Trump, Hegel, and the Twilight of the Liberal World Order
A Philosophical Commentary on "The YOLO Presidency" in The Atlantic
The Atlantic Essay
On April 29, 2026, The Atlantic published an article by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer under the headline “The YOLO Presidency: Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s ‘great men’”. Drawing on insights from sources close to the president—a senior administration official and a long-time confidant—the article paints a portrait of a president who, in his second and final term, has freed himself from the short-term political considerations that typically govern the actions of American presidents.
Donald Trump no longer primarily compares himself to George Washington or Abraham Lincoln. In private conversations, he has begun to think of himself as an addition to the triad of world-historical figures identified by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831): Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. One source describes how Trump has recently begun speaking about himself as the most powerful person who has ever lived, and that he wants to be remembered as the one who accomplished things others could not, by virtue of his sheer power and will.
The article describes how Trump, in his final term and freed from the judgment of the electorate, is concentrating on what he has decided truly matters: ascending to become one of history’s great men and leaving a lasting—and in many cases physical—imprint. The results so far have cost lives and billions of dollars, damaged the global economy, strained already fragile alliances, and radically lowered the president’s approval ratings. Yet his inner circle frames this as a liberation: he is no longer burdened by political considerations and can do what is truly right rather than what serves his narrow political interests.
The article links back to Hegel’s theory of world-historical individuals—men who redirected the course of humanity, heroes of improbable eras who overturned established orders that had previously seemed immovable. They were practical, political men who in their time were condemned for their norm-breaking behavior. The question The Atlantic poses—whether Trump belongs in this company—is partly ironic. However, it is not philosophically irrelevant, and it does not have to be treated merely as satire.
Hegel on the World-Historical Individuals
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel distinguished a specific category of historical figures whom he called welthistorische Individuen (world-historical individuals). These individuals—Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon—personify the spirit of the age and serve as instruments for historical progress. Even though they are driven by personal ambitions and desires, their actions contribute to the greater, rational unfolding of history. Hegel terms this the “cunning of reason” (die List der Vernunft).
It is crucial to understand exactly what Hegel means, for it is easy to misunderstand him as a mere proponent of “great men.” Such individuals, according to Hegel, lacked the conscious awareness of the very Idea they were realizing—they were practical, political men of action, not philosophers. They were great because they fulfilled the needs of their time. The world-historical individual is, in other words, not the creator of history but its symptom and instrument—an expression of a maturation within the inner logic of the times that tears up the old and prepares the ground for the new.
Hegel’s treatment of the three figures differs in tone and depth. About Alexander the Great he writes almost lyrically: Alexander—”the freest and finest individuality that the real world has ever produced”—places himself at the head of youthful Greek life and brings to completion the Greek revenge against Asia. Alexander appears as the perfect incarnation of Hellenistic culture, the figure in whom the potential of the Greek spirit reached its historical fulfillment.
About Caesar, Hegel is more politically analytical. Caesar faced the danger of losing his equal standing against Rome’s other leaders. His enemies had the formal constitution and the appearance of the legality on their side. But his victory over these enemies transformed simultaneously into the conquest of the entire empire. Without changing the form of the constitution, Caesar became the sole ruler. The decisive point for Hegel is that Caesar did not merely serve his own interests, but expressed the will of the World Spirit (Weltgeist) and acted instinctively to realize what the times demanded. One Zeitgeist had exhausted itself, another was ready to emerge, and Caesar was the individual in whom this spiritual shift was embodied and made visible.
Most powerful and personal is Hegel’s interpretation of Napoleon. On October 13, 1806, the day before the Battle of Jena, Hegel saw the French Emperor riding through the city and wrote to his friend Niethammer: “I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it.”
Hegel’s description of Napoleon as the “world-soul on horseback” (die Weltseele zu Pferde) became legendary. Napoleon completed what the French Revolution had initiated: the liquidation of feudal Europe and the spread of a new political order founded on individual liberty and constitutional law. The hero was the vehicle of history—the universal concretization of the World Spirit.
Lyotard and the Crisis of the Liberal Narrative
Hegel’s speculative philosophy of history holds little sway today. It constitutes exactly the type of metanarrative that Jean-François Lyotard, in La Condition postmoderne (1979), declared we have lost faith in: the notion of history as a rational process with an inherent direction. For Hegel, this development was about the successive realization of the consciousness of freedom in increasingly perfected state forms. Yet, Hegel’s lectures remain a classic work of intellectual history—one of the most influential and famous frameworks for interpreting major historical actors and epochal shifts. It is no coincidence that the authors behind The Atlantic article turned to Hegel when looking for a framework that highlights history’s major actors like Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon.
A metanarrative in Lyotard’s sense is an overarching narrative that provides legitimacy to knowledge and power through the anticipated realization of a yet unachieved goal. Hegel’s speculative or idealistic metanarrative was at its most influential during the 19th century, particularly in Germany, Sweden, and Finland. The two dominant political metanarratives of the 20th century were Marxism and liberalism—though liberalism does not necessarily need to be understood as a narrative in a narrow sense. Marxism largely lost its influence with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Today, it is the metanarrative or idea of liberalism—the Enlightenment-based liberal, rules-based international order—that three decades later finds itself in crisis, a crisis embodied by Donald Trump.
Madman Theory and Unpredictability as Historical Rationality
The liberal world order—Pax Americana, rules-based multilateralism, free trade, transatlantic alliances—has rested on a grand narrative: that American hegemony is a universal good, that free trade benefits everyone, and that democracy constitutes the ultimate goal of history. Trump is not the cause of this crisis—he is, just like Napoleon in Hegel’s interpretation, its symptom and its agent. The United States, whose hegemony is now challenged by China, appears to have given up on paying the price for leadership in a system that enabled its position as the world’s richest and militarily most powerful nation.
But can Trump’s seemingly chaotic and unpredictable politics nonetheless possess an internal rationality? When an established hegemon is challenged by a rising power, it can be rational to dismantle the institutions it once created. A hegemon in relative decline has reason to question the rules and structures that, in the new landscape, benefit the rival more than itself. The WTO, the IMF, multilateral trade agreements, and NATO were built during an era of uncontested American supremacy. In an era where China commands global supply chains, expands technologically, and increases its influence in international bodies, these structures have paradoxically come to facilitate the rise of state-capitalist China rather than secure America’s continued dominance.
From this perspective, the unpredictability of a madman is not a psychological trait but a rational bargaining tool: an actor whose next move cannot be predicted forces the adversary into a defensive posture and ties down resources. Trump relies on his signature strategic unpredictability as an asset to gain leverage, and the priority appears to be a China policy that combines deterrence and a logic of containment, but without direct military confrontation with China. Under the Trump administration, the United States—without regard for international law—leverages its power to secure its dominance at least in the Western Hemisphere. The United States is still, but perhaps not for much longer, the indisputably strongest economic and military power. If the authoritarian socialist regimes backed by China and Russia in America’s backyard are not toppled now, the opportunity may never arise again.
With a certain measure of goodwill, one can discern a rationality in the new U.S. security doctrine and its application, yet at the same time, the inconsistency and short-sightedness are striking. Trump’s tactless remarks and capricious policies deplete trust in the United States, but for the moment, they make the American president the world’s most powerful man. In the long run, the U.S. risks losing not only its power of attraction and its allies but also the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. Without the petrodollar, it will become very difficult to maintain American dominance on a global scale, and perhaps even regionally.
Symptom of Ascent or Decline?
And here is where The Atlantic’s comparison—spiteful but not far-fetched—fails philosophically in a decisive way. For Hegel, the world-historical individuals were great not only because they were destructive, but because their destruction carried a progressive content. They realized the next stage in the history of freedom. Caesar replaced an exhausted republican oligarchy with a more universal state form. Napoleon spread the legal achievements of the Revolution—the Code Civil, constitutional order, equality before the law—across a feudal Europe. Their disruption served the construction of a new and freer order. Reason used them as its tools.
It is far from clear that Trump’s destruction of the existing order makes room for a freer one. He tears down the order that actually, if imperfectly, institutionalized liberal principles on a global scale. If Napoleon carried Hegel’s Weltgeist forward, Trump arguably carries it backward—or, more accurately: he carries a content whose logical destination is a multipolar system dominated by states for which freedom, in the Hegelian sense, is not a guiding value. The form of rationality his policies may end up serving is not a liberal one, but one aligned with Chinese and Russian interests.
The comparison with Caesar therefore falters. The historical parallels that shine brightest are instead Commodus and Honorius—two quite different emperors who act as complementary mirror images of the two dimensions we are now witnessing.
Commodus and Honorius
Commodus illustrates the internal dynamics. With the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 AD, the era of the Five Good Emperors ended, and with it, Pax Romana. The first of the emperors who followed was Commodus, the son of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius—a ruler who, according to most historians, was not only corrupt and debauched but also megalomaniacal, viewing himself as a reincarnation of Hercules. He inherited a superpower at the height of its power and allowed his reign to erode the institutions that underpinned Rome’s strength from within—not by replacing them with something better, but by letting them wither through neglect, corruption, and personality cult. He erected countless statues of himself in the guise of Hercules throughout the empire, renamed Rome Colonia Commodiana—the colony of Commodus—and had the inscriptions on the Colosseum proclaim his feats as a gladiator.
Honorius illustrates the geopolitical consequence. In 410 AD, under the passive and dysfunctional rule of Honorius, Rome was sacked by the Goths—an event that shook the ancient world to its core and drove Saint Augustine to write The City of God. But perhaps the most emblematic feature of Honorius’s reign was another: when Roman Britain sent pleas to the emperor for military support against the increasingly bold raids of the Saxons, he replied that they had to look to their own defense.
It is not difficult to see parallels here to Trump’s message to NATO allies to pay their share or manage without American protection, to the deliberations about abandoning Ukraine to its fate, and to the signals that Taiwan is ultimately Taiwan’s own problem. Honorius did not understand—or did not care—that the empire he inherited rested on a permanent presence in the periphery, and that retreating from that presence was not a cost-saving measure but a liquidation.
Commodus and Honorius thus illuminate two distinct dimensions of the same historical pattern: internal decay and external retreat reinforcing one another. It is at the intersection of these two movements that the crisis of Pax Americana takes its most tangible form.
The Final Dialectic
There is, of course, a complication in the analogy worth mentioning. Hegel argued that even the fall of Rome in the long run served the progression of reason—the entry of the Germanic peoples into history, the universalism of Christianity, and the synthesis that in Hegel’s own time appeared as the highest stage of historical development. But this requires a time horizon of centuries, and it is by no means certain that the multipolar world now emerging will lead to any higher synthesis of freedom. On the contrary, the new multipolarity that may follow the decay of the American world order risks creating favorable conditions for authoritarian powers to maintain and export their societal systems. In Hegelian terms, the World Spirit—with the unintended help of Trump—may be taking its step across the Pacific to Beijing.
YOLO—You Only Live Once—is a telling formula for Hegel’s world-historical individual. The great man lives only once, acts without regard for conventions and posterity, and leaves behind a world he himself would no longer recognize. But Hegel’s world-historical individual leaves a freer world in his wake.
If Trump, in his second and final term, resembles any predecessor in the great historical gallery, it is not Caesar, who crossed the Rubicon to give birth to an empire. It is Commodus—the son of a golden legacy, eager to gild it further and unable to see that the gilding covered a deepening decay—and Honorius, who responded to the periphery’s cries for help by telling it to help itself, never understanding that an empire that stops defending its periphery will soon have no center left to defend.
This text is a commentary on the article “The YOLO Presidency: Trump is focused on becoming one of history’s ‘great men’” (The Atlantic, April 29, 2026, by Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer).