THE NEED FOR A COLONOSCOPY OF DONALD TRUMP
NOW FREE: Analyzing assholes is not my favored occupation, especially not Trump’s asshole
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If there is a political leader who again and again demonstrates that he is full of shit, it is Donald Trump. The fact that such a leader can hold in thrall the entire world tells a lot about the moment in which we live. Since his last big piece of shit we are all compelled to smell is usually characterized as a brutal exercise of recolonization of sovereign countries, it seems natural that the analysis of Trump’s colonial politics should be designated as colonoscopy. The time to do it is now, on the anniversary of Trump’s second term. Colonoscopy is a procedure in which a doctor uses a flexible tube with a camera on one end to look inside your rectum and colon, showing irritated and swollen tissue, ulcers, polyps, and cancer links. To understand why Trump is doing (and not doing) what he is doing, we have to take a closer look at all the irritated tissue and polyps that flourish there. Let me emphasize the disgust I feel in doing this: analyzing assholes is not my favored occupation, especially not Trump’s asshole.
The most concise characterization of Trump is that he is an authoritarian without authority. He has a lot of power and he knows how to use it, brutally violating numerous unwritten (and now more and more even written) rules of social and political life, but he lacks authority, the silent confidence which certain individuals emanate and which confers a special non-violent power on their acts. The fact that Trump has no authority is rendered palpable by his obsession with his self-image: he is not just a spontaneous bully, he closely follows how his words and acts are perceived by the public, and reacts brutally, taking revenge on his enemies. Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out that sincerity and authenticity cannot be named, they can only be shown or displayed by way of practicing them – and a similar logic holds also for worshipping a god: “To paraphrase Stanislav Lem’s personoid Adan 900: Any god that demands our worship doesn’t deserve it.”1 Of course we can talk about what a speech shows or displays, but not in the first person: I cannot designate myself as authentic, as having dignity, etc. If I do this, I undermine my authenticity or dignity, which can only show itself in how I act – and this is what Trump is doing all the time. Recall his outrage at the fact that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize:
“Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace,” Trump said in a message to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre. He stated that although peace would still be “predominant,” he could “now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”2
So he will change US politics because he didn’t get the Nobel Prize – as if him getting the Peace Prize matters more than world peace itself. Macron has labeled Trump’s tariff threat over Greenland “unacceptable” and rebuffed Trump’s invitation to join the “Board of Peace” to oversee the rebuilding of Gaza. When asked about Macron rejecting the invite, Trump said: “Nobody wants him,” and raised the prospect of 200% tariffs on French wine and champagne. Playing with tariffs in such a capricious way, which violates all free market rules, is clearly opposed to what Mamdani is doing now in New York: he proceeds very carefully, taking care not to disturb the markets. The lesson to be learned from Trump is that markets are much more flexible than we think: they survive “crazy” interventions and quickly recuperate.
Furthermore, although Trump likes to present himself as almost all-powerful, capriciously blackmailing and attacking countries all around the world, his strength is very precisely limited, and he is well aware of these limitations. Let’s take the case of Ukraine. In an exclusive interview in the Oval Office, Trump said Putin is ready to wrap up his nearly four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. Zelenskiy, the US president said, was more reticent. “I think he’s ready to make a deal,” Trump said of the Russian president. “I think Ukraine is less ready to make a deal.”3 Furthermore, Trump has advised Europe to focus on the Russo-Ukrainian war instead of Greenland. Criticizing European leaders who are resisting his efforts to gain control over Greenland, he said: “Europe ought to focus on the war with Russia and Ukraine because, frankly, you see what that’s gotten them. That’s what Europe should focus on – not Greenland.”4 As usual, Trump expects Europe to fund not only Ukraine’s war effort but also the vast majority of Ukraine’s recovery after the war. His basic stratagem is clear: he knows he cannot bring peace, so he wants to occupy a comfortable neutral position from which he will be able to blame Europe for the failure of negotiations. Some commentators argue that even a “bad peace” for Ukraine (i.e., a peace which will meet all Russian demands) is better for Europe than continuing to support Ukraine in its hopeless war – here is what Zachary Paikin claims:
“Having already shredded its normative credibility, there’s little reason for Europe to pursue a policy course that risks consolidating its status as a strategic sideshow. At the mercy of an increasingly predatory US, we are fast approaching the moment where the risks of a ‘bad peace’ in Ukraine are outweighed by the risks of failing to seize the opportunity that such a peace offers Europe to emerge as a more strategically agile hard-power actor.”5
I find this stance problematic. First, it is all too simple to say that Europe has “already shredded its normative credibility”: it is still haunted by its normative background (the emancipatory legacy of the Enlightenment), which is why anti-Eurocentrism, the hatred of united Europe, is shared by all new right-wingers (and even by many leftists) around the world. Second, it seems obvious that, in the case of a “bad peace,” Europe would be perceived as the big loser, no longer a “strategically agile hard-power actor” but an object of bargaining between the US and Russia. As for borders, yes, they are as a rule meaningless – there are no just borders. This is why one cannot but admire the wisdom of the newly decolonized African countries in the late 1950s and early 1960s which collectively decided not to question the colonial borders, although they were mostly imposed by the colonizers.
And things are not so different with Iran: Trump warned that if Iran kept killing protesters, the US would intervene, and when the killing started, he even said help was on its way, but then nothing happened – one can only guess what went on behind the curtains. In general, Trump is most brutal towards his allies and weak states, but he tends to withdraw the moment his opponents fully resist. Apropos Greenland: Trump threatened to use force there, but the moment Europe united in defending Denmark, he made concessions. The trap to be avoided in such cases is to engage in the search for an easy compromise in the style of Mark Rutte (who is hailed by some as enabling Trump to step down) – beyond all possible compromises and oscillations, Trump’s stance towards united Europe is that of hatred. He repeatedly designated the EU as the main enemy of the US, more than Russia and China. This is why Europe will have to enact a much more radical split and proclaim its full independence – there is no diplomatic middle way here.
And Russia? While Trump justifies the US annexation of Greenland as an act that would protect Greenland from the Russian threat, one cannot but note how Russia is benevolently neutral with regard to Trump’s Greenland policy, but effectively supports the US. One should listen to Aleksandr Dugin here not because he is a state philosopher with a great influence on Putin (he is not that) but because he openly says what the Kremlin officials prefer to leave unsaid although it effectively guides their politics. In a recent interview, Dugin
“sharply approached the issue of sovereignty of states in the post-Soviet space, stating that independent national states cannot exist in the ‘new model of the world.’ This statement once again raised the question ‘who claims what?’ on the agenda in the information space. Dugin’s main thesis is this: he believes that a ‘tripolar world’ is forming, and in this system, Russia should become a ‘center of power’ and strengthen control over the surrounding territories. He emphasized that areas not under Russian control will not remain a ‘neutral zone’ – on the contrary, they can become a ‘support point’ for the US and the European Union or China.”6
Dugin also spells out the real implications of his stance: “We have nothing against the annexation of Greenland and the war between US and EU. But Eurasia (Ukraine included) belongs to us. We have our own Russian version of Monroe doctrine. Eurasia for Eurasianists.”7
This stance is now part of the accepted story: we are entering a new multipolar order with three superpowers (the US, Russia, China), each controlling its own sphere of influence, with Europe losing its place, and all we can hope for is that the big three will as soon as possible establish some new rules guaranteeing peace. However, before engaging in such speculations, we should focus on the inner political implications of this new situation. Within the US itself, Trump is enacting a kind of inner colonization: ICE (and no longer the National Guard) functions in big cities dominated by Democrats as a kind of externally imposed force of colonization depriving local inhabitants of their basic rights. It is composed mostly of young thugs and delinquents, quickly trained and given weapons, almost like Trump’s West Bank settlers. Under new guidance, ICE is now allowing its officers to forcibly enter people’s homes during immigration raids without judicial warrants – no wonder a Mexican priest who works in Minneapolis described ICE as worse than Mexican drug cartels.8 Why does Trump need ICE? The answer is simple: because he has fears about the US midterm elections in the fall of 2026:
“Worried about losing unified Republican power in Washington and mystified at his lack of support among the public, President Donald Trump keeps talking about not holding the November midterm elections, when Republicans could lose control of the House, Senate or both. ‘I wish you could explain to me what the hell’s going on with the mind of the public,’ he told House Republicans in a speech earlier this month. Later, he added: ‘Now, I won’t say, “Cancel the election. They should cancel the election,” because the fake news will say, “He wants the elections canceled. He’s a dictator.”’ But Trump did talk about canceling the election: in an interview he said Republicans have been so successful that ‘when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said the president was ‘joking’ and ‘being facetious’ about canceling the election. If it’s a joke, it’s material he’s been working on for months. Trump routinely says things that seem like trolls until they don’t. Owning Greenland? Not a joke.”9
As it has often been noted, Trump turns around the old Hegelo-Marxian formula “first as tragedy, then as comedy”: he begins with an idea that sounds like a (bad) joke, and then (sometimes) moves to realize it – so it is first comedy, then tragedy. So one has to take Trump’s threat that he will postpone or cancel the next midterm elections seriously: we cannot be sure he will do it, but there is a possibility he will do it if he thinks he can manipulate his way through it. The obscenity resides already in the fact that he publicly talks about it. Plus it is important to bear in mind that Trump can only play this role of an obscene clown if he is alone in this: for him to function as he does, other big powers have to maintain the form of dignity of their leaders (only Netanyahu sometimes comes close to Trump).
Some confused European leftists perceive the pressure of the US and Russia on Europe as a deserved punishment for European powers’ colonization all around the world: Europe is now experiencing a little bit of how it treated others in past centuries. However, one should not confuse the way big powers want to assert their spheres of influence with colonization. The supreme irony is that Greenland wanted by the US was a Danish colony, and what the US wants to do with it is worse than the old colonization. As in the case of Venezuela, the US doesn’t even pretend to impose a higher civilization on Greenland – it just wants to use it as a military base to control the Arctic and to exploit its natural resources, so they are quite satisfied if Greenland remains formally part of Denmark.
The fact that the liberal world order is falling apart is now globally recognized, shared by the new Right, old conservatives, whatever remains of the old liberals and dispersed leftist groups – there is nothing radical in claiming this. Many commentators hailed Mark Carney’s speech in Davos where he referred to Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, in which “he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this ‘living within a lie’. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source.”
But at this point Carney makes a weird comparison: in the same way as, in Havel’s story, the greengrocer decides to take the sign down, we should decide to take our sign down, i.e., to openly renounce the old world order. There is nonetheless a big difference between Havel’s story and today’s situation: our grocery sign was not taken down by some dissidents who opposed the system but by the big powers themselves, especially the US, which no longer finds useful the system they imposed on the world decades ago. Free market competition and other international rules were OK for them as long as they guaranteed their privilege; now they are renouncing them because they became aware that in a new situation these rules can undermine their hegemony:
“Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false – that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.”10
This is a speech with many salient points, but a couple of remarks are needed. Carney idealizes way too much the old system: yes, it worked well for the developed West and selected Asian countries. Open sea lanes were controlled by the West, a stable financial system (with the US dollar as the global currency) clearly privileged big Western powers, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes mostly worked to neutralize threats from underdeveloped states. Second, did Merz not say the same thing in Davos: “A world where only power counts is a dangerous place. First for small states, then for the middle powers, and ultimately for the great ones. Our greatest strength remains the ability to build partnerships and alliances amongst equals based on mutual trust and respect.”11 Carney and Merz were joined by Viktor Orbán, who wrote in a Facebook post that the action ordered by Trump to kidnap Nicolas Maduro is a “further proof” of the collapse of a geopolitical model: “The first days of this year reminded us that the liberal world order is disintegrating. The new world is only just beginning to take shape, and the years to come will be even more unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous,” warned Orbán, while reaffirming his government’s commitment to “the path of peace and security.”12 The first thing to note in this quote is the passive form of the verb: “is disappearing” – no, this disappearance has an agent, and this agent is clearly the new populist Right. “This bargain no longer works” for the new superpowers, and Europe finds itself in a very difficult situation.
Europe lies in the great pincers between America on the one side and Russia on the other, who both want to dismember it: both Trump and Putin support Brexit; they support rightist Eurosceptics in every corner. What is bothering them about Europe when we all know the misery of the EU, which fails again and again at every test, from its inability to enact a consistent politics about immigrants to its miserable reaction to Trump’s tariff war? It is obviously not this actually existing Europe but the idea of Europe as a civilization. In the 33-page document “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” quietly released by the White House in late November 2025, it is written that Europe has economic problems, but it insists that they are “eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure” within the next 20 years. For us Europeans, it is Trump’s US which is caught in a process of civilizational erasure. There is no third way here, no higher synthesis.
That’s why, although the old world order is dead, there is something deeply emancipatory in persisting in some of its rules. The worst mistake is to share the cynical satisfaction that the old order is dead: what we are getting with its demise is the raw brutal reality which was the dark underside of this same order. Supporting the struggle of Ukraine against Russian aggression is part of this fidelity to the old order. With all the mistakes – corruption, misjudgments, nationalist excesses – that Ukraine made, and whatever the outcome of the war will be, one should unambiguously assert that its resistance to the Russian aggression is the act of an unheard-of popular heroism. If Ukraine miraculously survives as a state, it will be because of this heroic resistance – without this resistance, it would already be a part of Russia.
Trump is in some sense right: the European notion of “objective social democracy” (Peter Sloterdijk) effectively reached its limit, there is no way to directly return to it. We are thus confronting a brutal choice: either we simply abandon this dream, leave behind our civilization and enter the Trumpian new barbarism, or we approach the difficult task of sublating the European civilization – sublating in the precise sense of the Hegelian Aufhebung: we leave it behind (“negate” it) and at the same time maintain it by way of elevating it to a different, higher level.
David Chalmers, Reality+, London: Penguin Books 2023, p. 144.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/01/19/trump-tells-norway-he-has-no-obligation-to-think-purely-of-peace-after-nobel-snub_6749567_4.html.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/trump-says-zelenskiy-not-putin-is-holding-up-ukraine-peace-deal-2026-01-15/
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/01/19/8016910/.
https://www.politico.eu/article/us-president-donald-trump-compromise-peace-ukraine-strategic-opportunity-europe/.
https://zamin.uz/en/world/182588-dugins-statement-the-debate-over-sovereignty-has-heated-up-again-in-central-asia.html.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/17/politics/midterm-elections-trump-2026-analysis.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/.
https://www.dw.com/en/davos-world-economic-forum-2026-live-updates/live-75560683.
https://www.plenglish.com/news/2026/01/05/hungary-aggression-to-venezuela-confirms-collapse-of-liberal-order/.
Write about how Epstein is the superego obscene underside of your Baby Boomer pact of silence.
I can’t believe I ever took Slavoj Zizek seriously.