obvious excoriation of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Lang’s Dr. Mabuse is a criminal genius whose insane scribblings literally possess Dr. Kramm (played by Theodor Loos). Dr. Mabuse’s ideology of terrorism is called the “Empire of Crime.” Dr. Mabuse’s theory of horror includes frightening the general population with “unfathomable and seemingly senseless crimes” in order to shake all of us to our depths. This is the left’s conjuration of Donald Trump: the spirit of autocracy packed in a badly-tanned skinsuit. He’s “literally Hitler,” after all. And like Dr. Mabuse, his attacks on “our democracy” are so profoundly destabilizing that they require extreme measures in order to stop the crime from spreading. This means oppression across the board; online, at work, and in your own mind.

To those of us on the real right, Trump is still Dr. Mabuse, but we take different lessons. Dr. Mabuse’s criminal networks in Weimar Germany exposed the many vulnerabilities of that desiccated republic, and likewise, the MAGA movement has served to enlighten millions of normies about the prevalence of naked power. The elite rules because they exert the most power in multifaceted ways. Antifa and Black Lives Matter are the street thugs of the establishment, while the courts and bureaucracy serve neoliberal totalitarianism rather than the law. And, as Christopher Caldwell shows in The Age of Entitlement, the Constitution and anachronistic ideals of liberty are intentionally suppressed under the ever-expanding mandate of civil rights. Without Trump, most Americans would continue to believe the lies about fairness and the supremacy of law and blind justice.

President Trump, the great tribune of Foundational America, has been subverted at all turns by the D.C. Establishment, and he continues to be betrayed by the very institutions he sought to save, like the Supreme Court. This is definite “end of the republic” energy, and Trump should be celebrated for waking up millions to the illegitimacy of mass democracy and all its adherents. Trump, like Stilicho, sought to preserve a dying empire for a few more years. However, he has learned to embrace the anarchy of Dr. Mabuse and go fully into exposing the Empire of Crime. The only difference is that he is the victim of the criminal empire, while the “adults in the room” and those who blather about “decency” are the true and truly degenerate criminals. This is what makes him wholesome, as he exposes and suffers from criminal conspiracies rather than perpetuate them.

The final Mabuse-like element to Trump is that he, like Dr. Mabuse, will never truly die. To the left, Trump will continue to haunt their nightmares as the purveyor of incipient fascism, even if they make the tactical mistake of putting Trump on trial and/or executing him. Doing so would make Trump, who is already a martyr in so many ways, something worth killing and dying for. A Trump execution or imprisonment would certainly create a Bastille moment, except it would be the technocratic Jacobins suffering the consequences rather than the Royalists. For the real right, Trump will serve the same function as the faceless and formless Dr. Mabuse, who directs vast networks of criminal insurgents in Weimar Berlin. They do not know it, but the GOP is dead without Trump. Therefore, the American right will be Trumpist for the foreseeable future, and may split like Peronism in Argentina into left-wing and right-wing factions. Rather than take the same marching orders from the GOP, Americans on the right will look to Trump, whether living or dead, for direction. All future policies will be measured by how Trumpian or not they are. This cannot be stopped, thank God.

If for nothing else, Donald Trump has exposed how politics in the United States is mere venality wrapped in a façade of virtue. Democrats and Republicans uphold the Empire of Crime because it makes them and their diseased offspring rich. Trump has already paid many times over for exposing the decrepit inner workings of neoliberal totalitarianism and its multi-party consensus. It is highly likely that, like a hero in a Greek tragedy, he will endure horrific punishment for his selflessness.

So, what will happen to Trump? What happens to him physically is secondary. He may serve another term. He certainly earned it in the face of massive fraud and actual foreign interference. Or he will be thrown out by the Empire of Crime and forced into exile on some newfangled Saint Helena. This is not as important as the fact that Trump, like Dr. Mabuse, will exist as a miasma and figurehead of instability—instability that threatens the Empire of Crime and all its manifold tentacles, and instability that offers eventual salvation for those on the real right.

***

This is an excerpt from the new anthology Ending Bigly: The Many Fates of Donald Trump, edited by Bill Marchant. You can purchase the book from Terror House Press here.