The Wrath of Gods

BEING PROPHETS IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH in politics. Paraphrasing the future for an impatient people is not enough to qualify you as a politician of true change. A direct line with the divine is not all that matters. Being God is the thing now. Divinity in politics is a state of mind. In the beginning it was the god-deniers who played God, the looming Zeus in revolution’s day after. Communism, so to speak, was Christianity without the symbolism of the Cross. Wasn’t Heaven on Earth an ideological inversion of faith’s overreach? The nature of the heaven was a dreadful story, but humanity was never again given a bigger dream. And when ideology gave way to religion as the engine of revolution, there too hovered the god figure above the liberated. They all looked very Jehovah in different geographical settings, their commandments matching the image, whether it was Ayatollah Khomeini in Tehran, circa 1979, or Osama bin Laden from his Mount Jihad somewhere in Afghanistan, circa 2000.

That was then.

Democracy is not immune to deities. The elected tend to be reborn as the chosen. Donald Trump on the stump was a man possessed by his own sense of divinity, and there were any number of churchgoers who saw the halo of the chosen one around him. Deified Donald, in MAGA mythology, peaked with his ‘resurrection’ after an assassin’s bullet nearly killed him on the campaign trail. As president playing God, he is sending out commandments no nation can fully ignore. America, for too long, imagined itself as the only power with a celestial mandate to play out its selective morality. The leader of the free world was a role that required supranational powers. Maybe the normalisation of American power began with the Obama presidency, his right-wing critics even going to the extent of calling him an apologist for America Never First. They had a point. Trump changed all that with his messianism.

When he stormed in to disrupt the two-party idyll, Trump was not a candidate moulded by the rulebook of the Establishment. He contested on a Republican ticket as a post-Reagan insurgent who wanted to save the party from its own legacy—and he succeeded. Candidate Trump was an unlikely social revolutionary who did not come from below but descended from the Golden Tower. President Trump, in his first term, was less God and more a grievance-stricken head of state with deep character flaws. God was born in the second term, after a prologue in a campaign steeped in God metaphors. As the architect of a chaotic world order where the very concepts of allies and partners are rewritten by a believer in the absolutism of American power, Trump is at the height of God-play. Comply or be damned, so goes the diktat of the tariff god. He ignored the MAGA isolationists and, living up to the historical responsibility of being Israel’s spiritual ally, sent bunker busters to Iran and crippled the Islamic Revolution further; and ignoring the same lot again, he has stepped out of Putin’s shadow to send arms to a beleaguered Zelensky. The wrath of God is felt more in the war on trade in which almost every nation on earth is struggling to put up a defence. Welcome to the Trump version of an American Heaven on Earth.

IT’S HELL, CRIES OUT ELON MUSK. The richest man on the planet, after being ejected from Trump’s heaven and after rubbishing the president’s “big, beautiful bill”, has announced the formation of the America Party, promising an alternative to Trumpism. He is, in many ways, Trump with more money, better business sense, and a character unblemished by excessive vulgarity—and with the same, if not more, of the God complex. For a while, he was content with the assignment of chief enabler in the House of Zeus on the Potomac, and then went on to portray himself as an unelected equal to the One. Ejection hurt him badly, but it didn’t diminish his faith in himself as the first among the masters of the universe—and the power and possibilities that come with it. The great American alternative he promises is not born from a long-standing commitment to the politics of redemption. It is born in the combat between two gods with radioactive impulses. Still Musk is fighting against the tradition of billionaire gods falling by the wayside on the long road to power—remember Ross Perot? Trump chose a different path, not as an independent but as a man who bought Lincoln’s party, playing God of not creation but co-option.

In the new divine dramedy of American politics, is the fate of Musk’s messianism prewritten?

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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