At Issue: Pundits and historians will eventually look back at the rise of Donald J. Trump and wonder what truly guided it. A recent SKY TV production, Mussolini: Son of the Century, offers a striking perspective on Italy’s first—and last—fascist dictator. The series, with its remarkable narrative and production values, presents Mussolini in a strangely cartoonish light, reminiscent of Robert De Niro’s portrayal of Al Capone in The Untouchables: a blustering figure spouting nonsense while swinging a bat for dramatic effect. What’s unsettling is how close that caricature may come to our present moment. Is Trump a modern-day Blackshirt, or merely a Black Box—an opaque vessel whose motives historians will need far more time to decipher?

Donald Trump is often mischaracterized as either a populist anomaly or a crude, accidental demagogue who stumbled into power by channeling public grievance. Both views misunderstand the deeper structure of his rise. Trump’s ascent did not come from an ideological awakening nor from policy innovation—it came from a style of politics that mirrors, uncannily, the instincts of Benito Mussolini. The comparison is not one of intellect or brutality; Mussolini was a learned man steeped in Marxist theory, Nietzschean philosophy, and revolutionary syndicalism. Trump, by contrast, is famously uninterested in reading or doctrinal thinking. Yet both men share a fundamental political instinct: the belief that power belongs not to those with ideas, but to those who project vitality, dominate their rivals, and bend institutions to their will.

What Mussolini articulated as a philosophy, Trump performs as a personality.
And that is the striking continuity.

I. Mussolini’s Legacy: Will Over Ideology

Mussolini’s political evolution—from socialist firebrand to fascist dictator—was less a journey across the ideological spectrum than a shedding of ideology altogether. He rejected egalitarianism, rejected liberalism, rejected class struggle, and ultimately rejected theory itself. His worldview distilled into a single proposition: strength is legitimacy. A leader succeeds not because his doctrine is correct, but because he asserts his will more forcefully than the institutions or individuals around him.

He believed truth was a tool, not a boundary. Politics was a theatre of energy, where victory went to those who projected vitality. Mussolini used philosophy to justify this worldview, but the worldview itself was pre-philosophical—a temperament more than a doctrine.

II. Trump’s Rise: Power as Vibration, Not Vision

Trump never read Nietzsche, Sorel, or Marx. He didn’t need to.
He arrived at a similar politics through instinct rather than scholarship.

Trump’s political identity is not built on principles; it is built on dominance rituals. The moment he called Jeb Bush “low energy,” he destroyed the Republican establishment’s aura of legitimacy. Mussolini would have recognized the tactic instantly. Trump reframed politics as a contest of vitality—strong versus weak, winners versus losers. It was Mussolini’s worldview, delivered not through essays in Gerarchia but through insults on a debate stage.

This is why Trump swept aside decades of Republican orthodoxy without breaking a sweat. He didn’t defeat the GOP on policy grounds—he humiliated it. He exposed its leaders as timid, programmed, emotionally bloodless. In a politics defined by energy, they were already defeated.

III. The Strange Vessel: Crudeness as Authenticity

Here lies the paradox that confounds his critics:
Trump’s crudeness is not a liability—it is the proof of his will.

People say of him, “He’s rough, uncouth, even ridiculous—but he’s doing what needs to be done.” This is the same phenomenon that Mussolini understood when he elevated action over refinement. Trump’s lack of polish becomes evidence of authenticity, his shamelessness a form of courage, his belligerence a substitute for competence. The media, perplexed by a figure who refuses to play by the conventional rules, ends up grading him on a curve. If the man has no ideology and no consistency, then nothing counts against him—only the energy of the performance.

IV. Bannon’s Role: Not Teacher, but Interpreter

Steve Bannon did not give Trump ideology. He gave Trump context—a way to translate Trump’s personal grievances into a political narrative. Trump’s resentments toward Manhattan elites, financiers who dismissed him, Democratic power brokers who denied him tax deals, and Republican donors who sneered at his origins became the emotional engine of his political movement. Like Mussolini, Trump’s politics are not the people’s grievances elevated to power; they are his grievances, adopted by millions.

V. MAGA as a Post-Ideological Movement

MAGA is not conservatism.
It is not traditional populism.
It is a movement organized around the idea that Trump embodies the national will, in the Mussolinian sense. His supporters do not evaluate his ideas—they evaluate his vigor. Weakness is the greatest sin; strength is the highest virtue. “Low energy” is a death sentence.

Trumpism is a cult of vitality masquerading as ideology.

VI. The Through-Line

The astonishing thing is not that Trump resembles Mussolini intellectually—he doesn’t.
The astonishing thing is that Mussolini’s philosophy survived without needing to be read. It re-emerged through temperament, through energy, through instinct.

Where Mussolini wrote pages on the primacy of action and the irrelevance of doctrine, Trump simply lived it. He became, accidentally, the modern vessel of a century-old anti-ideology: the politics of will.

And that is why he succeeded.
Not because he read the theory.
But because he is the theory—raw, unfiltered, and unencumbered by the burden of intellect.