What Hegel Knew About Trump
He stands in the eye of history’s storm—and may not even realize it.
This article was originally published in Notus Perspectives.
It’s tough to pinpoint when exactly it happened, but gradually, as President Donald Trump has entered the second year of his second term, a sense of optimism has returned to the Democratic side. Maybe it was the big gubernatorial wins in New Jersey and Virginia last November. (“Democrats came out in record numbers,” gloated one strategist who worked in Virginia, “and this is a foreshadow of what we’re going to see next year.”) Or perhaps it was the numerous recent elections where Democrats have proven competitive in conservative areas. (“There’s something happening,” one Democrat said after the party had a surprisingly strong showing in a deep-red Tennessee district in December. “And I think that next November is going to be a big year for us.”) Or maybe it’s simply Trump’s dismal poll numbers. Whatever the cause, Democrats are increasingly looking to the future not with fear but with hope.
“House Democrats are on the verge of a takeover,” Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries predicted last month. And while he is obligated to sound optimistic, he is not wrong. The war in Iran is highly unpopular. Gas prices are about to go through the roof. Democrats might well take back the House in November. They might even be in a strong position to take back the White House in 2028. On our current trajectory, it seems quite possible, even likely, that Trump will end his second presidency unpopular, ineffective, and roundly repudiated by voters.
But too many Democrats are missing the forest for the trees. Yes, Trump himself may soon be disgraced, but he and his administration have set in motion long-term changes that are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Trump, it is increasingly clear, is a figure of enormous historical significance who is reshaping America and the globe in ways that will not easily be undone by Democratic wins in future elections.
Liberals, naturally, would like to believe the opposite: that once they triumph at the ballot box, all can go back to normal. “Time will show the Trump era to be less turning point, more freakish aberration,” Simon Tisdall, a foreign affairs columnist for The Guardian, wrote in December. “In history’s bigger picture, Trump is a blotch, an unsightly smear on the canvas.”
This could not be more wrong. And the ill-conceived but also era-defining war in Iran—the seventh country that Trump has attacked in his second term—is just the latest manifestation of how Trump is irrevocably changing our world.
My confidence in this prediction derives from an unlikely source. To try to make sense of Trump’s presidency, I recently returned to G.W.F. Hegel’s “Lectures on the Philosophy of History,” which I had read many years ago when I was trying to understand his influence on Marxism. This may seem to be an unnecessary diversion—like studying quantum mechanics in order to repair a car—but Hegel’s theory of history maps remarkably well onto our current situation.
Hegel viewed history as consisting of stages punctuated by times of upheaval. He assigned to what he called “world-historical individuals” a special role in spurring the transition from one era to another. These individuals didn’t necessarily grasp the full import of what they were doing, and their actions, while transformative, didn’t necessarily result in the outcomes they intended. Trump, I have come to believe, is exactly such an individual: He is speeding the transition from one historical era to another. The ultimate results are very unlikely to line up with his exact ideological aims, but they will be profound. And the world is never going back to what it was.
Hegel, writing in the early 1800s, divided history into three major stages. The first was the Asiatic-Oriental (ancient) stage, in which only the ruler possessed freedom; next was a Greek and Roman stage, in which some people were free but slaves were not; and finally, there was a Germanic-Christian stage, in which all citizens of a nation achieved freedom. Hegel further divided the Germanic-Christian stage into the barbarian centuries, the Catholic years of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Protestant years—his era—of sovereign states.
The world, Hegel believed, goes from one stage to another because of continuing conflicts. During these clashes, individuals, peoples, and nations are motivated by different passions and interests, but the outcomes, driven by what Hegel called “the cunning of reason”—that is, the sum of historical forces beyond the control of any individual—almost invariably defy their expectations. To cite a contemporary example: A decision to invade a country may not result in the promised liberation of its people, but in decades of strife and hardship. These clashes eventually reach a point where they can only be transcended through a major change that results in a new stage of history. That’s when the world, in Hegel’s phrase, is “ripe for development.”
At these moments, Hegel believed, a “world-historical individual” could play a decisive role. Alexander the Great spread Greek culture throughout Asia and North Africa. Julius Caesar transformed Rome from a republic to an empire. Napoleon Bonaparte—Hegel’s contemporary and the model for his theory—ended feudalism, instituted civil law (the Napoleonic Code), and put an end to the Holy Roman Empire, creating a continent of rival states.
These world-historical individuals were “practical, political men” of action, not philosophers. Caesar, Hegel writes, was driven by “an unconscious impulse that occasioned the accomplishment of that for which the time was ripe.” Their ability to enact change depended on their willingness to defy current custom and mores. “It is even possible,” Hegel writes, “that such men may treat other great, even sacred interests, inconsiderately; conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension.”
These leaders often leave death and destruction in their wake. To achieve their results, Hegel writes, “They must trample down many an innocent flower, crush to pieces many an object in its path.” To many of their contemporaries, they may seem to be monsters. They “appear to have done everything under the impulse of some passion, more grand—some morbid craving—and on account of these passions and cravings to have not been moral men.”
Hegel saw the stages of history as naturally progressing in a positive direction. But shorn of that Enlightenment optimism, the parallels to today are considerable. When Trump burst onto the political scene in 2015, he entered a world where a consensus that had prevailed for decades was rapidly breaking down. The consensus had several names and overlapping premises. The economic component went by “neoliberalism” or “market liberalism” and consisted of a belief that the United States and the rest of the world could achieve peace and prosperity through the free flow of goods, capital, currency, and labor. Its crowning achievement was the World Trade Organization, which began in 1995.
The geopolitical component was liberal internationalism, a concept that dated from Woodrow Wilson but that the United States began to put into effect after World War II. Its premise was that the United States could keep the peace by aggressively encouraging capitalism and democracy—through the spread of neoliberal institutions but, if necessary, through military intervention—and that it could prevent or resolve conflict through agreements like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and international organizations such as the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union. After the Berlin Wall fell, liberal internationalists assumed that both Russia and China could be brought into the American-led order of peaceful, free-market, free-trading nations.
In the early 2000s, this consensus fell victim to a series of historical fiascoes. American invasions failed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Great Recession cast doubt on the reliability of free markets. Porous borders led to soaring illegal immigration in the United States and Europe. The fear of migrants became fused with the fear of Islamist terrorist attacks. NATO expansion plans provoked Russia into war in Georgia and Ukraine. China’s entrance into the WTO caused a massive loss of factory jobs in the United States and Western Europe. And far from becoming a liberal democracy, Beijing remained a dictatorship, one that threatened its neighbors.
When established political leaders failed to recognize that the old order was disintegrating, politicians and populist movements sprung up on the left and right that did. And the most important of these was Trump and his MAGA movement.
In a 2018 interview with the Financial Times, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who certainly knew his Hegel, said, “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”
Trump may or may not have fully understood what he was doing, but he did, clearly and correctly, sense that the world was at a turning point, which he encapsulated in his promise to “make America great again.” In his first term, he took direct aim at the pretenses of neoliberalism and liberal internationalism. He rejected the ideal of free trade and boycotted the WTO. He instituted tariffs and negotiated bilateral and trilateral agreements. Defying his own party’s free-market precepts, he subsidized and protected industries that he thought were vital. He began building a border wall. He gave short shrift to the post-World War II system of alliances and institutions, including the UN and NATO. He denounced the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan that were intended to spread democracy. He negotiated an end to the war in Afghanistan.
In his second term, he has gone much farther. He imposed global tariffs and slapped additional punitive tariffs on countries that were running large trade deficits with the United States or had simply incurred his displeasure. He empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport illegal immigrants through paramilitary incursions into Democratic cities. He cut funding to the UN and its agencies and sought to replace the Security Council with his Board of Peace. He backed away from Ukraine and courted Russia. He declared a new “Donroe Doctrine” that justified kidnapping Venezuela’s head of state. In Venezuela and Iran, he initiated military action not to spread democracy but to exercise power over two oil-rich nations by replacing their unfriendly leaders with those who would do his bidding.
Trump’s break with neoliberalism and liberal internationalism perfectly fits Hegel’s profile of the world-historical individual standing at the center of a transition from one era to another. So do his character and leadership. He didn’t merely appear to act out of a “morbid craving” for power and glory; that is at the center of his being. When Napoleon became first consul of the French Republic in 1799, he had one of his successful battles turned into a national commemoration. Trump has put his name on buildings and institutions and lusted after the Nobel Peace Prize. When Napoleon became emperor in 1804, he bestowed titles and riches on his family and supporters. Trump has enriched himself and his family.
Trump, like Hegel’s world-historical individuals, has ignored or repudiated “sacred interests” including the Constitution and its checks and balances. He tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shut down or fired leaders of independent agencies that Congress created. He fabricated pretexts for patently illegal actions by invoking laws that were intended for entirely different purposes—for instance, citing the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, intended to root out French insurrectionists, to justify deporting Venezuelans to a foreign prison without a hearing. His actions—which have included calling Somali immigrants “garbage” and belittling a female reporter as “piggy”—have been, in Hegel’s parlance, “obnoxious” and deserving of “moral reprehension.”
When Caesar vanquished his enemies, Hegel wrote, they “had the form of the constitution, and the power conferred by an appearance of justice, on their side.” Like Caesar, Trump sees himself as above ordinary morality or law. In the wake of his invasion of Venezuela, The New York Times asked Trump if he saw any limits on his global use of power. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me,” he responded. “I don’t need international law.” This willingness to defy law and morality, and to pursue power and glory relentlessly, has been integral to world-historical individuals—and to their ability to detonate outworn ideas and institutions.
Even if Democrats win in 2026 or 2028, it is increasingly difficult to imagine important parts of Trump’s legacy being reversed. Given recurring imbalances in the international economy, could any future president really resurrect the old dream of free trade? Remember that Joe Biden retained Trump’s tariffs from his first term. Going forward, countries are likely to emphasize bilateral and regional trade agreements, as well as government policy aimed at protecting key industries. Trade may begin to look more like it did 100 years ago, between the world wars.
Trump has also likely dealt a death blow to numerous international institutions. His Board of Peace, dominated by illiberal democracies and autocracies, is unlikely to last, but it has still exposed the impotency of the UN and its Security Council. He has undermined, perhaps fatally, the trust that held together America’s post-World War II alliances. NATO temporarily lost its rationale after the Cold War ended, but it appeared to revive in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. After a lame attempt to reach an agreement between the warring parties, Trump has largely withdrawn from the conflict. By the time Trump leaves office, the defense of Ukraine may have become a lost cause—and with it, the bond between the United States and its erstwhile NATO allies. To make matters worse, Trump has sent mixed signals about his commitment to Article 5, which requires NATO countries to come to the aid of any members who are attacked. America’s Asian allies, which depend on our nuclear umbrella, have taken note.
Trump may have also, without specifically intending to do so, prompted a struggle to divide up the world among the great powers that recalls pre-World War I imperial rivalries. In Latin America, he has attempted to coerce countries into accepting American leadership and business investment. He has softened his objection to Chinese economic and foreign policy, and, by undercutting international law, he may have helped lay the groundwork for Beijing to take Taiwan.
What Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has called the “middle powers” have already begun to fend for themselves. Japan’s new prime minister has pledged to rewrite its country’s post-World War II constitution, which committed Japan to pacifism. France, Germany, and Canada have attempted to improve relations with China. International diplomacy and military rivalry, like international trade, are becoming more anarchic and less predictable. It is difficult to see how these changes, once underway, could be reversed by Trump’s successors.
Outcomes that would have been unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago are now conceivable. Here at home, the foundations of our democracy—the rule of law, respect for election results, a free press—now appear shaky. On the economic front, we could experience another Great Recession because of constricted trade, the removal of regulations on banking and cryptocurrencies, and artificial intelligence’s reduction of job opportunities. We could even see the dollar lose its status as the main global reserve currency. Trump’s use of punitive tariffs and sanctions has already inspired key nations to discuss an alternative. If this were to happen, the United States could no longer run large budget deficits with impunity.
In response to Trump’s weakening of the ties between the United States and its principal allies in Europe and Asia, we could see countries withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty to build their own nuclear weapons. The spread of nuclear weapons might reduce the chances of regional wars breaking out, but it would also increase the possibility of a global catastrophe. Here again, there is probably no going back from the changes that Trump has set in motion.
Trump won in 2016 and 2024 for many reasons, but one factor was that voters understood, as Kissinger had argued, that the old order was broken. Free trade was a chimera. The free movement of capital had contributed to the hollowing out of industry in the West. Illegal immigration had become unmanageable and a threat to public order. NATO had lost its rationale after the Cold War’s end. The UN had long ceased to play a constructive role in major conflicts. And American attempts to introduce democracy to rogue states had proven disastrous. It was no mean feat for Trump to have exposed these pretenses.
But Trump—driven by hubris, seething with a desire for vengeance against his political enemies, and buoyed by “New Right” intellectuals, conservative media and billionaires with their own agendas—has also overreached. And voters have noticed. The pledge to deport illegal immigrants who had committed crimes morphed into sweeps by ICE of random illegal (and sometimes legal) immigrants. His demand that other NATO countries pay for their own defense somehow morphed into an attempt to poach Greenland from Denmark, a fellow NATO country.
His promise to end “forever wars” and eschew “regime change” has yielded to a newfound enthusiasm for intervention aimed at securing power for the United States over oil-rich states. His tariffs aimed at protecting strategic industries became selectively punitive tariffs aimed at eliminating trade deficits entirely (which would also imperil the dollar as a reserve currency) and at providing revenue to make up for his huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. His first-term forays into industrial policy—culminating in the highly successful Operation Warp Speed, which allowed for the impressive development of COVID-19 vaccines—have devolved into a defunding of medical and scientific research and the abandonment of renewable energy, including vital battery technology. Trump may not merely fail to make America great again; instead, he may have assisted in making China the center of the world again.
Yet these failures do not disqualify him as one of Hegel’s world-historical individuals. On the contrary, those leaders—often propelled by megalomania—also overreached, then found themselves bedeviled by forces beyond their control. What Hegel described as “the cunning of reason” invariably caught up with them, making a mess of their ultimate ambitions. Alexander the Great swept through Egypt and the Middle East, but when he tried to conquer India, his troops revolted. Napoleon suffered a major defeat when he tried to expand his empire into Russia. He spent his final years in exile. And instead of solidifying the dominance of France, he bolstered Britain’s power and put Prussia on a path to becoming the continent’s preeminent military force.
Does the pattern sound familiar? Trump has pushed us into a new stage of history. But it is a stage in which, because of his overreach, America may find itself diminished and disempowered. Whoever wins the White House in 2028 will inherit a fragmented international economy, ruptured alliances, and emboldened adversaries, not to mention a divided and angry electorate. That president, and presidents for many years to come, will be operating in a difficult and perilous world—a world Trump remade.
John B. Judis is the author of The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism and, with Ruy Teixeira, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
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A beautifully argued piece. One objection though. By stating that NATO expansion provoked Russia into war in Georgia and Ukraine, you employ the Mearsheimer framing in what is otherwise a Hegelian argument. Hegel's states have agency, they make choices. Georgia and Ukraine also have agency, including the agency to not want to remain inside Russia's sphere of influence. And so does Russia - it could refrain from going to war to assert dominion over its neighbours.
The thing about Hegel is that you can apply his thought to just about anything. Thesis: Bread (soft, pale, inert); Antithesis: Heat (destructive, burning, transformative); Synthesis: Toast (a “higher” unity—crispy, browned)! But sure it's a fun device to make your point and there are deeper problems with your argument.
In particular, you make a lot of large claims, particularly with respect to economic policy, that are not substantiated by the evidence.
1. "China’s entrance into the WTO caused a massive loss of factory jobs in the United States and Western Europe." I'm guessing that you're referring to the Autor et al research, and that you haven't read the paper. The estimated effects was job loss that affected about 1.7% of the US workforce. Should the US have done a better job of managing those losses and helping out those affected? Absolutely. Does it make sense to protect strategic industries and friend-shore manufacturing. Yes again. But this is not a wholesale repudiation of all free trade. Nor are the policy remedies obvious. Need I remind you that a year after Trump imposed his tariffs, while the rest of the economy has continued to add jobs at a surprisingly high clip, manufacturing employment has declined.
2. "Free trade was a chimera. The free movement of capital had contributed to the hollowing out of industry in the West." Wrong again. Gains from free trade are sizable and real. If you want an easily digestible summary of the research, read Free Trade Under Fire by Douglass Irwin. For now, I'll just leave a few citations.
- https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24407/w24407.pdf
- https://www.ericksager.com/uploads/3/8/0/3/3803061/price_effects_trade_latest.pdf
- https://alevchenko.com/BLPT.pdf
I don't deny that a lot of people believe these statements and that it is driving policy, but it doesn't mean it's a good idea. Bad policy has serious long term effects. Look at Argentina. If you're going to make sweeping statements about the way the economy and the world order works, it seems like the least you can do is learn statistics and familiarize yourself with the actual statistics. But of course it's so much easier to fall back to a lazy appeal to authority and quote Hegel instead.