Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin (December 21, 1949) | Wikipedia Commons / Public domain
“[Stalin] changed the old political and especially revolutionary belief expressed popularly in the proverb “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” into a veritable dogma: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.”
—Hannah Arendt
We are living through a revolution, though not the kind we are used to. Most today think of revolutionaries as the proletariat, and a revolution is fought in the name of equality and justice. Unlike past revolutions fought in the name of equality, Trump’s revolution is against legitimacy itself—and against the very idea that legitimacy depends on equality.
Like all revolutions, the Trump revolution thrives on violence. But unlike many revolutions of the past, violence is not a means to an end—there is no fresh vision of society, no alternative and legitimate institutions. Its aim is destruction itself: the delegitimation of elections, courts, laws, knowledge, and the very procedures that make politics possible. And beyond destruction, its second aim is simply power—the replacement of one elite with another, stripped of legitimacy, bound only by force.
At its core, this is a class war, though not the economic struggle imagined by Marx. The class behind Trump is new and hard to pin down. To resist the Trumpian revolution, however, requires understanding it.
This new revolutionary class is a coalition of an anti-bureaucratic bourgeoisie allied with a resentful petty bourgeoisie and a plutocratic elite. What unites these diverse groups is their rebellion against authority. They are the unmanaged and uncredentialed, those who experience oversight—by auditors, regulators, professors, journalists, or judges—not as fairness but as humiliation. Oversight is recast as conspiracy.
Judges, professors, regulators, journalists—institutional actors meant to safeguard fairness—are instead imagined as a coordinated apparatus of exclusion. The new revolutionary class sees their exclusion from cultural power as illegitimate. They believe they are the rightful elite and resent anyone who will regulate or limit them.
To this new class, legitimacy itself is a mask for domination, an unjust claim of power. Instead, they believe in the rule of power—Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is simply the right of the stronger and Darwin’s assertion that only the fittest survive—and so they have abandoned lawful order itself. What unites them is not a program of construction but a politics of resentment: a determination to tear down the institutions that once constrained them, even if nothing coherent is built in their place.
This is why the current gerrymandering controversy that began in Texas is so revealing. For Trump’s movement, oversight and regulation are never neutral; they are signs of conspiracy. Judges, legislators, and election officials are imagined as part of a coordinated apparatus of exclusion, proof that the system itself is designed to cheat them. The problem is that Trump wins whether he succeeds or fails. Even if Trump and his allies do not win the fight over district lines, they win by casting the very idea of fair and legitimate elections as illegitimate. Victory is not measured in seats gained but in the destruction of trust in the system. Every loss becomes proof of fraud; every rule becomes evidence of a rigged game. What matters is not outcomes but delegitimation itself.
The Trumpian revolution has its surprising roots in Marxist revolutionary theory. It was Stalin who, according to Hannah Arendt, altered the revolutionary maxim, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” into the dogma, “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.” As Arendt observed, this inversion shifts revolution from the pursuit of ends that justify the means to the glorification of means themselves. Brute force, once imagined as the path to utopia, becomes the very substance of politics.
The aim of revolution for Trump, as for Stalin, is no longer the creation of a new order but the perpetual seizure of power—the endless unseating of enemies, the compulsive display of strength, and the faith that one day victory itself will deliver … what? There is no vision or ideal. Trump’s revolution follows this mold. It thrives not on building but on breaking, not on hope but on humiliation and destruction, carried out in the name of a class that has traded legitimacy for power alone.
This logic extends beyond elections to the wholesale replacement of officials charged with protecting the public good. Economists in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonpartisan attorneys in the Department of Justice, and even generals in the armed forces have been dismissed or attacked for failing to show loyalty to Trump himself.
Expertise, independence, and adherence to law are redefined as disloyalty. In their place, Trump elevates figures like Pete Hegseth, who openly advocates a Christian nationalist vision—one that even flirts with abolishing women’s suffrage through “household voting.” These proposals reveal something deeper than an attack on legitimacy. They do not simply attack individuals or agencies; they attack the very principle on which modern legitimacy rests: impartial equality.
What Trump’s movement rejects is not legitimacy as such, but legitimacy grounded in impartial equality. Where modern legitimacy rests on impartial equality, Trump’s legitimacy rests on exclusion—the authority of the household, the patriarch, the tribe. Since the 1800s, legitimacy has largely been defined by equality: equality of voting in universal suffrage, equal under the law according to the idea of equal protection, and the equal dignity of all persons and natural human rights. Under the tribal legitimacy of the Trump revolution, universal suffrage, due process, human rights, and the neutral rule of law are recast not as fairness but as tyranny of a woke elite that denies the rights of a tribal elite.
In place of the equality of all, Trump’s movement resurrects an older, hierarchical vision of legitimacy: the “traditional equality” of household heads, patriarchs, or “real Americans.” Within such an order, equality exists only inside the tribe or family, not across humanity. The gesture toward household voting, then, is more than a thought experiment. It is a declaration that impartial equality is illegitimate—that only a chosen community has the right to rule.
Nowhere is this rejection of the legitimacy of impartial equality more visible than in the transformation of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To Trump’s movement, immigration enforcement is not simply policy but the frontline of a larger conspiracy: the belief that judges, regulators, and bureaucrats have colluded to weaken the nation, to impose “open borders,” to replace “real Americans” with outsiders. The response is not to reform legal institutions but to overwhelm them with force.
The Republican “Big Beautiful Bill” gives ICE control of nearly 100,000 beds in detention centers and authorizes the hiring of 10,000 new agents. ICE is set to become one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies in the country, with more power, more personnel, and fewer constraints than ever before. It is becoming the most potent and least accountable arresting force in the federal system.
Historically, fascist regimes relied on paramilitary forces—Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s SA—to enforce ideological loyalty, intimidate opponents, and carry out extrajudicial violence. These groups blurred the line between state and party, legality and terror. Their aim was not justice but fear. ICE, while still a legal federal agency, increasingly exhibits warning signs of this paramilitary drift. The militarization of enforcement, the ideological alignment with Trumpist nationalism, and the massive infusion of funding for opaque, unaccountable operations raise urgent alarms.
Arendt warned that the first step on the road to total domination is to “kill the juridical person in man,” to put certain people outside the protection of the law. When ICE disappears individuals in unmarked vans, builds secretive detention centers, and denies due process, it is not merely enforcing immigration policy. It is withdrawing the law’s protection from entire categories of people. That is not law enforcement; it is preparation for tyranny. Every new detention center, every unmarked van, every vanished voice is not simply policy; it is proof of power, the demonstration that the law can be suspended at will.
Arendt warned of the danger of the lesser evil. “The trouble begins,” she wrote, “whenever one comes to the conclusion that no other ‘lesser’ evil is worth fighting … all historical and political evidence clearly points to the more-than-intimate connection between the lesser and the greater evil.” What Stalin did was to transform the justification of means by ends into a dogma of ends guaranteed by means: “You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.” Once violence becomes the proof of politics, once the breaking of eggs is accepted as a necessity, there is no limit to how many can be broken.
This is the danger Trump’s revolution poses. It presents cruelty, humiliation, and lawless force as necessary evils, lesser evils, temporary evils—all in the name of an omelette that never arrives. But the omelette is a mirage. What remains is only the breaking, the proof of power itself.
As Mao Zedong put it, “a revolution is not a dinner party.” It is not refinement or persuasion but an act of violence in which one class overthrows another. Trump’s revolution is Maoist in this sense: it pits one class against another in a struggle defined by humiliation and vengeance. But like Stalin’s and Mao’s revolutions, its ends are always deferred, its promises always vague. It all goes back to Trump’s original boast that he could kill someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. The true end is simply power itself—power proven in the claimed right to break eggs without consequences.
This article was first published in Amor Mundi, the newsletter of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, on August 17, 2025. Reprinted with permission.
