Photograph Source: Vice President – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s re-election marks not just a political turning point but the ascendance of a corpse-like order, a nation stiffening under the weight of its own decay. His second coming is less a victory than a death march, a spectral procession of hollow men in red ties and stiff gaits—zombies with ice in their veins. Videos of Trump dancing evoke images of him moving in a style that is jerky, lifeless, as if his body resents rhythm itself. A wooden plank with a painted sneer, twitching to the anthem of reaction, soulless and mean. No body on fire here. no slow bend toward desire, no trace of the supple grace that lives in a world still capable of love. Instead, the image signals the aesthetic of a new order of crudely celebrated as the manosphere—puffed-up bodies, drunk on steroids and grievance, exuding the acrid scent of sweat and power.

This is the culture that Trumpism has wrought: stripped of tenderness, of improvisation, of joy. Gone is the world I knew as a working-class kid, where music spilled into the streets, where voices—aching, defiant, untamed—set bodies in motion. Etta James wailing, Billie Holiday lingering on the edge of heartbreak, Nina Simone playing the piano like she was conjuring a storm. Little Anthony and the Imperials harmonizing into the night. This was a world of movement, of bodies ignited by something more than rage—by love, longing, the exquisite pain of feeling too much.

But in the America of Trump 2025, the only bodies that matter are those that march in unison, rigid and obedient. His regime, unbound by law or morality, has reconfigured the machinery of the state into an instrument of vengeance. The January 6th insurrectionists walk free, hailed as patriots. Federal agencies are gutted, purged of dissent. Civil rights protections are erased with the stroke of a pen. Universities, once imperfect sanctuaries of critical thought, are being remade into white Christian indoctrination centers. And in an act of breathtaking cruelty, thousands of immigrants await detention in Guantánamo Bay, that purgatorial space of empire where justice goes to die.

This is not simply the return of authoritarianism; it is its evolution—leaner, more technologically adept, more deeply........

© CounterPunch