I am blessed with more worldly and sophisticated friends than I deserve. And some (but by no means all) of my worldly and sophisticated friends are Germans.
Like all foreigners, my German friends live in an American world; and that is bound to have an effect. Over the decades, my German friends have often earnestly asked me: “What do your fellow Americans think of us?”
I’ve always answered the same way: “We don’t.”
Nevertheless, it is not without compassion that I note that Germans are currently experiencing a few problems of their own. First and foremost among these problems is the wholesale displacement by their own government of native Germans in favor of Middle Eastern and African fellows who can get a bit “rapey.”
But if you think “having a few problems of their own” would induce my German friends to set aside the German hobby of holding forth about the United States of America…well, apparently you’ve never had German friends.
The Germans I’ve known believe that a two-week trip in a rental RV along Route 66 provides a hyper-accurate sociological x-ray of “Americans”…and that our habitual openness, hospitality, and good cheer are actually an open invitation for endless lectures on “norms” and “customary international law.”
Lectures like that make me very nervous. You see, I am afraid that hanging out with people who are 100% convinced that they are right about everything¹ might be contagious. The only thing to be done is to “minimize my exposure,” which I also do with my Woke-Left and Woke-Right friends.
But please be gentle with my friends who find Mr. Trump’s, ahem, “diplomatic efforts” alarming, such as the President’s recent overture to Iran: “Open the F***in’² Strait, you crazy b****rds,² or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”³
I get why they are alarmed: Unlike us, the Germans don’t have two giant oceans on either side of them and two weak democratic neighbors to the North and South. We believe that diplomacy is something that happens “over there,” but “over there” to us is just “there” to them. So the risk seems different.
After Mr. Trump’s post, a friend in Germany offered me the following ultimatum: “People who can’t break with Trump after this sick tweet are beyond evil.”⁴
But I am not a member of the Church of the Anti-Trump, so don’t blame me for his elevation to the Presidency.
Adolescent emoting can be quite cathartic, but let’s look at the situation through the lens of something that is (on purpose) highly unemotional: Corporate governance.
If an “Uncredentialed Activist Shareholder” relentlessly attacks the “Board of Directors” for gross mismanagement and self-dealing, and the shareholders subsequently elevate that “Uncredentialed Activist Shareholder” to Chairman and CEO, should our very first reaction be to blame the “dumb owners of the corporation” for “being too ignorant” to know that “such things are not done?”
Or might we not ask: “Why have the actual owners of the company decided that the Board has mismanaged thing so spectacularly that an ‘Uncredentialed Activist Shareholder’ is a viable alternative?”
One of the great things about being a professional philosopher is that we have extensive training in a discipline called “logic.” So, rather than relying on emotional,
ad hominem theatrics, let’s address the (quite understandable) disquiet of my “Orange Man Bad” friends via a strict logical sequence:
- Premise 1: In a representative democracy, a successful political candidate is merely a market supplier responding to existing voter demand.
- Premise 2: The overwhelming voter demand today is the repudiation of the Elite Establishment for mismanaging government and selling out their constituents.
- Premise 3: Mr. Trump’s core political “brand” is as the primary supplier of that repudiation.
- Premise 4: A market supplier is the symptom of a demand, not the root cause of it.
- Conclusion: Thus it follows that Mr. Trump is the symptom of the Elite Establishment’s failure, not the root cause of it. QED.
Mr. Trump’s power does not derive from a lunatic fringe that believes he is God. His power – like his elevation to Hegemon of Earth, a position that members of the Elite Establishment would literally commit murder to obtain – derives from a profound, systemic collapse in public trust regarding our present-day Scribes and Pharisees.
Why do American voters no longer trust our Elite Establishment? The answer is glaringly obvious. In foreign policy, grifting “Realists” (like John Bolton) and grifting “Idealists” (like Lindsey Graham) have delegitimized entire schools of thought. The same is true for our Educationalists, our Journalists…heck, our entire Intelligentsia.
And this is not just an American phenomenon: The voters of what used to be the free countries of the West have systematically rejected their Elite Establishments in recent years, too.
In fact, in an overwhelming show of “No confidence,” Free Peoples everywhere have consistently voted against the instructions of their Elite Establishments for decades⁵—which is how the Elite Establishment love affair with “fighting misinformation” (i.e., “protecting democracy” by denying voters the ability to vote for candidates of their own choosing) happened.
Look at voting patterns in American Presidential elections since 1989. George H.W. Bush – the ultimate insider – had Mr. Reagan’s third term handed to him by political savant Lee Atwater. For a naturally restless people, this represented a striking act of continuity and demonstrated Mr. Reagan’s astounding ability to unify our entire country – and the Free World – against Soviet Communism.
But Mr. Bush the Elder quickly proved that he was no Ronald Reagan and lost to “outsider” Bill Clinton the first chance he got. Mr. Clinton happily became the new status quo (even as he set about recklessly destroying the mystique of the Oval Office).
In 1992, Mr. Clinton easily defeated the ultra-insider Bob Dole; but Mr. Clinton’s designated successor, Al Gore, fell to Mr. Bush the Younger.
Rather than clean up the Augean Stables (as he had been elected to do), Mr. Bush the Younger brought in the ultimate insiders – Mr. Cheney, Mr. Powell, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Perle – to launch a two-decade undeclared war against a verb (“Terrorism”) that none of them had the slightest clue how to end.
Mr. Obama then came out of nowhere, promising “hope and change,” only to reveal himself as yet another insider who grew inexplicably wealthy during his time in “public” office. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama accelerated the persecution of whistleblowers inside the government and targeted assassinations outside of our borders. (Well, hopefully targeted assassinations only outside of our borders; but, at this point, what wouldn’t you believe our Intelligence State is capable of?)
And this brings us back to Mr. Trump, whom voters “shockingly”⁶ preferred to the ultimate insider, Ms. Clinton Rodham. Mr. Trump was a hand grenade that fed-up American voters tossed into the D.C. hot tub. (As it turns out, voters don’t appreciate being called “racists” and “deplorables” for having genuine concerns about the systematic dismantling of our immigration system while their jobs got systematically exported to countries that “outcompete” us via slave labor.)
After throwing the Trump grenade, voters got back to doing what we have habitually done since 1963: Naïvely assume that “our” public figures are, essentially, decent human beings.
So what did “our” government do during Mr. Trump’s first term?
During COVID, the “expert consensus” was to drive the entire economy straight into the ditch, open up the trunk, pull out a can of gasoline, and set the wreck on fire.
Civil liberties? Immolated.
Freedom of Worship? Immolated.
Freedom of Speech? Immolated.
And the first casualty: Freedom of Assembly. Banned until the “Summer of George Floyd” arrived, revealing the hypocritical rule that “mostly peaceful” rioters seeking to burn down police stations and federal courthouses were “a legitimate exception” to the lockdowns. Because, you know, Black Lives Matter.⁷
You might think I am proving the point of my “Orange Man Bad” friends—that the serial incompetence of Mr. Trump’s first term⁸ proves that it was all about Mr. Trump all along.
But don’t be a German. Look more deeply.
I am proving the exact opposite.
The dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla (82–79 BC) did not cause the collapse of the Roman Republic. Rather, Sulla’s actions after being elevated to the dictatorship simply revealed that the stabilizing institutions within the Roman Republic had collapsed.
The Republic degenerated into an Empire, as they always do; but it was Rome’s descent into degeneracy⁹ – not political maneuvers that attempted to strip Sulla of command in the war against Mithridates VI of Pontus – that were the root cause of the Roman Republic’s collapse.
Sulla merely took advantage of the fact that a weak Roman Legislature was too morally compromised to act as an effective “check and balance” against Executive Usurpation.¹⁰
Gaius Julius Caesar (who, barely, survived Sulla’s terror) understood what Mark Antony never learned.¹¹ At the Lupercalia festival in 44 BC, Mark Antony thrice offered Gaius Julius Caesar a kingly crown, and thrice did Caesar reject it.
But the die was cast.
Casca, Cassius, and Brutus – all honorable men – sought to “save the Republic” by assassinating Caesar. But what did “saving the Republic” even mean at that point?
By their own words, we know that the plot of Caesar’s assassins lacked a plan. As Cassius, Casca, and Brutus – all honorable men – were to learn at the hands of Octavian and Mark Antony at the Battle of Philippi in 42 B.C., the Republic was already dead. All they were actually fighting over was who was going to get to wear that kingly crown.
For, as Cassius is said to have said to Brutus, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” In other words: Why should Caesar’s head wear a crown and not the head of Brutus?
“What does the collapse of the Roman Republic 2,053 years ago have to do with Donald Trump?” you might, understandably, ask.
Well, everything.
My faith tradition teaches me that God’s Civil and Ecclesial Economies of Salvation operate in parallel. No matter what man intends, all human things exist to work complementarily to achieve an outcome utterly beyond human comprehension. All things exist to advance the good.
In his Confessions, published about 1,626 years ago, St. Augustine put to rest the heresies of the Manichees—a sect that believed this world is hopelessly corrupt and that there is a “secret inside knowledge” (Gnosticism) accessible only to a properly-credentialed Elite Establishment.
Augustine proved them wrong: Creation is good, truth is accessible to all, and no Elite Establishment possesses secret knowledge of Truth.
But you’d be surprised what people will believe if their power depends on it. And anyway, to them you are irrelevant. Because any individual person is, by definition, irrelevant to the Collectivist.
Their desperate deception isn’t for you; it was only adopted to conceal their descent into degeneracy from the only audience that the desperate deceivers believe matters: Themselves.
But instead of lulling us back into a false sense of security, their desperate deception has had the opposite effect: It has shocked even the most disengaged citizens out of their disengagement.
What “the Middle 83.56%” is waking up to is that it’s a genuinely bad idea to imbue any man with godlike power.¹¹
Thus did the Father warn the Israelites in the Book of Samuel against asking for a King to rule over them, and thus did the Israelites ignore Him.
Because it is in the nature of most men to tragically confuse what they want now with what they want most.
But I am not confused at all: What I want most is for my friends to grow up and realize that those who blame one man for all the things that are wrong in the world are probably trying to distract you from what’s really going on.
(c) Daniel Zene Crowe, 2026
Footnotes:
¹ And how is a marriage supposed to work if both you and your German-South African wife are 100% right about everything?
(Honestly, I don’t want to find out.)
² As much as I wish they had, no asterisks appear in Mr. Trump’s post.
³ As I have written elsewhere, most Japanese I know (and myself) found Mr. Trump’s recent joke about the Japanese not giving us advance warning about Pearl Harbor hilarious. However, those of us, like me, with sons actually serving in the U.S. Army right now don’t find Mr. Trump’s “tough” (read: insane) talk about the Iranians nearly as funny.
⁴ “Beyond evil?” C’mon, Germans. Surely, out of all races on earth you people know the one guy who everybody agrees defines “beyond evil?” Why even go there?
⁵ Well, Populism is not winning exactly everywhere. Voters up and down the West Coast of the United States still habitually vote for a cartoonishly incompetent status quo, but there’s a simple explanation for that: Our Republican Parties out here consistently act even more crazy and incompetent, as State Political Parties invariably do when the National Coalition (like MAGA Republicanism, or Country Club Republicanism before that) is a poor fit for a State’s cultural and political dynamics (like Oregon’s Communitarianism).
⁶ My Evangelical and Protestant brethren need not rely solely on the Bishop of Hippo for this truth. The great Dutch Reformed theologian Abraham Kuyper famously rejected this Gnostic retreat from the physical world, declaring, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!‘” To cede the political or material world to the Devil as “irredeemably corrupt” is to deny the total sovereignty of God.
C.S. Lewis similarly demolished Dualism in Mere Christianity, noting that evil is a spoiled good, not an independent dark force. The physical world is “enemy-occupied territory,” yes, but it is God’s territory, and it is fundamentally good.
⁷ I mean “shockingly to our Elite Establishment.” Normal people weren’t shocked at all that we didn’t make Lucretia Borgia the first female President.
⁸ Unless those black lives belong to black cops or black babies about to be aborted or black Moms & Dads who want to raise their kids to love Jesus Christ more than the State. Their “black lives” don’t matter any more than mine does.
⁹ Seriously, has every MAGA Republican forgotten the names Scaramucci, Fauci, Lewandowski, Omarosa, Sessions, Bolton, Kelly, McMaster, Pompeo, Cohen, etc., etc.?
Personnel-wise, Trump 45 was an absolute madhouse, and I am deeply offended that I was never self-promoting (or important) enough to get invited in.
¹⁰ And, please, don’t insult all of your fellow readers by deciding, “Oh, there he’s given himself away. ‘Descent into degeneracy‘, indeed! Now I’ve got him! Just another religious fundamentalist crying out in the wilderness.”
I confess: I am a Warrior-Monk, and I do belong in the wilderness. But “fundamentalist?” That title is reserved for those who are certain of their own understanding. (The only wisdom I could possibly claim is that I understand enough to know that I understand almost nothing.)
As a public person in Oregon, I know that offering an easy off-ramp to someone means they’re likely to take it. So no off-ramps as easy as that for you, dear reader!
¹¹ And I mean “barely”: Only the intercession of influential friends saved young Gaius Julius Caesar – who had picked the wrong side in Sulla’s Civil War against “new man” Gaius Marius – from being executed during Sulla’s Proscriptions.
¹² If there has ever been a man who is immune to the weight of godlike power, I haven’t met him.
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