When Freedom Loses Its Soul: Trump and the End of a World

The world didn't end with a bang. It ended with a quote.

In an interview with the New York Times, Donald Trump declared that only his "morality" and his "mind" limit the exercise of his global power. Read that again. Let it settle in your bones like a cold draft through an old window. A man holding the most powerful office on Earth just told you — plainly, without shame — that there is no external constraint on what he can do. Only what he thinks. Only what he feels is right.

Paranoid delusion? Sure, partly. But as the source text brilliantly observes, Trump's brutal frankness often carries a "metaphysical truth that transcends the realm of psychopathology alone". And that's what terrifies me. Not the man. The truth he accidentally reveals.

The Morning Scroll and the Smell of Endings

I know this feeling. You know it too.

You wake up. You reach for your phone. The screen's blue glow hits your face before the morning light does. And as you scroll through the headlines, there's that creeping sensation — like the hum of a machine winding down — that the world is approaching its end. Or that it's already ended, and we're just catching up .

I've spent years studying the cosmos from a wheelchair in Emilia-Romagna. I've looked at dying stars, at galaxies ripping apart, at the quiet entropy that governs everything. And I'll tell you something: the death of a world order feels eerily similar. It doesn't happen all at once. It happens in increments — in phrases dropped casually at press conferences, in policies nobody voted for, in the slow erosion of words that once meant something.

What Do We Mean by "World"?

Let me simplify a dense philosophical idea here, because it matters.

"World" doesn't just mean everything that exists — the trees, the oceans, the Wi-Fi signal you're stealing from your neighbour. Heidegger argued that "world" is an existential — a meaningful constellation with human beings at its centre, shaped by our participation in a shared symbolic order . In plain terms: the "world" is the story we collectively agree to live inside. It's the framework of meaning. The compass.

And the compass that's now spinning wildly? It was set in 1789.

The Trinity That Made Us Modern

The French Revolution didn't just topple a monarchy. It built a world. "Liberty, equality, fraternity" — those three words became the operating system of modernity . Everything since — liberalism, socialism, communism, human rights law, the United Nations — runs on some version of that code.

Here's a beautiful observation from the source: we feel a sense of contemporaneity when we read about the men and women of the revolutionary era. Their philosophical and ethical dilemmas still feel like ours. But the world before 1789 — the wigs, the powder, the exaggerated formalities of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon — feels alien, sealed behind glass in a museum . We can admire it. We can't inhabit it.

That's because something identical persisted from 1789 until, as the text puts it, "the day before yesterday" .

What was it?

The Binding Thread

The revolutionary trinity wasn't a list of values — not the way the "obscene trinity of God, Country, and Family" functions today . It established an indissoluble link: no freedom without equality, no equality without freedom, and no free equality without fraternity extended to all of humanity .

Pope Francis understood this. His encyclical Fratelli Tutti remains, as the source argues, "one of the most solid manifestos of anti-Trumpism" . And the great Toussaint Louverture understood it too — arms in hand — when he had to remind the French Jacobins that "fraternity" must extend even to those they enslaved, founding the first Black Republic in Haiti .

Was this trinity always honoured? Of course not. The source is unflinching about this: "How many horrendous crimes have been committed in the name of freedom, equality, and fraternity! How much injustice has been masked in free democratic institutions!" . The genocide in the Vendée happened under the Revolution's own banner.

And yet.

The connection was binding in terms of public discourse. You had to accept it — at least formally, at least rhetorically — to be legitimised in the political sphere . Hypocrisy, as the old saying goes, is an indirect tribute to virtue. And all the great institutions built to rationally regulate human conflict — the UN, international courts, human rights frameworks — rest on that tribute .

The Severing

This is where Trump's words become philosophically devastating.

When he says only his "morality" and his "mind" limit his power, he's not just bragging. He's announcing a new metaphysics. Freedom has been severed from equality and fraternity and placed as the exclusive foundation of power . The sovereign subject decides. His criteria are subjective. His will is the law.

The source reaches back nearly two thousand years for the perfect parallel: Juvenal, the Roman satirical poet, put these words in the mouth of a debauched matron — "Hoc volo, sic iubeo. Sit pro ratione voluntas." This is what I want, this is what I command. Will is reason .

Trump's phrase is a replica of this. And on a metaphysical level, it means making free will the supreme authority — the very "reason" of reality. The intellect doesn't guide; it serves. It provides the tools for whatever the will demands .

Doesn't that chill you?

The Tech Lords and the Phantom of Freedom

Now something clicks into place. The unconditional support of Big Tech magnates for the Trumpian project isn't random. It's philosophical .

They profess the most unbridled anarcho-capitalism. They consider any limitation of free will in the name of a supposed common good to be an attack on individual freedom . And here's the key insight: only the intellect can conceptualise a good that is "common" — a good that transcends private interest. The common good is a necessary good, beyond all contingencies. "Necessity" is the exclusive object of the intellect .

But capital doesn't need necessity. Capital needs a supremely free will — unshackled, unaccountable, infinite in its appetite. The process of incessant self-valorisation of capital sees the common good only as an ideological "shackle" from which to break free . That's what MAGA supporters hate when they hate "leftism." Not a political programme. A philosophical constraint.

And here's the darkest line in the entire source: this phantom of freedom — this will detached from reason, from equality, from fraternity — is precisely what "the ancient masters identified as the root of evil" .

What the Stars Taught Me About Constraints

I want to pause here and get personal. Because I think about constraints differently than most people.

I live with dystonia — a movement disorder that put me in a wheelchair before I could form memories of walking freely. I've had a deep brain stimulation implant drilled into my skull and later removed. I've undergone surgeries that left me staring at hospital ceilings in Bologna, in Milan, wondering if the next morning would bring improvement or more pain.

Constraints are my daily reality. The weight of gravity in my limbs. The resistance of a body that won't cooperate with what my mind envisions.

And here's what I've learned: constraints aren't the enemy of freedom. They're its architecture. A star doesn't shine because it's free from gravity. It shines because gravity compresses hydrogen until fusion ignites. Remove the constraint, and you don't get more light. You get diffuse gas. Nothing.

The revolutionary trinity understood this. Freedom without the constraint of equality becomes tyranny. Freedom without the constraint of fraternity becomes solipsism. And a will that recognises no limit outside itself isn't free at all — it's just chaotic. It's a collapsing star, not a shining one.

The Performative Power of Abstract Justice

There's a phrase in the source that I keep returning to, the way you return to a sentence in a book that changes how you see everything: "There is a performative power of abstract justice that cannot be renounced in the name of a realism that claims to be unprejudiced but is only condescending to horror" .

Read that slowly.

The "realists" — the ones who say the world has always been brutal, stop being naive — aren't being honest. They're being complicit. Because even if the ideals of 1789 were never perfectly realised, their mere articulation constrained power. The fact that a leader had to frame actions within the language of universal justice — even dishonestly — created a barrier. A friction. A space where resistance could breathe .

Remove that language, and you remove the friction. Power slides forward without resistance. And we've seen, throughout the 20th century, what frictionless power looks like.

So Where Does This Leave Us?

I don't have a neat conclusion. I distrust neat conclusions — they're usually lies dressed in Sunday clothes.

What I have is a question. If the world that began in 1789 is truly ending — if the link between freedom, equality, and fraternity is being dissolved not by accident but by intention, not in the shadows but in broad daylight, in New York Times interviews — then what world are we entering?

The source suggests we're returning to something pre-modern. A world where the sovereign's will is the law. Where the intellect serves power rather than guiding it. Where the common good is dismissed as sentimentality.

I refuse to accept that.

Not because I'm naive. I'm a physicist — I know the universe doesn't care about our preferences. But I'm also a human being who's spent his entire life proving that constraints don't destroy possibility. They create it. Every surgery, every setback, every morning I've woken up in this wheelchair and chosen to keep going — that's not freedom despite limitation. That's freedom through limitation.

Never give up. That's not a slogan for me. It's an ontology.

The world that began in 1789 wasn't perfect. It was hypocritical, violent, and often blind to its own contradictions. But it gave us a language — a framework — within which justice could at least be demanded. Losing that language isn't realism. It's surrender.

And I don't do surrender.

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Gerd Dani is the founder and president of FreeAstroScience, a science and cultural group