Trump’s Frankenstein Monster

All of the images have been created specifically for this essay by my interaction with AI in which I give it prompts about themes, style, mood, and "we" work together.

Introduction

Many consider Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein to be the first truly modern myth in its scientific quest to create a human-like mind and body. The emerging, world changing consequences of Artificial Intelligence have made that modern myth even more compelling and urgent as many fear the destructive potential of AI as much as they welcome its boon. In that context I recently saw a stunning balletic interpretation of the Frankenstein story, coproduced by the San Francisco Ballet and The British Royal Ballet. It is filled with the deepest human emotions between creator and creature, including the yearning for love and destructive rage at rejection and abandonment. It is all foretold in this short video clip from an early scene of the ballet:

I leap from the Frankenstein ballet to Trump’s Presidency because in both performances there is such drama and horror. Both feature destructive monsters who have been created in the hope of bringing something new and good into the world—or, in the case of Trump, has it been primarily in the hope of destroying what he hates? Whatever the motive there is intense love and hate in the passionate dance between Dr. Frankenstein and his creation and between Trump’s dance with America, and the rest of the world. The two stories are most alike because we have been witnessing in the first months of 2025 what feels like the almost overnight creation of a Frankenstein monster in Donald Trump’s second term as President that is destroying the US government and the world order as we have known it for 75 years. He is replacing it with a creature of unknown and horrific proportions that threatens to cause great harm to all of us. The dynamic energy that has spawned this monster has come from America’s complicity in bestowing god-like powers on a very mad man. Unlike the ballet version, Trump’s Frankenstein elicits little empathy. Although Trump himself has not shown any signs of falling out of love with his creation whom he appears to adore with the same ardor that he loves himself, signs of disaffection throughout America and the rest of the world are rapidly growing and we can only hope that the sleeping giant of America’s innate impulse to democracy will awaken from its slumber and unite with Trump’s innate tendency to self-destruct. All the while, we continue to wonder what motivates this mad man? Several possibilities come to mind:

1. Trump knows something we don’t know and is a bold and fearless innovator like his side kick, Elon Musk.

2. Trump is characterologically a megalomaniacal and deceitful man (who also happens to be working for Putin).

3. Trump is stupider than we thought in his inability to listen to anybody who may know more than he does, especially the elites and experts he despises.

4. Trump is like a Dr. Frankenstein who is trying to create a better world and is ignorant—or

5. Trump is demonic and fundamentally a destroyer

Perhaps each of these possibilities holds something of the truth.

Whatever motivates Trump, he has assembled his Frankenstein government with lightning speed that has left us in awe, shock, and terror. We are just now beginning to be able to discern the different features of this creature that has been crafted to clusterfuck our minds and souls. It is a hodgepodge assembly of ideologically crafted body parts, each of which is a terrible creation. There is little that is recognizably human in this creation, other than the fact that it is all too human in its monstrous flaws. We can think of this Frankenstein creation both as a single creature, having been stitched together from many different pieces of grievances and right-wing ideology, and we can also imagine it as having been cloned into many identical Frankensteins, like Mr. Jones in The Matrix, and spread throughout the government at the highest levels like a virulent virus. Other than absolute devotion and loyalty to Trump himself, the primary function of America’s homegrown Frankenstein is to destroy the existing government and undermine all its functions.

This essay intends to break this beast down into its symbolic component parts that pieced together are a true 21^st century Frankenstein or some postmodern version of multiple cloned Frankensteins. However we envision it, Trump seems to want to project and see himself everywhere on the world stage and what much of the world is seeing in response to that megalomania is in fact a monstrous Frankenstein creation of Trump’s massively inflated image of himself.

DOGE: Nerd Reich Technology

The main headline of the early months of Trump’s Presidency, until he unveiled his massive tariff scheme on the world in April 2024, has been the bromance of Trump and Elon Musk. It is really a threesome between Trump, Musk and AI in the disruptive DOGE plot to throw the country into chaos by wholesale firings of government employees from all departments, especially those that have anything to do with the public or common good at home and abroad. Now that the initial shock of the DOGE blitzkrieg has worn off a bit, it is becoming clearer that the country has been under siege by a well-orchestrated strategy to upend the government in all its major functions. We must wonder who is choreographing the dance of throwing the country into such profound disorientation and disruption? It clearly is not Trump alone. More and more the Project 2025 scenario that Trump disowned during the election seems to be behind many of the carefully timed steps of “draining the swamp” and inspiring fear in any who would counter his authoritarian shakedown, especially in the universities and judicial system. Musk’s huge DOGE layoffs, conducted with the glee of a chain saw murderer and the ruthless impersonality of an AI generated algorithm, accomplished two things: it diverted the primary negative attention for causing such havoc onto Musk and Tesla rather than Trump himself and it succeeded in a very short time in putting the whole country on notice that the government as we have known it is being systematically dismantled. At the heart of a major piece of this effort are a group of Silicon Valley billionaires including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and David Sacks who have embraced a rightwing philosophy that Gil Duran has brought to light in his brilliant investigative reporting in The Nerd Reich newsletter.

(https://www.thenerdreich.com. Also, a fine interview with Gil Duran https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101909416/is-the-nerd-reich-taking-over-the-government)

The Nerd Reich Tech movement is profoundly antidemocratic, and authoritarian based on the belief that tech nerds know much more about how to manage the technology and organizations of the future than anyone else and should be running the show. They share an arrogant belief in their superior intelligence and skill sets which entitles them to rule the world. Musk has his own personal origins in this vision of a right wing technocracy in the life of his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, as Jill Lapore has reported in the New York Times:

“Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement (in the 1930’s) known as technocracy. Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members. Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.)”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html

The current incarnation of the technocracy movement is a marriage of revolutionary technology including social media and artificial intelligence, vast amounts of money, and the growing political will to exert their power. This is at the heart of the story of the Musk/Trump mutual seduction that we have all been witnessing play out on a grand scale. Trump recognized in Musk a perfect agent to take the government by storm in a bloodless coup that seemed to catch everybody by surprise. Musk clearly saw Trump as a perfect vehicle to enact his own overweening ambitions for power, money, and a trip to Mars. DOGE is the Frankenstein tool that brings together Musk and his Nerd Reich disruptive revolution with Trump’s demonic drive for revenge, power, and the wish to remake the world in his own image. Even more stupefying, Congress has never voted on a single piece of this DOGE “legislation” as Trump’s absolute power already seemed to be ratified by a Supreme Court which held him above the law for any impeachable act in his official duties or even any limitation in his role as President. According to Duran—and it seems more and more plausible—Trump, Musk and DOGE have been following a playbook conceived by far-right thinkers on how to take down institutions and seize power. Of course, Silicon Valley in its contributions to our everyday life through the internet, social media and connectivity in general has already had a good deal of Frankenstein in it.

The America First Neo Colonial Foreign Policy

Just as stunningly disruptive on the international scene as DOGE has been on the domestic front are the Frankenstein juggling acts and power plays that have turned upside down our relationships with allies and adversaries. Abandoning Ukraine and siding with Russia, condoning ongoing Israeli brutality against Palestinians in Gaza with the unimaginable goal of America developing the land for god knows whose profit, and threatening to seize Greenland for access to rare minerals and new northern ports all point to our foreign policy being in the hands of an America-first, neo colonial Frankenstein who is systematically betraying the “rules-based international order” we have championed over the past 75 years. The monstrousness of Trump’s unending willingness to destroy anything that does not directly serve his own personal interests has become the model for how America now pursues its own interests in the global community. Trump’s personal megalomaniacal narcissism is now America’s megalomaniacal narcissism. No moment more fully captured this shift in our attitude to the rest of the world than the meeting between Trump and Vance with Zalenskyy in the White House on February 28, 2025. It will stand out as one of the most disgraceful moments in American history when we betrayed just about every democratic value we hold most dear.

We join the citizens of the planet in witnessing in horror what America has become as we toy with the lives and livelihoods of people around the world with the same wanton disregard of Elon Musk upending the lives of hundreds of thousands of government workers on the domestic scene. Our foreign policy is now firmly in the hands of a strongarm bully who is playing the juggler in an international geopolitical power game as if it were a crude hand of poker. We have abandoned our traditional allies while pandering to our cruelest adversaries. Trump is offering a rotten but thrilling media performance without substance, value, or clear purpose other than maintaining the illusion of control and power—more the play acting of a global nasty bully than a seasoned and knowledgeable practitioner of foreign relations. Posturing for peace, bullying for power. A dangerous charade on the international stage.

Trump’s Tariff Based World Economy

The most recent mindboggling Frankenstein creation of Trump is the imposition of worldwide tariffs. Apparently, the formula used to set these tariffs is an AI generated algorithm that few are familiar with and that has no credibility among economists. CNBC’s Steve Liesman said: “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So, I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along....”

Markets are reeling and people who have been willing to give Trump a chance are beginning to feel the pinch in their pockets. Who wants a Frankenstein created AI algorithm setting international tariffs that will end up stealing them blind?

Trump’s tariffs are a global shakedown scheme and should make every gangster in history roll over in their graves with envy at his chutzpah. From local shopkeepers to international corporations, from Main Street to Wall Street, Trumps’s Frankenstein strong arm tactics threaten to damage, if not ruin, just about everyone. Judging from reactions around the world, it is the economic equivalent of thermonuclear war without radiation.

Trump has managed to induce massive fear through huge economic threats that now terrorize universities, local businesses, neighboring countries, allies and adversaries alike, and the entire international economy.

Trump’s Anti-Scientific Crusade

Among the many irrational inconsistencies that spring from his Frankenstein brain, Trump has managed to slavishly embrace technology, side by side with his reckless disregard of fact-based science and education. He is taking a wrecking ball to government supported scientific research and higher education. He may want an autocracy, but he is creating an idiocracy. Nothing has proclaimed this Frankenstein idiocy more than handing the Department of Health and Human Services over to Robert Kennedy, whose anti vaccine faith has defied 100 years of research and evidence and puts the health and safety of the country at high risk.

Trump’s Frankenstein Tearing at the Fabric of Social and Biological Life

The tree of life symbolizes the diversity and interconnectedness of all life, the ongoing life of the human community through generations and the ongoing life of the plant and animal kingdoms through eons. We are all part of one tree of life: human, plant, animal.

Tearing at the very fabric of our social and ecological environment by gutting every program that promotes the interconnectedness, diversity and wellbeing of the human and natural environment is another of Trump’s Frankenstein efforts at destroying what in fact Makes America Great. Where did this monster come from. Is he us?

Conclusion

Trump: The Great Frankenstein Puppeteer

Is this narrative of a Trump/Frankenstein Presidency all a paranoid fantasy, my own conspiracy theory, or is this in fact our current reality? Is my extended metaphor of Trump’s Presidency being akin to a Frankenstein monster overblown in the same way that everything Trump does and says is overblown? Am I suffering from what the clever Trump propagandists call the “Trump Derangement Syndrome”? Trump is driving me and much of the world crazy. I begin to doubt my own Trump/ Frankenstein creation story, but something tells me it is closer to the truth than many of the things we are reading and hearing. Truth has become such a fungible commodity in our postmodern world of relativity that it is almost impossible not to second guess oneself. Trump does not second guess himself. Nor does he seem to experience any shame or guilt or remorse for anything he does or says. He simply changes his mind. Like he did just literally minutes ago by reversing the world tariff course he set a few days ago when he said, “My policies will never change.” Maybe that’s why so many people worship him—because he does and acts the way they would like to? Without any shame, remorse, guilt or doubts.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/04/trump-presidency-news-tariffs/

All the while, MAGA holds out the promise that Trump’s revolution will free up America from the intrusive and oppressive power of the federal government by creating a more efficient, prosperous, safer, independent America. This is to be accomplished through the orchestrated, wholesale dismantling of our federal government with a legion of Trump/ Frankenstein clones. These efforts include slashing support for scientific and medical research, education, environmental protection, health and human services, consumer protections, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, an all-out attack on our legal institutions and balance of powers in government as well as fundamental human rights, a systematic cutting off of foreign aid to less advantaged countries, an upending of longstanding international alliances and most recently, the beginnings of a global trade war.

It is all being undone in the name of Making America Great Again and freeing America from a bloated and corrupt government that has grown too big and powerful. Yet, paradoxically, never has more power been appropriated by an all-powerful single government employee, the President, who has claimed the right to do whatever he wishes, wherever he wishes with a Frankenstein like hubris and destructive vengeance. It turns out that MAGA’s freedom from big government is not that at all. It is all about increasing the governmental power of one man and those who blindly support him to do whatever he/they want to control our lives and the well-being of the world. This is truly both Orwellian and Frankensteinian.