Trump and Vance Are Perfect for Each Other — Both Are Craven Nihilists
- john raymond
- Aug 21
- 2 min read
President Trump’s recent invocation of “heaven” reveals not spiritual conviction but existential dread. A man who spent decades trafficking in domination, humiliation, and transactional power has discovered, at seventy-nine, that none of it guarantees him meaning when the abyss finally opens.
The rhetoric of salvation now enters his vocabulary not because he believes, but because he fears. This is the tell: a lifetime of hollow bravado gives way to a mystical plea at the threshold of decline.
This mysticism is not born of humanity. It is the mysticism of desperation, the mysticism of one who never believed in anything beyond the lower self yet clutches at the promise of an afterlife as a hedge against annihilation.
Unlike the devout, Trump does not look upward in hope; he looks downward into the abyss and recoils. Having built no inner life, no structure of meaning, he reaches for heaven as a final con. But what he discovers is the futility of that con, for eternity cannot be negotiated as another bullshit deal.
The result is revelation by negation: Trump’s life has been without meaning. His legacy is grievance, corruption, and the service of hostile powers.
He is not mourned but dreaded, not beloved but endured. Even those closest to him — family, allies, sycophants — stand at his side only while power remains to be siphoned.
And the moment his grip falters, so too will their loyalty. He is, at the core, unloved and unlovable.
JD Vance’s small humiliation of Zelenskyy mirrors this collapse. Vance mimics the Trump script: diminishment of others, projection of superiority, ritualized condescension.
Yet this, too, is a hollow performance. As Trump faces his own mortality, Vance inherits the script of a man already discredited. Vance has learned not how to lead, but how to shrink into the shadow of a collapsing master.
The irony is brutal: as Trump gropes for mysticism in fear of death, his acolyte demonstrates only the smallness of imitation, tethering his fate to a man who has proven across all dimensions — political, moral, personal — that his ways are insufficient.
The final image is one of entropy. Trump staring into the abyss, Vance aping him on the stage, both men diminished by the recognition that their power is fleeting, their legacies poisoned, and their capacity to inspire genuine loyalty nonexistent.
And what remains is the spectacle of weakness: one man begging heaven for an escape, the other hoping to inherit authority from a master who is on his way to being lost to history.
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