The rise of authoritarian populism is not merely a constitutional emergency or a moral aberration: it is the empirical symptom of a metaphysical decay. When truth itself becomes partisan, when the good is reduced to preference, and when beauty is debased to spectacle, a civilization has already begun to lose the conditions of its intelligibility. The argument proceeds from a simple yet profound claim: that the human world derives meaning only through participation in universality—the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. When that participation collapses, so too does the moral and epistemic fabric of society.

Donald Trump serves here not as an isolated political figure but as a sign, almost an allegory, of this decline. His ascendancy reveals how far America has drifted from its founding premise, a kind of metaphysical wager: that every human being has inherent dignity, that each person possesses a worth beyond price, and that law can embody universality. To describe Trump as a threat to this idea is true but incomplete; he is also its mirror. He exposes how thoroughly the liberal project has hollowed itself out. It is no accident that so many millions support him, for they too have lost faith in the idea of America. The tragedy is not merely that he exists but that we have embraced the symbol of our disease as if it were the cure.

His movement’s essence is not ideological coherence but ressentiment—a revolt against the very concept of universality. The authoritarian personality, as Adorno observed, craves certainty and hierarchy precisely because it has lost the capacity for truth. When belief in the universal collapses, the will to power becomes the last remaining form of conviction. Trump thus functions as a symptom of a civilization in decay, no longer sustained by reason or moral law.

Epistemic collapse: The death of truth

To understand this decay, one must grasp what is meant by “epistemic collapse.” It is not merely the spread of misinformation but the abandonment of the concept of truth itself. In its place stands an impoverished relativism: the view that all utterances are merely perspectives determined by identity or interest. Once this stance becomes habitual, proof and argument lose meaning; persuasion becomes performance.

The ancient and modern philosophers alike—Plato, Spinoza, Kant—recognized that truth is universal: it transcends the speaker and the context of speech. This is why the so-called genetic fallacy, when applied to truth, is fatal. The origin of a statement, whether noble or ignoble, says nothing about its truth value. A proposition is true not because a priest, a king, or a president pronounces it, but because reason can demonstrate its validity.

Trumpism annihilates this distinction. For his followers, the utterance itself suffices as verification; the leader’s speech acts as revelation. The proof is the personality. By collapsing truth into origin, he revives the most primitive form of mythic authority—what the ancients would have called nomos unredeemed by logos. The crowd’s chant “Because he said so” replaces the rational criterion of evidence.

This inversion has consequences beyond politics. Once truth becomes proprietary, the very equality that sustains reason dissolves. We are equal before the truth precisely because it is indifferent to us. When truth becomes a function of identity, equality vanishes, and with it the public realm. The epistemic fall of America is thus not intellectual but moral: it is the loss of our shared participation in universality.

Moral collapse: The death of the good

What applies to truth applies equally to morality. The genetic fallacy reminds us that the rightness of an act cannot be deduced from the identity of its actor. Even the virtuous may err, and the corrupt may do good; the moral quality of an action lies not in who performs it but in whether it conforms to the universal law of reason.

Trump’s entire self-presentation repudiates this principle. He insists that his actions are just by virtue of his office—that power sanctifies itself. “If the president does it, it’s not illegal,” Nixon once said, and Trump’s theory of immunity extends that cynicism to infinity. Here, the moral and epistemic fallacies converge: authority becomes its own justification.

This corruption of the moral sense extends outward to the scapegoating of entire groups. Immigrants are declared criminals not by evidence but by essence; opponents are “vermin” by nature. Such rhetoric annihilates the moral equality upon which justice depends. The universal moral law is replaced by a myth of purity and contamination.

The deeper danger lies in habituation. When citizens accept that moral standing derives from status, they have already renounced republican liberty. For the very notion of law presupposes that no one—not even the sovereign—is above it. To grant immunity on the basis of office is to undo the moral architecture of democracy itself. Kant’s principle, that every rational being must be treated as an end, becomes incomprehensible in a culture where moral worth is indexed to power.

In this sense, Trump is less a tyrant in the classical mold than the personification of moral relativism—an absolutist of the self. The moral law becomes will, justice becomes vengeance, and right collapses into appetite.

Aesthetic collapse: The death of beauty

If truth concerns what is and goodness what ought to be, beauty concerns the shining‐forth of being itself—the radiance of form that reconciles necessity and freedom. Plato called beauty the “splendor of the True”; it is the sensuous manifestation of universality. When a civilization loses the sense of beauty, it loses faith in the possibility that the world can disclose order or meaning.

Trumpism’s vulgarity is therefore not accidental; it is metaphysical. The gaudy towers, the gilded interiors, the obsession with contests and surfaces, are the outward signs of an inward desolation. Where beauty once signified measure, proportion, and harmony, it now denotes spectacle, domination, and excess. The sensibility that delights in the humiliation of others cannot recognize beauty, for beauty presupposes reverence.

This aesthetic barbarism is inseparable from epistemic and moral collapse. The beautiful, the true, and the good stand or fall together. A society that mocks the grace of restraint will soon mock the discipline of thought and the dignity of law. Trump’s coarseness becomes contagious because it flatters resentment: it tells the humiliated that refinement is hypocrisy, that taste is tyranny. In this way the aesthetic becomes political—the disfiguring of the beautiful prepares the ground for the disfiguring of justice.

What replaces beauty is kitsch: the counterfeit of feeling without the discipline of form. Kitsch is sentimentality weaponized; it weeps cheaply, it rages theatrically. The rallies, the slogans, the endless superlatives—“the greatest,” “the most beautiful,” “the best ever”—are the language of kitsch in power. It is no longer the voice of a people aspiring to greatness but the echo chamber of narcissism itself.

To recover beauty is therefore not a matter of taste but of truth. The love of beauty is the love of order against chaos, of harmony against brute will. When a culture can once more feel the difference between the beautiful and the vulgar, it will have rediscovered the measure that grounds both knowledge and virtue.

The trinity of universals

From antiquity the philosophers have spoken of three irreducible realities—the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. They are not separate domains but different inflections of the same universality: the True as intellect’s participation in being, the Good as will’s participation in law, the Beautiful as sensibility’s participation in form. To deny one is ultimately to wound the others.

Our crisis is the simultaneous disintegration of all three. The lie triumphs because the good has become relative; the good becomes relative because beauty has ceased to reveal the world’s intelligible order. The result is nihilism wearing the mask of freedom.

Against this stands the tradition of universality. In Plato, truth is the ascent from opinion to the vision of the Good itself. In Kant, the good is the form of universality legislated by reason; in Schelling, beauty is the reconciliation of freedom and necessity within the absolute. For each, universality is not abstraction but participation—the recognition that reason is common, that moral law binds all, that beauty is the visible sign of an invisible order.

Trumpism represents the negation of this entire lineage: the enthronement of the particular as absolute, the deification of self-interest, the aestheticization of power. It is not merely anti-democratic; it is anti-metaphysical. It proclaims that there is no realm of universality to which words, deeds, or forms are answerable.

To oppose it therefore requires more than policy or protest. It demands a philosophical renewal—a return to universality as the ground of human dignity. Only by re-affirming that truth transcends opinion, that the good transcends advantage, and that beauty transcends possession, can we restore coherence to our moral and political life.

Restoring universality: The rebirth of the American idea

The idea of America, at its noblest, was never nationalist but universal: the conviction that human equality is not granted by government but presupposed by reason itself. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” wrote the founders—not because they are obvious but because they express the universality of the moral law. That idea has been betrayed whenever the nation has confused liberty with license, equality with sameness, universality with privilege.

Trumpism’s rise reveals how far that betrayal has gone. Yet it also clarifies the task. To defend democracy is to defend the conditions of universality: education that cultivates reason, justice that is blind to rank, institutions that protect truth from power. The struggle is metaphysical before it is political. If truth once again commands reverence, if the good is recognized as binding on all, if beauty can still move the heart toward harmony, then the republic may yet renew itself.

This renewal cannot be nostalgic. It will require a re-founding: a civic metaphysics grounded not in myth but in reason, not in blood but in the shared dignity of thought. The philosopher’s calling and the citizen’s duty converge here—to keep open the space of universality in which the human can appear.

Conclusion: Universality or nothing

We began with the claim that America’s crisis is moral and epistemic; we end with the recognition that it is ontological. A people that no longer believes in truth, goodness, or beauty has ceased to believe in the reality of the human. Trump’s ascendance is the symptom of this nihilism, not its cause; he thrives because he mirrors the void. To defeat him politically without overcoming the metaphysical disease would be to win the battle and lose the world.

What, then, must be done? We must restore faith in universality itself—the conviction that reason is real, that justice is not a fiction, that beauty discloses something eternal. This is not optimism but discipline; it requires the courage to think, to judge, to care. The alternative is not another ideology but barbarism: a civilization of spectacle without truth, power without law, desire without form.

To affirm universality is to affirm that human life has meaning—that amid the noise of lies and the glare of vulgarity, there remains the quiet radiance of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. Only within that radiance can the American idea, and the idea of humanity itself, survive.

 Please follow Blitz on Google News Channel