President Donald Trump finishes his inaugural address as Vice President JD Vance applauds during the 60th Presidential Inauguration in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson, Pool)
Curtis Yarvin, the right-wing philosopher who reportedly influenced Vice President JD Vance, described the Trump administration as a “tragedy” that “has already lost” in a new article warning that President Donald Trump and his allies could spend the rest of their lives behind bars.
“The story now seems clear: the second Trump administration is a tragedy,” wrote Yarvin – a close associate of billionaire Trump allies Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – in a Substack article on Sunday. “I hate to say it, but it looks like the administration has already lost.”
Yarvin explained that while the Trump administration had a massive amount of “Rubicon energy,” which could have been used to effect real change, the administration had blown that energy by failing to couple it with execution against the “Deep State.”
“The administration failed, collectively, to realize that (a) the excitement of potential real change was how all its crackling political energy was generated, and (b) the energy would stop if the offensive stopped moving,” he explained. “And Rubicon energy is hard to turn back on again—far harder than to kindle in the first place.”
Yarvin warned that unless the energy could be rekindled with “some kind of very sharp conflict or crisis,” the Republican Party would be wiped out in the midterm elections and pushed “permanently on the defensive.”
Yarvin went on to predict harsh reprisals for anyone who “had anything to do with this little failed revolution,” including marginal Trump administration officials.
“They will prosecute everyone, for anything. They will treat Trump appointees like January 6 trespassers. Even if you held some obscure cultural or scientific position,” he warned, adding that “actual, straight-out corruption in the admin” would also come back to bite Trump and his allies.
Yarvin continued:
Last winter’s shock-and-awe Trump is vanished now. The administration is simply too well-integrated with the permanent government. This marriage is terrible, but it is still a marriage. The windows Trump would be breaking are now “his own.” This is why existential action is only possible at the beginning of a presidential term. […]
Trump’s tragic flaw is purely Shakespearean. It is the opposite of the accusations constantly hurled at him. Trump does not actually want full power. Rather, he is afraid of it. And it is not just him. He is actually far less afraid than the people around him.
Criticizing Trump’s “self-congratulatory boasting” from “a throne of brass,” Yarvin warned that “Trump will spend the rest of his life in court or in jail” if the Republican Party is defeated in 2028.
“This will also be true of all prominent Trump supporters, appointees, donors, etc,” he concluded. “This will be an all-you-can eat barbecue of fully-funded lawfare and endless fawning PR. Every Democratic prosecutor in the country will find a way to do her part in cleaning up the ruins of Trumpism. That is, rounding up and bayoneting the defeated veterans.”
