Trump as ‘Myth’ is understood in Moscow. They reciprocate.

Alastair Crooke, 21 August 2025

Trump’s ascent to a portion of the ‘Mythic’ has become only too evident. As John Greer has observed:

“It’s becoming difficult even for the most dyed-in-the-wool rationalist to go on believing that Trump’s political career can be understood in the prosaic terms of ‘politics as usual’”.

Trump the man, of course, is in no way mythic. He’s an elderly, slightly infirm, American real estate oligarch, with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego.

“The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant ‘story’. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happen but always are”.

Later, myth came to mean stories hinting at a kernel of inner meaning. This doesn’t imply a requirement to be factual; yet it is this latter dimension that gives Trump “his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time”, Greer suggests. He comes back literally from everything thrown to destroy him.

He becomes what Carl Jung called ‘the Shadow’. As Greer writes:

“Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way the latter brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay Wotan, that much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype”

Wotan in myth is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife -- now here, now there -- and works magic. Jung thought it piquant to a degree that an ancient God of storm and frenzy -- the long quiescent Wotan -- should come to life in the German Youth Movement.

What has this to do with the Alaska summit with President Putin?