Monday, Feb 9, 2026
By Devin Savage
Trump has hit it big. Megachurch-Pastor Huge. But his movement is hollow.
Growing up in the era before megachurches were common, the closest thing I can remember were the televangelists. These are the first and only salesmen I actually remember from the 1970s, aside from the car salesmen my father dealt with.
After moving to Ohio in the late 1970s, Sundays during the long, snowy winters were accompanied by—at first Ernest W. Ainsley but then my parents settled on the “Hour of Power” programme headed by Dr Robert Schuller, who broadcast from his Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California. And then there was Dr. D. James Kennedy broadcasting from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church. He was always talking about the ‘humanists’ and how dangerous they were to the country. These were the closest I had ever known which approximated a megachurch at that time.
I grew up in a semi-devout family. My parents took us kids—me and my siblings—regularly to the Presbyterian church in Sacramento, and later to another Presbyterian church when we relocated to Ohio. They never demanded strict piety from any of us, but they did express their surprise and disappointment when I started to question some of the dogma they so earnestly believed. This dogma is the Cultural DNA I talk about in my blogs and my book: the pre-scientific era knowledge that has been accumulating and passing down through generations. It’s been elevated and venerated, but largely unexamined by those who take it to heart.
It occurred to me early on that the raw material of a church is the sinner, and the product is the absolved, reformed Christian. The value proposition was always to keep in mind that nobody is perfect, so everybody is a sinner, and we all should be going to church to work on becoming better, reformed human beings in Christ’s image. This requires work, self-examination, and growth. But Donald Trump is anything but a reformed Christian—at least it seems that way to anyone paying attention to his grifting, his serial adultery, his porn-star scandals, his casual cruelty. Yet he is wholly accepted, even celebrated, by so many of the devout. It’s as if Trump is seen as a knight on a white horse who has come to defend the righteous—to protect them from the swirling secular and humanist forces that threaten to choke off the influence of the Christian right, leaving America open and vulnerable to a terrible fate. Imagine—Donald Trump, a saviour of the Christian Right. Are they serious?
The answer, I believe, reveals something profound about what populist demagogues actually sell. To understand this better, I think it’s necessary to look at what Christianity has to sell, and compare it to what demagogues are peddling and to whom.
The Two Models of Salvation
To understand what’s happened, we need to compare two different value propositions, two different production processes that look similar on the surface but produce fundamentally different products.
The Church Model:
- Raw material: Sinners (flawed people who acknowledge their flaws)
- Process: Reformation through prayer, study, community accountability, moral improvement
- Product: Reformed Christians (people aspiring to become better versions of themselves)
- Value proposition: “You’re broken, but through faith and work, you can be redeemed”
- The Foil: Satan (and non-believers and humanists and liberals, homosexuals and anyone except us)
The Populist Model:
- Raw material: People with grievances, inherited identities, and a sense of displacement
- Process: Validation of existing beliefs, externalisation of blame, tribal affirmation
- Product: Status as “chosen ones” who are already righteous
- Value proposition: “You’re already fine—you are a real American, and by definition you are great”
- The Foil: Elites and all enemies from within—but we will define who is in and who is out
The church demands continuous effort. The populist offers instant salvation through tribal membership alone. You need only show up, affirm the correct Cultural Monuments, and hate the designated enemies. No self-examination required. In fact, self-examination is discouraged as a sign of weakness, of being infected by the “woke mind virus” or Trump derangement syndrome or perhaps one is contaminated by elite sensibilities. There is a whole lot of crossover between the two systems—and this is the basis for the confusion between the two. The overlap is often difficult to discern, especially since the nativist portion of the populist model overlaps with the ideas of who is a real American as defined by those members of the tribe.
The Confusing Overlap: When Church and State Become One Congregation
The reason Trump’s acceptance by evangelicals seems so paradoxical is that the two systems—the church model and the populist model—share so much common infrastructure that it’s easy to mistake one for the other.
They both:
- Require regular congregational gatherings (Sunday service vs. Fox News, political rallies and online ‘brawls’)
- Demand visible displays of loyalty (wearing crosses vs. wearing MAGA hats & flag pins)
- Use ritualistic language and call-and-response patterns (“Amen” vs. “Lock her up”)
- Promise belonging to something larger than oneself
- Offer clear boundaries between the righteous and the damned
Most importantly, they revere many of the same Cultural Monuments. This is where the systems become nearly indistinguishable to participants, and where the genius of the populist model reveals itself.
If you are unclear on my definition of Cultural Monuments, please see this blog post: https://dnaofdisaster.com/what-is-a-cultural-monument/
The Shared Blue-Sky Monuments:
- Christianity (or at least the cultural signifiers of Christianity)
- The Constitution (as sacred text, not working document or operating system of democracy)
- The Flag (as symbol of tribal belonging)
- “Traditional Values” (gender roles, sexual norms, family structure)
- Capitalism—as a Blue-Sky Cultural Monument, Capitalism cannot be questioned. It is rock-solidly entrenched
- The Second Amendment (as identity marker, not as a policy football)
The Shared Dark-Sky Monuments:
- Secular humanism (D. James Kennedy’s great enemy)
- “Elites” who look down on “ordinary Americans”
- Sexual minorities who threaten “traditional values”
- Immigrants who don’t share the “founding stock” identity
- The “liberal media” that mocks their beliefs, or at least the perception that they are mocked (related to Christian persecution complex)
- Government programmes that redistribute their “hard-earned” money to the “undeserving”
- Liberals and their policy goals are often referred to as “demonic strongholds” in the rhetorical framework of megachurch pastors who present the struggle to their congregations as literal battles between God and the Devil
When you’re inside either system, the Cultural Monuments look identical. A megachurch pastor and a populist demagogue can both rail against the same enemies, celebrate the same symbols, and receive the same “Amens” from their audiences. The difference lies not in the Cultural Monuments themselves, but in the goals of the cult leadership.
The Critical Distinction: Reformation vs. Affirmation
Here’s where the two systems diverge, and why Trump can be simultaneously unchristian and the perfect champion for Christians:
The Church’s Promise: “These ideals we present to you define what you should aspire to become. You are fallen, but through grace and effort, you can be reformed to embody these values. Jesus was perfect; you are not; the gap between you and Him is the space where your spiritual work must happen.”
The Populist’s Promise: “These components of identity define what you already are. You already embody these values simply by being who you are—a real American, a member of the founding stock, someone who has inherited this country from our ancestors—the Founding Fathers. The gap isn’t between you and perfection; the gap is between you and them, and that gap must be widened and defended.”
Do you see the sleight of hand? The church says: “You’re a sinner, but you can be redeemed through Christ.” The populist says: “You’re already redeemed by virtue of your identity; anyone who says otherwise is the enemy.”
Trump doesn’t need to be Christ-like because he’s not offering spiritual reformation. He’s offering political vindication and retribution for all the perceived persecution. He’s not their moral guide; he’s their champion, their weapon, their voice saying the quiet parts out loud. He’s Attila the Hun, not Jesus—flawed, aggressive, crass, and vengeful. He’s their street brawler, and he is fighting their battles against those who would do them harm. Their bodyguard.
The evangelical acceptance of Trump reveals that many have stopped purchasing “moral improvement” from their leaders. They’re now purchasing cultural dominance. The megachurch model has merged with the political rally, and the product has fundamentally changed. Now it’s about who gets to define what America means, what it stands for.
Why the Confusion Persists
The two systems can coexist so comfortably because they’re both built on the same foundation: in-group/out-group dynamics wrapped in the language of righteousness.
My parents’ pastor, if he were alive today, could preach against pride and greed on Sunday morning, and his congregation could nod along earnestly, genuinely believing they were spurning temptation, mending their ways, working to be better Christians. Then on Tuesday, those same parishioners could attend a Trump rally and cheer for policies rooted in pride (America First) and greed (Trump’s incredible appetite for grift), and vengeance against his political enemies, without experiencing a moment of cognitive dissonance.
Why? Because in both contexts, the same Cultural Monuments were being honoured, and the same enemies were being denounced. Perfect alignment. The church says “Satan is the enemy”; the populist says “the radical left is the enemy.” To someone inside the system, these feel like the same fight. The Cultural Monuments provide the continuity that makes the contradiction invisible.
This is particularly insidious because it allows people to feel they’re being faithful Christians whilst supporting policies and leaders that directly contradict Christ’s teachings about the poor, the stranger, the prisoner, the enemy. The Cultural Monuments have replaced the actual moral content. Performance of loyalty to the symbols has replaced the harder work of living according to the principles those symbols supposedly represent.
The Televangelists Saw This Coming
Thinking back to those snowy Ohio Sundays watching Robert Schuller’s “Hour of Power” and D. James Kennedy warning about “humanists,” I now see they were pioneering the merger. They were building congregations that looked like churches but functioned like political movements. Robert Schuller was a kinder, softer person with his “It takes guts to get out of ruts” and his insistence, when referring to homosexuality that “there is a better way.” He was more likeable. But Kennedy—he wasn’t just preaching the Gospel; he was defining enemies (humanists, secularists, liberals) and teaching his congregation that defending America from these enemies was itself a form of Christian witness. Kennedy was a warrior in a battle that was years away. At least for me it was.
The megachurch model was always quasi-political. It gathered thousands together, used sophisticated media production, created celebrity pastors, and promised belonging to something powerful and important. It’s a short step from “Come to our church and be part of God’s chosen people” to “Come to our rallies and be part of America’s chosen people.”
Trump didn’t invent this merger. He just recognised that the infrastructure was already built. The congregation was already assembled. The loyalty mechanisms were already in place. The enemies were already designated. All he had to do was step into the pulpit and start preaching a slightly different sermon—one where salvation came not through Christ, but through Making America Great Again by owning the ‘Libs’.
This isn’t a new tension in America. In a 2018 interview, Margaret Atwood explained that when she wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, her rule was that “nothing goes in there that doesn’t have a precedent in history or in real life right now.” She went on to describe how she believed that certain tendencies have been present in the United States since the seventeenth century, and that these tendencies don’t ever really go away. Two competing forces play themselves out over time, she said: a tendency towards fundamentalist theocracy, and a tendency towards a more egalitarian democracy. You can see the pendulum swing back and forth.
The American narrative we’ve been handed down is that the Puritans escaped England to obtain religious freedom. “But that’s only partly true,” Atwood explained. “They did it to get religious freedom for themselves but not for anybody else. And one of the next things they did was to persecute Quakers.” This is the in-group/out-group dynamic baked into American cultural DNA from the very beginning: freedom for us, persecution for everyone else.
By the 1970s, we had significant liberalisation of laws—civil rights, women’s rights, bodily autonomy. Joan Didion predicted what would come next. She observed that some people were not happy with these changes. “This is not their idea of how things should go,” Atwood recalled Didion saying. The 1980s brought the pushback and the political organisation of the religious right. They were already saying things like women should belong in the home. As Atwood noted wryly, this was curious given that women were “out there, running around like mice and opening bank accounts and having jobs and all this uppity stuff that they’re doing.”
What Trump offered in 2016 wasn’t just resistance to further liberalisation. He offered something more: permission to roll it all back, to reconstruct society along the lines of an imagined past where everyone knew their place. For a certain constituency, this was intoxicating.
The Manufacturing Process: Raw Materials and Finished Product
In capitalism, at least in part, the process is extractive by nature. Raw materials are gathered, worked by employees into a finished product, and sold on the open market at a profit. But what are the raw materials of the populist demagogue? And what, exactly, is the finished product? Could it be a remanufactured America? A reconstructed nation? Cleansed and refurbished? I think it resembles a startup in some ways—something like Amazon. Amazon didn’t invent anything new really; Amazon just took something already in existence and made it more readily available—availability approaching instant gratification, and just in time to spread the message on social media. Populist techniques also mesh completely with social media. As Andrew Lewis pointed out way back in 2010—”If you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” This of course refers to how user attention and personal data are being harvested, packaged, and sold to advertisers. Rather than being customers, users are considered the raw material or product in a system designed to maximise user engagement. Populism works so well as a self-perpetuating system because the populists have discovered that the raw materials are the identities of the customers themselves—their social rank, their race, their rung on the economic ladder, their historical background, their grievances both real and imagined. This was done on a massive scale in Germany in the 1930s—but with a manufactured, “Aryan” racial identity. We know how that ended. But what does today’s populist leader actually do with that raw material? He reflects it back to his congregation, but transformed. In the process, he needs to make his followers feel better about themselves. He tells them that their flaws are actually acceptable, even virtuous. It’s fine to be bigoted, because you (the group in the mirror) have a certain identity. You are real Americans. Your ancestors came across the Atlantic on ships to be free to practise your own religion. Your forebears braved the passage from Queenstown to New York, passed through Ellis Island, and inherited a country—a good country. We need to get back to that country—make it great again. Those ethnic and religious groups who were not present in America at the beginning, those whose ancestors did not build America—are not true Americans. They are newcomers and they do not deserve to inherit America, and their progeny do not deserve to inherit America. They don’t deserve to inherit America and they certainly don’t deserve to govern it. They are the “other.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is the implied MAGA message.
This rhetoric works remarkably well in a multicultural society where many different identities come together. The demagogue simply designates one group—say, conservatives or MAGA or the “real Americans”—as the true inheritors, and declares that nobody else has the right to govern. In a way, Trump has told his base that it’s acceptable to be a misogynistic racist bigot because everybody else is weak, “woke,” and doesn’t actually deserve to govern. They are the out-group, and they always will be.
The product of this startup—because that’s what Trump’s political movement essentially is, a business startup—is a sort of national pride that has its roots in identity. But this seems to have a fatal weakness, a DNA of Disaster: by its very nature, this in-group is defined by the populist demagogue himself, and who gets to be part of it is also controlled by him. If you displease him, you will surely be cast out as an apostate. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a loyal lieutenant, has found herself on the outs.
But I want to be more precise about what the product actually is. After observing this phenomenon throughout my lifetime, I believe the product is this: inherited rightful status requiring no maintenance or moral effort, plus permission to resent those who threaten it.
Many members of this group don’t seem to have status anxiety in the traditional sense. The redneck with the big American pickup truck isn’t worried about his status—he’s celebrating it. He’s been told he’s one of the “chosen ones,” the “real Americans,” the inheritors of what was built by his ancestors. He isn’t trying to climb a ladder; he believes he is already standing on the top of the only ladder that matters. The product isn’t relief from anxiety. The product is affirmation of entitlement.
The MAGA cult leader tells him: “You deserve this. You inherited this. They want to take it from you. It’s acceptable to hate them for that.”
The Dopamine Architecture: How Congregations Work
Dopamine is the brain’s reward chemical and it is the keystone of group psychology. In the “church system” sinners carry the burden of knowing they are ‘flawed’. In the populist model—those who carry a weight of self-doubt or social guilt (“those faults the out-group blames me for”). When the MAGA cult leader provides a space where those faults are not just forgiven, but rendered irrelevant by your membership, the brain experiences a massive rush of relief. It is the transition from anxiety to certainty. Physiologically it’s the dopamine hit that comes when this congregation gets together and tells themselves: “Despite all my faults—those that I know about and those the out-group blames me for possessing—I am good. And I have company. They are also all good, as long as they do not stray too far from our dogma.”
But what is this MAGA dogma? And what are the membership requirements?
First consider these ‘pillars’ which I call Cultural Monuments. As I have said before—not all monuments are set in stone.
The congregation must revere all the same Cultural Monuments:
- Jesus and Christianity (though notably not Christ’s actual teachings about the poor, the stranger, the enemy)
- Capitalism (as theology, not as an actual economic system with trade-offs and exploitation)
- The Second Amendment (the symbol, not the policy debate—and of course there will be collateral damage)
- The Constitution (the monument, not the actual document or its interpretation)
- The Flag (the symbol of tribal belonging)
- Above all, they must value the American Worker (the mythic figure, not actual workers’ material conditions)
If they do not revere these monuments appropriately, then they are apostates. They deserve to be cast out, banished, sent to some sort of “Hades” where all the others like them must go (deported).
These aren’t principles to live by. They’re totems to display. Loyalty signals. The equivalent of knowing the secret handshake. Crucially, they cost nothing to maintain except ritualistic affirmation. You don’t need to actually help the poor, or support policies that benefit American workers. You are free to shop at Walmart all you want—and Walmart earnings and the cumulative wealth of the Walton family show that you do. Nobody will call you out if you don’t offer your thoughts and prayers or a moment of silence after a mass shooting. You just need to perform reverence for the symbols at the right moments. Especially at Trump rallies. Salvation is truly easy in a Populist movement. Just show up and affirm your beliefs on election day.
The scale of difference between a megachurch and a political movement is worth noting. A successful megachurch might have ten thousand members. Trump’s movement encompasses tens of millions. The manufacturing process is the same, but the distribution system—twenty-four-hour news channels, social media, rally spectacles—allows for production at unprecedented scale.
The Requirement for Satan: Enemy Within and Enemy Without
Both the church and the populist demagogue need an adversary. We know the job description of Satan in the church: he is the eternal tempter, the source of evil, the explanation for why good people sometimes fail. His existence is necessary because without sin, there’s nothing to absolve. If the church banned sinners, what would there be to talk about?
But the populist’s Satan is more complex and more dangerous. The populist requires two types of enemies, and if they don’t openly exist, they must be manufactured.
The Enemy Within: The “Purge” of the Deep State
The most potent threat used to justify structural power grabs is the Deep State. By labelling career civil servants, intelligence officials, and judges as “unelected saboteurs,” the populist narrative justifies the dismantling of the administrative state. I covered this in my blog post available here: https://dnaofdisaster.com/the-vandalism-of-democracy-how-constitutional-flaws-enabled-the-ransacking-of-american-institutions/
The “Woke” Infiltration: The threat has evolved from simple policy differences to a “cultural virus.” By claiming that the military, schools, and federal agencies have been “captured” by radical ideologies, the leader justifies mass firings and the installation of loyalists (often through mechanisms like “Schedule F”).
The “RINO” (Republican In Name Only) represents the “enemy within”—a traitor often more despised than the external foe. This narrative of internal betrayal serves as a permanent excuse for why “the chosen” haven’t reached their promised land, keeping the congregation in a state of eternal vigilance and turning them against their own citizens. Just as Weimar-era rhetoric used “Judeo-Bolshevism” to scapegoat Jews and Communists for Germany’s decline, Trump targets “woke elites,” “RINOs,” and the “deep state” as an infiltrated force plotting to subvert the nation through institutional capture and “illegal” votes.
The Enemy Without
The Enemy Without is the external “existential threat” used to justify emergency measures and strongman rule. Where the Weimar Republic pointed to Moscow-directed communists as a revolutionary menace, Trump frames modern border issues—the “migrant invasion,” MS-13, and the official 2025 re-designation of Mexican cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organisations—as biological and national security threats.
The genius of this dual-enemy system is its self-sustaining logic: the Enemy Within (Deep State, RINOs, “Woke elites”) explains away the movement’s failures as internal sabotage, whilst the ‘Enemy From Without’ justifies the suspension of normal legal processes to meet a crisis. By framing the struggle as eternal, the populist eliminates all feedback loops; anyone who questions the narrative is immediately branded a “traitor” or a “collaborator.” As the rhetoric shifts from the political to the biological—citing the “poisoning” of the nation’s blood—the choice is reduced to a binary black-and-white moral reckoning, as President George Bush (the son) put it: you are either with us (the movement) or with the terrorists.
This is what I call Dark-Sky Monument building. You take the opposition’s Blue-Sky Monuments—their aspirational symbols—and invert them into threats. “Diversity” becomes “white replacement theory.” “Social justice” becomes “reverse racism.” “Expertise” becomes “elite contempt for ordinary Americans.” The demagogue doesn’t just fight the competition; he transforms their very symbols into sources of fear.
The Reichstag Fire Pattern: Manufacturing Crisis
One of the most important parts of my framework for understanding disaster is examining the catastrophic potential of a system. If we look at the Weimar Republic as a system, we can see how carefully and systematically the Nazis constructed their Satan figure out of the pre-established biases of the German folk.
Before the Reichstag Fire occurred in 1933, the Nazis spent years painting a picture of “Judeo-Bolshevism”—a conspiracy theory claiming that Jews and Communists were working together to destroy German culture and the economy. Germany was paralysed by political instability, frequent elections, and street brawls between the Nazi SA and the Communist Red Front. By portraying Communists as violent revolutionaries taking orders from Moscow, Hitler convinced the middle class and President Hindenburg that a bloody civil war was imminent.
Then came the perfect catalyst. On 27 February 1933, the German parliament building was set ablaze. A Dutch communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was caught at the scene. Whether he acted alone or was a Nazi plant is still debated by historians, but for Hitler, the “who” mattered less than the “how” he could use it.
The narrative was deployed within hours: the Nazis declared the fire was the signal for a nationwide Communist uprising. The public, gripped by panic, looked to Hitler for “law and order.” The result was the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and gave Hitler emergency powers. The catastrophic potential of the Weimar system—its structural vulnerabilities, its procedural weaknesses—had been fully exploited. Democracy was effectively over in Germany.
Now consider Operation Southern Spear, the 2025–2026 strikes on alleged drug boats, and the subsequent capture of Nicolás Maduro. When discussing these events alongside the Reichstag Fire, it’s important to distinguish between historical fact and modern political debate. The 1933 events are widely classified by historians as a manufactured crisis used to establish dictatorship. The parallels drawn to the current situation are often rooted in debates over executive overreach, lack of transparency, and the use of external threats to justify major domestic policy earthquakes.
Critics point to several troubling patterns:
The “Imminent Threat” Narrative: In 1933, the threat was “Judeo-Bolshevism.” In 2025, the Trump administration designated cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organisations and “narco-terrorists.” By framing a criminal issue (drug smuggling) as a military one (war on terror), the executive branch bypasses traditional legal systems and congressional oversight.
The Erasure of Evidence: Historians note that the Nazis destroyed evidence regarding the Reichstag Fire to maintain their narrative. Human rights groups have pointed out that by using lethal airstrikes on boats rather than interdicting them (the traditional Coast Guard method), the U.S. military effectively destroys any evidence—drugs or witnesses—that would prove the vessels were actually smuggling narcotics. The threat becomes unfalsifiable. We’re told to trust that the boats contained fentanyl, but the evidence lies at the bottom of the Caribbean.
The Bypass of Legislative Approval: Just as the Reichstag Fire Decree bypassed the German parliament, the 2025 strikes and the January 2026 “Operation Absolute Resolve” in Caracas were conducted without a formal Declaration of War or a new Authorisation for Use of Military Force from Congress.
There are significant differences, of course. The Reichstag Fire was a staged (IMO) domestic event used to turn Germans against each other, whilst the drug boat strikes are a foreign policy action directed at external actors. Hitler’s government operated in a media vacuum they controlled entirely, whereas today there is still pushback from the United Nations Human Rights Office, the U.S. Senate (https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-global-implications-of-the-us-military-operation-in-venezuela/), and international courts. And unlike the largely fabricated threat of a “Communist uprising” in 1933, the United States is facing a genuine fentanyl crisis with somewhere around 40,000 deaths annually.
But the primary takeaway for analysts is the expansion of executive power. In both 1933 and 2025, the use of “emergency” or “war” powers allowed a leader to take actions that would be illegal under normal circumstances—such as extrajudicial killings or the arrest of a foreign head of state—by arguing that the safety of the nation outweighs the “red tape” of the law.
This is the catastrophic potential of the populist model: once emergency powers are normalised, once evidence destruction becomes standard practice, once questioning the narrative marks you as an enemy within, the system loses its ability to self-correct. And we know that—at least in the first year of Trump’s second term—Congress has not been an equal partner in the distribution of powers.
The Constitution as Unchangeable American Cultural Monument
If we look at the Constitution as a sacred document, we enter the realm of the almighty. There are people who believe the document was handed down to us by God through the Founding Fathers. But this Constitution is a very unbending document—a document that was, at its genesis, a foundational set of commandments. But its elevated status as a sanctified, venerated Cultural Monument gives it resistance to updates as an operating system. Those who want it to stay sacred and “untouched” by human hands will resist any changes whatsoever. Those who stand to benefit from its many flaws—the Electoral College that enables minority rule, the Senate’s malapportionment that gives Wyoming the same power as California, the difficulty of amendment that makes adaptation nearly impossible—will resist the slightest reform.
The delegates who wrote the Constitution were exclusively white, wealthy, land-owning men, leaving out a number of groups, including women. I am certain there are those who believe that the original document—which was in reality created as a bulwark against the tyranny of King George III—should be the framework and blueprint by which we should reconstruct our society, giving up all the progress we have made since. These conservatives want to deconstruct all our progress: women’s rights, bodily autonomy, equal representation, civil rights. They want to wipe it all away and go back to the old ways. Women kept in the home, barefoot and pregnant, going to church on Sundays. Don’t fight the patriarchy.
This is the reconstructionist impulse, and it reveals what the populist product actually promises: not just maintenance of current status, but reversal of decades of egalitarian progress. The populist congregation isn’t simply defending what they have. They’re being sold a return to an imagined past where hierarchies were clear, roles were defined, and certain people knew their place.
The DNA of Disaster: Why This System Is Designed to Fail
In my book The DNA of Disaster: Catastrophe by Design, I present a framework that can be applied to events that can help identify catastrophic potential. Let’s have a look at the current situation with this lens:
Veto Nodes and Blocked Feedback
In the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, engineers who knew the O-ring system best were unable to get their concerns taken seriously. This, in effect, constitutes a veto node, which blocked the flow of critical information to NASA management. Their judgement and agency were overruled by others in the hierarchy (NASA Management). These managers reflected the opinions of those who had other priorities—in my assessment, President Reagan and his geopolitical ambitions for the Teacher in Space Project.
In a populist takeover, potential veto nodes are silenced. Courts are packed, loyalists are installed, career public servants are let go—having been sacrificed on the altar of the “deep state.” Any member who questions this takeover or whether the enemy is truly as threatening as claimed, gets purged. This eliminates feedback about reality, about norms, and results in the elimination of centuries of accumulated institutional knowledge. There is no-one left to apply the brakes. Climate scientists, public health experts, election officials, military generals, intelligence analysts—all become suspect the moment their findings contradict the narrative. The system is designed to be blind.
Value Chain Distortion
Understanding Value Chains helps organisations understand the full range of processes that produce the product or service they were designed to produce. Through error, these processes cannot produce a “better” product than that which they were designed to produce.
If the Value Chain is diverted by a powerful leader primarily to boost his personal brand and to inflate the pride of a nation, these implied goals may conflict with the safety of passengers and crew. In the Challenger case, geopolitical priorities conflicted with mission safety. In the populist case, the Value Chain is optimised to produce feelings of cultural dominance and tribal belonging and retribution against political enemies, not actual governance outcomes or material improvement in people’s lives.
Success is measured in rally attendance, television ratings, and social media engagement—not in whether people’s wages have risen, their communities are safer, or their children have better opportunities. The product is the feeling, not the reality. This is a system designed to prioritise appearance over function.
The Trojan Horse Folly
In the Space Shuttle programme, twenty-four successful missions created a false sense that future needs could be met by the current product. This is the Trojan Horse Folly: misunderstanding the true nature of an intelligent design. Past success breeds dangerous overconfidence. But our ‘intelligently designed’ and ‘holy’ constitution are riddled with flaws. These are structural flaws- holes that can let water in and cause the ship to sink. We’ve known about them. People have exploited them. But we should repair them for the future generations, not milk them for advantage.
In populism, early electoral victories breed the conviction that the system is working. Trump won in 2016, despite losing the popular vote. Republicans maintained control. The Supreme Court was reshaped. These successes create the illusion that the designed system is robust and sustainable, when in fact it’s becoming increasingly maladapted to environmental conditions—demographic change, economic transformation, global interconnection, regard by our allies, climate reality.
The movement assumes that because the formula worked once, it will work indefinitely. But the formula depends on manufacturing ever-greater crises to justify ever-greater concentrations of power. Eventually, you run out of enemies to designate, or the actual crises (economic collapse, institutional failure, international isolation, climate catastrophes) become too severe to blame on the out-group. But we know the Republicans will try to blame anyone else they can pin it on.
Supervised Neglect
Both the Concorde and the Space Shuttle entered phases of what I call supervised neglect—known problems swept under the rug because addressing them would require pausing operations, which would damage the product’s prestige. Concorde had tyre problems from before its first flight. The Shuttle had O-ring blowby detected as early as 1981. But these were Blue-Sky Monuments, symbols of national pride, and nobody wanted to look too closely to find flaws when the flags were flying high. Looking too closely and blowing the whistle was a career-ending proposition. Yes, we have seen this before.
The populist movement exhibits the same pattern. The contradictions are obvious: a moral movement led by an immoral man; economic populism that delivers tax cuts for the wealthy; “America First” policies that alienate allies and strengthen adversaries; “law and order” rhetoric accompanying pardons for violent January 6th riot offenders. These contradictions are known, documented, impossible to miss. But they’re ignored because the flags must keep flying. The MAGA movement must go on. To ground it for repairs—to admit the design flaws—would be to admit that the chosen ones might not be so chosen after all.
The Missing Sensor: Cognitive Control Without Environmental Feedback
Cognitive control requires feedback from the environment. The small child learning to ride a bike must also learn to avoid hitting the curb. Markets provide feedback in the form of the Chain of Tribute—payment for products or services. If the Chain of Tribute dries up, production dries up as well.
But populist movements, like Soviet-style planned economies, suffer a specific blindness. A product is designed, prototyped, and put into production, but it is poorly adapted to changing environmental conditions. The designed system throws off noise—unexpected failures that indicate malfunction—but this information does not always make the journey back to cognitive control—and if it does—cognitive control may not give it the time of day. When do you stop production when nobody is buying, but nobody really knows? In the Soviet times, one indicator were the piles of boots lying about that were the wrong colour or the wrong size. But the customer feedback never made it to cognitive control. What do authoritarians usually do? Apply more control. It’s what they know. It’s all they know- and then when things go wrong, point fingers.
In the Challenger disaster, NASA managers placed themselves in the veto player position and blocked feedback information from the engineers who were right next to the production line. Cognitive control was handed over to an entity (President Reagan) who was completely unaware of the environment and did not even know to look for the binoculars to check for icebergs.
In the populist system, cognitive control is handed over to a ‘charismatic leader’ who is not just unaware of the immediate environment, but actively hostile to information about it. Climate data, economic indicators, public health statistics, diplomatic warnings—all are dismissed as “fake news” or conspiracies by the enemy within. The leader operates on instinct, grievance, and the immediate feedback of crowd approval, not on empirical reality. Creating metaphorical piles of boots that nobody wants.
This is the catastrophic design flaw. When you eliminate feedback sensors and hand control to someone divorced from environmental reality, disaster becomes not just possible but inevitable. The only question is when and how severe.
Why This Matters: The Attention Economy and the Oxygen of Movements
Margaret Atwood observed that the European intellectuals she encountered couldn’t believe America could turn backwards. They wanted America to remain the “beacon of light, hope and freedom” that was the America of their hopes and dreams. The idea that it could turn round and go the other way was just horrifying to them. America was a Blue-Sky Monument not only to Europeans of that time, but to many throughout the world.
But Atwood also noted that these tendencies—towards fundamentalist theocracy and towards egalitarian democracy—never really go away. They swing back and forth like a pendulum. The question is: what makes the pendulum swing?
I believe attention is the critical resource. The populist model depends absolutely on commanding attention. Without attention, the reflection process fails—if no one’s looking, there’s no mirror. The tribal bonding weakens—rallies need crowds. The permission structure loses power—taboo-breaking needs an audience to shock. The manufactured crises lose their urgency—the Enemy Within and Enemy Without require constant reinforcement to maintain their threat level.
Trump’s particular genius was recognising that negative attention works as well as positive. He turned the entire news media into unpaid manufacturing partners in his identity-affirmation factory. Every outrage, every scandal, every norm violation generated more attention, which fed back into the system as proof of his importance and proof of the enemy’s obsession with destroying him.
But in our media-dominated world, what can we actually do but take a break from the intense, attention-hogging effect that this one politician has on daily life. Trump doesn’t deserve our attention on his own merits, but the fact that he lost the popular vote twice, and won it once at only a 1.5% margin, should worry us indeed. Trump has become a movement, a bandwagon, and a worrying one at that. If you examine his credentials, his speeches, his businesses, and his accomplishments, not one thing was done by Trump alone—it’s all because he was able to reach a tipping point where others would jump on his MAGA movement. It’s not just J.D. Vance and others like him who have something to gain from the association with Trump—but his entire ecosystem. The whole thing, echo chamber and all the rest who smell an opportunity. What he is doing now is not Trump himself; it’s hundreds of people who come together to act like a corporation, with corporate interests placed front and centre.
How do we starve this machine? Withdrawing attention isn’t just personal self-care, though it is that. It’s withdrawing the raw material that the entire manufacturing process depends on. Without constant reinforcement through the news cycle, the congregation might begin to notice that their actual lives haven’t improved, that the promised victories are hollow, that they’re being extracted from rather than served.
Will we ever learn? History suggests we have difficulty learning from catastrophes that occur in different domains. We see the Titanic as a ship disaster, Challenger as a space disaster, Concorde as an aviation disaster. We fail to recognise the common pattern: when national pride or political ambition distorts the Value Chain, when veto nodes block critical feedback, when monuments become too sacred to inspect for flaws, when cognitive control is handed to those divorced from environmental reality, disaster is not just possible. It’s designed in from the start.
The populist demagogue offers absolution without reformation, status without merit, belonging without obligation. It’s an attractive product, and it scales remarkably well in the attention economy. But it’s a designed system that cannot account for its environment, that eliminates its own feedback mechanisms, that optimises for appearance over function.
The catastrophe, when it comes, will not be because we failed to see the warning signs. It will be because we saw them and decided the monument was too important to ground for repairs.
Kind Regards,
Devin Savage
Tübingen
