Part 7: The Hyperstition President: How Trump Became a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Part 1: The Dark Enlightenment Lens: Understanding the Slow Strangulation of Democracy
Part 3: Silicon Valley's Unholy Alliance: How Tech Wealth Powers the New Religious Right
Part 4: From Heidegger to Here: The Philosophical Roots of America's Alt Right
Part 5: Accelerating Toward Autocracy: Nick Land's Vision and Its Implementation
What Is Hyperstition?
In an age where reality often feels stranger than fiction, the idea that stories can shape the world is no longer a metaphor – it’s a method. Among the uncanniest concepts to emerge from late 20th-century theory is hyperstition: a term coined by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), a renegade collective of philosophers, artists, and theorists operating out of Warwick University in the 1990s.
Hyperstition is a portmanteau of ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition,’ but its meaning cuts deeper than either term alone. A hyperstition is a belief, narrative, or fiction that makes itself real through its spread and circulation. It doesn’t describe the world - it rewrites it. These are stories that act as seeds, growing into material consequences through repetition, belief, and feedback loops between culture and politics. They are engines of transformation.
In the world of hyperstition, myth has muscle. The future is constructed, conjured, summoned into being. This was once the domain of science fiction, cybernetics, and fringe philosophy. Today, it is the logic of modern politics. And no one embodies it more completely than Donald J. Trump.
Across two presidential terms, countless scandals, failed impeachments, and a media apparatus unable to look away, Trump has done more than defy political gravity - he has revealed something essential about how power now works in the 21st century. His rise was not just political; it was mythopoetic. A creature of reality television and tabloid excess, Trump’s ascent has followed the logic of hyperstition: the transformation of a caricature into a commander-in-chief through sheer repetition, spectacle, and belief.
Trump did not need to persuade; he needed to perform. And in doing so, he did not merely win election: he rewrote the rules of reality.
In this article, we explore what it means to call Donald Trump the Hyperstition President. From the alt-right’s meme warfare and QAnon’s viral mythology, to Steve Bannon’s media strategies and the recursive nightmare of cable news, we will trace how Trump’s myth was manufactured and how, in a media-saturated culture collapsing under the weight of its own fictions, he came to embody a new mode of political being.
We begin by returning to the concept of hyperstition itself: where it came from, what it means, and why it now matters more than ever.
Hyperstition in a Post-Truth Era
The rise of hyperstition coincides with the collapse of consensus reality. For much of the 20th century, liberal democracies functioned on a broadly agreed-upon set of facts, curated and communicated by institutions, newspapers, public broadcasters, universities, etc. This consensus was always imperfect and often exclusionary, but it acted as a kind of stabilising force. Today, that centre has collapsed.
We now live in what many have called the post-truth era, a term popularised during the twin shocks of Brexit and Trump’s 2016 election (Flood, 2016.) But the phrase doesn’t go far enough. We are not simply beyond truth; we are trapped in a reality where competing fictions vie for dominance, and the power of a claim lies not in its veracity, but in its virality.
This is the perfect terrain for hyperstition to flourish.
In a post-truth landscape, narratives are no longer judged by whether they reflect reality. They’re instead judged by whether they stick. Belief becomes a kind of magic, and attention a form of currency. Memes travel faster than reason. Viral clips, misquotes, conspiracy theories and contrarian hot takes are now more influential than policy papers or parliamentary debate. The result is a cultural logic in which fiction manufactures the world.
In this environment, hyperstitional narratives take root easily, and are all about reshaping what people think is possible. And once an idea takes hold, no matter how absurd, it can begin to influence behaviour, choices, elections, and even laws. ‘They’re coming for your kids!’ might be a baseless claim, but it has real-world effects when it fuels schoolbook bans and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. ‘The election was stolen!’ doesn’t require proof; it just needs momentum.
Trump did not create this epistemic breakdown, but he is its master practitioner. He intuited, long before most of his opponents, that truth had become secondary to spectacle. More crucially, he understood that belief is a political weapon. If you can get enough people to believe a fiction, you can bend the world around it.
Hyperstition thrives in such conditions because it mirrors the logics of acceleration, media saturation, and ideological fatigue. In the face of institutional decline, algorithmic feeds have become the new architects of reality. They anticipate and reinforce what people want to see. The future is not being written by slow deliberation, but by recursive loops of content and consumption, where the most outrageous narrative often wins.
When Trump declared in 2016 that only he could fix America, it sounded like the fantasy of a demagogue. And yet, millions believed and acted on it. When he said he would “drain the swamp” (Kennedy, 2017,) it didn’t matter that he surrounded himself with billionaires and loyalists. The hyperstition had already taken root: Trump as the outsider saviour, the billionaire messiah who spoke for the forgotten American. The fiction became a reality, because it was repeated, shared, memed, and felt.
In the post-truth era, the conditions of hyperstition have become the conditions of politics itself. This is about fiction versus fiction, and the most potent, emotionally resonant story wins.
Trump as a Hyperstitional Creation
To understand Donald Trump as a hyperstitional entity is to grasp that his power was never simply political. It was also mythological. Long before he descended that golden escalator in 2015, Trump was already a fiction. He was a recurring character in American life: a tabloid playboy, a business ‘mogul,’ a guest on Oprah, a punchline in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. But most consequentially, he was the host and executive producer of The Apprentice, a reality television show that rebranded him in the American imagination as a decisive, successful tycoon.
That version of Trump, the made-for-TV Trump, became the prototype for his political persona. And in classic hyperstitional fashion, the fiction came to replace the man. The real estate failures, the bankruptcies, the lawsuits, the chaos: all of it was absorbed and overwritten by the TV myth.
“You’re fired!”
Trump became synonymous with power, efficiency, and dominance. The audience accepted the illusion, and they voted it into office.
This is hyperstition at work: the fiction that makes itself real through repetition, desire, and belief. Trump did not become president in spite of being a media caricature, he became president because of it. He was already imagined as a symbol of strength and success, particularly by those who felt the system had abandoned them. What they saw in Trump was not a coherent ideology but a vessel. Someone who could become real if only enough people believed.
His supporters projected onto him every quality they felt was missing from Washington: authenticity, toughness, rebelliousness, wealth, independence. In Trump, the right found their antihero: a billionaire who claimed to hate the elites, a celebrity who said what they couldn’t, a man who looked like he had already won. The fiction was emotionally resonant. Its truth did not matter.
And like all effective hyperstitions, the Trump myth evolved. The 2016 campaign cultivated a populist fantasy: Trump as the outsider, the wrecking ball, the saviour. He claimed he would drain the swamp, build a wall, and “make America great again.” These were not policies in the traditional sense; they were slogans, memetic incantations designed to invoke a lost era that never quite existed. And by invoking that fiction, he shaped political reality around it.
In office, the hyperstition deepened. The scandals, the chaos, the impeachments, they only fed the narrative. To his base, every accusation became proof of persecution. Every media critique was confirmation that he was the one telling the truth. He framed himself not just as a president, but as a prophetic figure - one who was under attack because he was the only one fighting for the people.
And when he lost in 2020, the hyperstition adapted again. The claim that the election was stolen. Lacking evidence, coherence, or credibility, it was nonetheless widely believed. Why? Because it fit the myth. The Trump story could not end in defeat. So, it didn’t. His followers simply rewrote the ending. The myth reasserted itself, detached from material facts but grounded in emotional truth.
This is what makes Trump the first true Hyperstition President. He is the logical culmination of its conditions. He exists at the intersection of media, money, emotion, and belief. He exploited and reprogrammed the system in his image.
And as we are now in the second term shaped not by the surprise of his rise but by the entrenchment of his mythology, we must recognise that we are no longer dealing with a conventional political actor. We are dealing with a myth that thinks it is a man; a fiction that has rewritten the real.
Memes, Prophecy, and Chaos Magic
The deeper one ventures into the hyperstitional logic of Trumpism, the more it begins to resemble a form of modern-day magic. Not the sleight-of-hand kind, but the symbolic, memetic kind: chaos magic for the digital age. Trump’s power came from the manipulation of symbols, the weaponisation of belief, and the strategic deployment of viral repetition. In this sense, he didn’t just ride the meme wave. He became the wave.
Memes were not just jokes in the 2016 and 2020 elections; they were sigils. Charged symbols circulating through online networks, generating cultural and political momentum. The alt-right’s deployment of meme warfare, most infamously through platforms like 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter, was not accidental. It was an intentional strategy to bypass mainstream discourse and seed new realities. Cartoon frogs, doctored videos, ironic slogans, deepfakes, and disinformation campaigns worked like digital spells, reshaping the collective unconscious one post at a time.
Trump himself became a totem in this ritual space: a memetic president whose every tweet was a pulse of chaos. He could say the unsayable, lie with impunity, contradict himself hourly, and still maintain dominance. His power wasn’t grounded in consistency or logic, but in affect. What mattered was the signal strength, not the signal clarity. His function wasn’t to convince but to destabilise. To destroy the shared coordinates of reality. To make belief itself the battlefield.
This is where chaos magic enters the frame. A school of thought within modern occultism that emphasises personal belief and symbolic manipulation over fixed dogma (Greenwood, 2023.) The central idea is that belief is a tool. Use it well, and you can reshape the world. A sigil, in chaos magic, is a personalised symbol charged with intent, one that, once released into the subconscious, bypasses rational resistance and acts as a transformative agent.
The alt-right adapted this logic perfectly. The “Kekistan” mythology, the frog-god meme known as Pepe, and the use of ironic Nazi aesthetics were all forms of memetic warfare. Absurd, offensive, disorienting. But in chaos magic, disorientation is a feature, not a bug. It breaks down old belief structures so that new ones can take root.
Steve Bannon, a devotee of disruption, seemed to understand this implicitly. His strategy of “flooding the zone with shit” (Stelter, 2021) seemed cynical but was instead mystical in its consequences. It didn’t matter if Trump’s lies were disproven; what mattered was that truth itself became unstable. The more confusion, the better. In this chaos, a new reality could be imposed, one where Trump was always the winner, always the victim, always the saviour.
Trump’s own behaviour mirrors the logic of the magician. He casts himself as persecuted and prophetic, a truth-teller and a victim, a billionaire and an everyman. He is paradox made flesh. He is whatever his supporters need him to be at any given moment. This plasticity is not weakness, however. It is a kind of power. A shape-shifting performance art in which contradiction is strength and belief is currency.
Even QAnon, often dismissed as fringe lunacy, follows a hyperstitional and magical logic. It operates like a participatory religion: cryptic prophecies, good-versus-evil mythology, and a call to secret knowledge. Every failed prediction is reinterpreted as part of a bigger plan. Every anomaly is proof of hidden truth. It is the perfect digital-age faith because it is immune to falsification, fuelled by narrative, and endlessly self-reinforcing.
In this climate, politics becomes a kind of augmented reality game. Conspiracy theorists are no longer outside the system. They are the system. Belief has overrun bureaucracy. The meme is mightier than the law.
And Trump? He’s not just a president. He’s the Grand Magus of this chaotic domain. A figure who intuitively understands that in an era of collapsing meaning, performance and prophecy can overpower governance and fact.
The spell has been cast. The question now is: can it be broken?
The Trump Singularity: Hyperreality and Media Feedback Loops
By the time Donald Trump entered the White House, he had already collapsed the boundary between the real and the representational. There was no longer a meaningful distinction between Trump the man, Trump the media phenomenon, and Trump the myth. He had become a kind of hyperreality - a term borrowed from Jean Baudrillard to describe a state in which simulations of reality become more real than the thing they supposedly represent (Baudrillard, 1981.)
In a hyperreal system, the original is irrelevant. What matters is the copy, the symbol, the performance. Trump, as a cultural and political figure, is no longer tethered to biography or truth. He is a feedback loop. He exists because he is talked about. He thrives not in spite of the media’s criticism, but precisely because of its obsessive focus on him. Every scandal becomes a spotlight. Every outburst a headline. Every lie a story. This is the Trump Singularity.
It is the moment where Trump and the media become inseparable; locked in a mutual dependency that neither can fully escape. News organisations rail against him, fact-check him, dissect his language, but they cannot look away. He is too clickable, too outrageous, too good for ratings. Even his opponents must talk about him, respond to him, amplify him. In doing so, they reinforce the very system they hope to challenge.
The 2016 campaign was the prototype. Trump dominated cable news coverage, often receiving more airtime than all of his Republican rivals combined, because he was better television*. He understood that controversy is currency. That outrage fuels attention. That saying the unsayable guarantees you control the conversation.
But Trump’s singularity isn’t just about media saturation, it is also about the erasure of causality and coherence in a culture governed by spectacle. His presidency was (and is) a sequence of image-events: the bleach injection comments, the awkward Bible photo-op after Lafayette Square was cleared by force. These were memes in motion. They functioned more like scenes in a reality show than like moments in a statesman’s tenure.
In this hyperreal theatre, narrative trumps policy. A wall doesn’t have to be built; it just has to be talked about. Draining the swamp doesn’t have to happen, it just has to be promised again. His presidencies, like his campaigns, run on the logic of the trailer: an endless promise of something about to happen, something just around the corner. The moment never arrives, but the suspense remains.
The Trump Singularity is also a black hole of accountability. In this world, truth becomes unstable, and memory is overwritten daily. Statements are retracted, denied, reframed. There is no past, only the now of the feed, the trending tab, the morning outrage cycle. It becomes almost impossible to sustain a coherent critique, because the story has changed before the ink is dry.
Trump’s opponents continue to treat him like a traditional threat, something to debate, disprove, fact-check. But they are playing the wrong game. Trump is not operating in the terrain of facts; he’s operating in the terrain of affect. Of spectacle. Of performance. In this way, he is the media. He is its engine, its subject, and its most toxic creation.
And yet, here lies the paradox: Trump claims to hate the media, while being its ultimate expression. The media claims to hold him to account, while being unable to survive without him. In this collapsed loop, the real has vanished, just the Trump Show remains. It’s only not “fake news” if the news agrees with him.
Baudrillard wrote that in the age of hyperreality, we no longer experience the world, we consume signs of the world (Baudrillard, 1981.) Trump is the ultimate sign: a symbol of power, rebellion, wealth, and grievance, endlessly repackaged. And like any good simulation, he evolves with the expectations of his audience.
In this singularity, democracy begins to warp. It ceases to be a system of deliberation and becomes a theatre of myth. Governance fades into the background; narrative becomes king. And in the mythos of MAGA, Trump is not a man, or a candidate, or even a president. He is the story itself.
Trump 2.0: A Hyperstitional Return
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency is the second instalment of a self-authored mythos. He is a resurrected archetype, summoned by his followers to finish what he started. This is no longer electoral politics in the conventional sense. This is narrative continuity: Trump 2.0 is the sequel, the reboot, the myth returning for a darker, more vengeful chapter.
If Trump’s first term was framed as a disruption, then his second is framed as a vindication.
In mythological terms, Trump is the wounded king returning to the throne, having survived betrayal and exile. In cinematic terms, he’s the antihero who was wronged by the system and is now returning to destroy it. His base has revived a legend, and legends do not govern. They avenge.
The hyperstition adapts accordingly. In Trump 2.0, the stolen election is a foundational myth. The traitors have names. The “deep state” is a character now. The battle between good and evil is fully staged. The chaos of January 6th becomes, in the minds of his most loyal followers, an origin story.
In this narrative universe, Trump is both martyr and messiah. He is at once Caesar and Christ, betrayed and crucified, but destined to return in glory. The imagery is not subtle. His campaign has leaned heavily on apocalyptic rhetoric and Biblical allusion. He speaks of retribution, not recovery. Of purging, not policy. Prophecy, even.
And like any sequel, Trump’s return is more exaggerated, more stylised, more grotesque. The script is tighter. The enemies more clearly defined. The ensemble cast has changed too: now featuring a vice president in J.D. Vance who serves as a kind of ideological foot soldier, and allies like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson who act as high priests in the media ecosystem that sustains the myth. The once fringe has become the centre.
What matters most is that this sequel no longer pretends to operate within the old system. Trump’s second term promises to remake democracy in his image. Civil service protections are being targeted for dismantling. Legal norms are being redefined. Loyalists are being elevated. The government is being turned inside out to reflect the logic of the Trump mythos: obedience, performance and vengeance.
None of this would be possible without the hyperstitional scaffolding laid over the past decade. The world has been carefully conditioned to accept this turn of events. Truth has been eroded. Institutions have been hollowed out. The media no longer has the moral authority to issue a warning that cuts through. We are deep into the simulation now. The line between plot and policy, between fantasy and governance, no longer holds.
And crucially, this time no one is surprised. That is the greatest power of the hyperstition: it rewires expectation. Trump 2.0 was always part of the arc, always on the cards. The disbelief and shock that accompanied his rise in 2016 have been replaced by a weary inevitability. The world made space for the fiction and now it must live within it.
As his administration begins to reshape reality once more, the question is: what happens when a myth, unchecked and unfinished, is allowed to write its own ending?
Why Hyperstition Matters Now
Hyperstition is no longer a fringe concept. It is the cultural operating system of the present. What once lived in theory, fiction, and experimental philosophy has become the architecture of real-world power. America is governed not by consensus, but by competing realities. And in this fractured landscape, those who understand how to manufacture belief, harness attention, and weaponise fiction have the upper hand.
Trump is not the only figure to rise through hyperstition. He is simply the most potent example, the proof of concept. Around him, the world is now thick with others who deploy similar techniques: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. merges anti-vax disinformation with an American messiah complex; Elon Musk markets himself as a visionary saviour while actively dismantling civic norms under the guise of efficiency and innovation. Conspiracy culture, once marginal, is now mainstream. Pseudoscience, grift, and apocalypse have become marketable brands.
Hyperstition matters now because it explains why traditional responses to authoritarianism keep failing. Fact-checking doesn’t work when belief is more powerful than truth. Electoral safeguards are meaningless when the electorate is captured by an alternate reality. And outrage is impotent when scandal becomes spectacle. The terrain has shifted, and too much of the liberal-centrist establishment is still playing by rules that no longer apply.
We are dealing with the broader transformation of epistemology: how we know what we know. In the age of hyperstition, the future is increasingly colonised by those who can imagine it first and loudest. Authoritarianism is now here, disguised as fandom, irony, prophecy, and entertainment. Its architects don’t need to seize control of institutions; they simply need to delegitimise them. Hyperstition does the rest.
When reality itself is up for grabs, everything becomes a battleground: science, history, gender, climate, medicine, democracy. Even the most basic facts: who won an election, what is a human right, who gets to speak, are no longer protected by truth. They’re vulnerable to whatever fiction can gather enough momentum.
But hyperstition also poses a question: can it be turned against itself? If fiction can shape reality, if belief can alter outcomes, then what alternative narratives are we willing to imagine, and to build? Can the left, the disillusioned, the forgotten and the furious, reclaim this terrain? Can we move beyond a defensive posture and begin to articulate a different kind of myth, one rooted not in nostalgia or vengeance, but in solidarity, imagination, and structural change?
Because the alternative is not a return to normal. There is no rewind button. The hyperstitional machinery is in motion, and it is accelerating. Trump is not a glitch. He is the prototype. The first fully realised political figure of the post-truth, post-democratic age. To understand him is to understand the future of politics itself.
Conclusion: Undoing the Spell
Donald Trump more than a political figure: he is a rupture in reality, a glitch that became the new code. Through meme, myth, and repetition, he summoned a world into being, a realm where narrative triumphs over fact, where prophecy rewrites memory, and where governance is indistinguishable from performance.
This is the age of hyperstition, and Trump is its high priest.
But hyperstition is not inherently right-wing. Nor is it necessarily destructive. It is a mechanism, a feedback loop between belief and becoming. It can be used to summon dystopia, yes, but it can also be used to imagine, articulate, and realise new worlds. The problem is that, for too long, the left has ceded this terrain. It has allowed the fantasy factory to be overtaken by fascists, grifters, and digital cultists. While the right dreams vividly of apocalypse and empire, the opposition settles for proceduralism and polite corrections.
The truth is: you cannot fact-check a myth. You cannot out-debate a spell. You cannot defeat a narrative by refusing to tell one of your own.
To undo the Trump hyperstition, we must first understand its power - not as an aberration, but as the logical end point of a system that rewards spectacle, monetises rage, and erases truth in favour of engagement. And then, we must build counter-hyperstitions. Not by mirroring the right’s nihilism, but by offering compelling, vivid, emotionally resonant alternatives: stories of justice, dignity, collective power, and real liberation. Not false nostalgia, but radical possibility.
This requires more than policy proposals. It demands imagination. It demands new language. It demands the courage to believe in something before it exists. We have to work, slowly and stubbornly, to make it real. Because if hyperstition teaches us anything, it’s that belief is never idle. It moves. It shapes. It builds. The only question is: whose world will it build next?
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References
Baudrillard, J. (1981: Translated from the French by Glaser, S.F. 1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Flood, A. (2016) ‘Post-truth named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries.’ The Guardian, 15 November. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/15/post-truth-named-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-dictionaries [Accessed 1 May 2025.]
Greenwood, I. (2023) ‘What is Chaos Magic? A Guide to the Radical Occult Practice.’ Dazed Digital, 24 October. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/beauty/article/61174/1/what-is-chaos-magick-a-guide-to-the-radical-occult-practice [Accessed 1 May 2025.]
Kennedy. L. (2017) ‘Drain the Swamp: Conflicts of Interest, Lobbying, and Corruption Solutions to Restore Trust in Government that Works for Americans.’ Center for American Progress, 5 January. Available at: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/drain-the-swamp/ [Accessed 1 May 2025.]
Stelter, B. (2021) ‘This infamous Steve Bannon quote is key to understanding America’s crazy politics.’ CNN, 16 November. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources/index.html [Accessed 1 May 2025.]