The Apocalypse of Don: Trump, Nietzsche, and Antichrist America

Why far-right Christians turned to the world’s most infamous atheist

This is the first of a two-part essay on how Friedrich Nietzsche became the lodestar of reactionary Christianity. Please subscribe to stay in touch! Check out more content in the How This Happened series.

The world is on fire. Inside the United States, chaos reigns and established institutions are proving utterly feckless in response. Despite running the most corrupt and incompetent administration in American history and despite instigating an armed mob invasion of the Capitol building, Donald Trump got re-elected and has once again become the president.

There are many different explanations for how this happened, but the most significant is that the United States, and humanity as a whole, is in an epistemic crisis which has sparked a political rebellion. Unlike military rebellions, the liberal order of the past 200 years has no idea how to respond. Political leaders, educators, and scientists have been unable to understand, much less ameliorate the situation.

While the global epistemic crisis began among religious fundamentalists, it has spread to societal institutions which have become so far removed from common experience that they cannot even grasp the nature of the problem.

It all comes down to this: Willful ignorance and skepticism are functionally the same thing. They differ only in purpose. Willful ignorance seeks to preserve existing knowledge and existing hierarchies. Skepticism, by contrast, seeks to reevaluate existing knowledge and discover new ways of thinking and being.

Not having the ultimate answers is not nihilism; it is an invitation to discover and create shared moral viewpoints that work for everyone—whether through democratic consensus, ethical philosophy, or cultural traditions that foster collective understanding and cooperation.

While some of us may not like it, we can know that there is no evidence that Noah’s flood happened, or that many early Christians did not view Jesus as divine, just as we can know that there are thousands of transitional fossils that have been discovered and that gravity behaves in ways that are predictable in our slice of reality.

While we can never definitively prove that gravitation will always and everywhere behave according to the equations of Isaac Newton, we can demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that gravity behaves the same way in the area of space-time we inhabit. Likewise within the realm of ethics, while there are no absolute principles on which to base moral beliefs, we can strive to make societal and individual choices which maximize collective and individual freedom. Uncertainty can thus be the basis for democracy, if properly understood and respected, as it allows for adaptability and the continuous reevaluation of policies and governance structures.

Historically, the democratic process has thrived on this principle of moral relativism, beginning with the deliberative assemblies of ancient Greece, where open debate was essential to governance. The Magna Carta of 1215 represented a crucial shift in the relationship between rulers and the ruled, establishing the foundation for legal constraints on monarchical power. The Swiss cantons, which began developing their system of self-governance in the 13th century, later reinforced these ideas through their decentralized and participatory political structures, demonstrating how local governance could function within a broader democratic framework.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 in what later became the United States further enshrined this principle. Finally, the black civil rights movement of the 1960s demonstrated the necessity of uncertainty and struggle in ensuring democratic rights, as activists challenged and reshaped the moral and legal landscape of American society through protest, legislation, and civic engagement.

Skepticism and moral relativism are powerful tools for freedom. But at the same time, the skeptical posture can very much be destructive or tyrannical. If facts and values cannot ever be true, couldn’t we treat ethics and science as matters of personal opinion? What if truth is more a question of power than of argumentation? Answering yes to these two questions was the central moral thesis of Friedrich Nietzsche, the first postmodern reactionary.

Nietzsche’s rebellion against democracy and facts

Living at the beginning of modernity in mid-19th century Germany, the flagrantly profane Nietzsche realized sooner than almost anyone that the West was facing a crisis of nihilism now that Christianity’s truth claims had been disproved through Biblical scholarship, the research of Charles Darwin, and the philosophizing of David Hume and Immanuel Kant.

“God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed, and now that Christianity had been factually and philosophically deconstructed, the ethical and scientific order it had been created would still remain, but in a permanently damaged state. He was correct.