As American political chaos radiates around the globe, it is tempting to label Donald Trump a nihilist—an authoritarian devoid of values, trashing all that he can in a primal bid for dominance. This may sound convincing, and yet it misreads the crisis at hand. Trump is not a nihilist in the sense of believing in nothing or cynically holding all values in contempt. Rather, he is an opportunist exploiting a nihilist moment of moral despair and cultural disorientation to install an anti-liberal value system that many millions perceive as a cure for nihilism itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher who made a subtle analysis of nihilism and its remedies, offers an incisive perspective. For him, nihilism is the complex predicament a society finds itself in when it loses faith in its own values. It arises when dominant moral frameworks crumble—whether through the decline of religion, the aftermath of war or the failure of ideological projects. Its signature mood is one of anxiety, disorientation, despair and even rage, as people struggle to find meaning in a world where old certainties have collapsed.
For Nietzsche, only heroic individuals who embody the “will to power” can successfully confront nihilism—tearing down decayed values and erecting new ones in their place. Norms and beliefs that no longer “serve life” must be destroyed to make way for more vital forms of meaning.
It is striking how much the New Right echoes these Nietzschean themes in its framing of the Trumpist project. Figures such as Steve Bannon and Michael Anton cast contemporary American politics as a struggle between a weak, decadent and nihilistic liberalism and a heroic authoritarian right tasked with rebuilding a culture of strength and renewal.
For many of Trump’s intellectual enablers, nihilism is not the problem they embody, but instead the crisis they are solving. It is liberal ideology that, on their telling, has dismantled national identity, faith and traditional social structures, leaving behind nothing but moral confusion and an unhealthy obsession with pronouns, past injustices and marginalised groups. This is why populist strongmen like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán resonate so powerfully in Trumpland: they reject liberal permissiveness and its emphasis on individual rights, pluralism and equality and instead enforce an ethos of national strength based on traditional values and hierarchies.
The destruction of institutions such as the US Agency for International Development, which consumes a minuscule fraction of the federal budget, is not about fiscal responsibility. It is about broadcasting this radical revolution in values to the world. An agency feeding the hungry and healing the sick is not just wasteful, but a hotbed of leftist radicalism, “evil”—to use Elon Musk’s term. The disdain for procedural democracy, the glorification of violence, the embrace of conspiracy—these are not signs of nihilism but of a radical alternative morality that places loyalty, strength and ethnonational purity above traditional democratic values and norms.
The rise of Trumpism, then, is not just a reactionary movement—it is a self-consciously moral one, in which righteousness is restored only when the forces of liberal decadence and corruption are vanquished
This is the logic that justifies the rule-breaking and rationalises authoritarianism. It explains why democratic norms once considered safeguards of a shared political order are dismissed as obstacles to a necessary moral purge. When the enemy is a force of existential corruption, almost anything becomes justifiable. As Trump tweeted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
Trumpism is effective because it taps into deep human needs for belonging, purpose and moral clarity. If liberals are to understand and counter this movement they must recognise they are not fighting amorality—as though the only real values are liberal ones—but an alternative morality that finds meaning in hierarchy, dominance and submission to authority.
Long accustomed to unquestioned moral and cultural ascendancy, liberalism must defend itself anew. This requires more than rejecting authoritarianism and defending liberal institutions. We must make a fresh case for why liberal values—freedom, dignity, and equality—are worth preserving.
Nietzsche teaches us that nihilism can give way to new values, for better or worse. Trumpism is one possible response to our nihilistic moment—but it is not the only one. The question is whether a reinvigorated liberalism can offer an alternative vision compelling enough to withstand the storm.
