It was eerily similar to the end of the great book Atlas Shrugged, where the arrest of John Galt resulted in the torture of the main character in similar ways as Jesus Christ was captured and tortured. The arrest of President Trump by a desperate, thieving government was almost a word-for-word script of the classic novel by Ayn Rand. Even though the book was always considered extremely over-the-top science fiction, we had now seen in 2023 the future so dystopian when that book was released in 1957 to be completely accurate. You could attribute the arrest and prosecution of President Trump to precisely the same reasons as John Galt was arrested. Or even Jesus Christ. It is beyond coincidence that all this is happening during the holy week, with Good Friday coming, where Jesus Christ was killed for his threat to the established order. It also reminded me of the killing of Socrates and many other names throughout history who have threatened the established order, which resulted in their arrest and torture to preserve their corruption from the eyes of the public. I’m sure objectivists will want to argue that President Trump is anything like the pure, Ayn Rand characters of flawless bravery, but it’s the only thing that came to my mind as I watched Trump fly on his big private plane to New York, to stay in his golden tower among the skyline, a lifetime of achievement building up to his remarkable life. And his life of individual achievement threatened this dystopian monstrosity of a corrupt government that wanted more than anything to destroy its rival. In this case, President Trump is the presidential frontrunner. You could almost place the villain of Atlas Shrugged, Mr. Thomson, who is the president of the United States, in that book with Joe Biden. But as bad as Atlas Shrugged is, as a story about how government abuses its power, the real world of this prosecution of President Trump is far worse and more sinister. Even Ayn Rand couldn’t imagine the evil we have witnessed in this obvious attempted destruction of Trump.
President Biden, like his fictional counterpart, Mr. Thompson from the book, knows what they have done. They acquired power through massive election fraud, and that evidence is clear for all. But this arrest of their political rival only confirms to the extreme extent the corruption we have seen on the surface. The fear they have shown toward Trump is something we have only established in the worst of our fictional explorations in movies and novels. A polite society does not even acknowledge this level of corruption, there are few mechanisms of psychology to acknowledge such a thing, yet there it was for us all to see. Trump being arrested by a phony legal premise and having his fingerprints taken and paraded around as a captive of tyrannical authority. It was the evil of a state-controlled government intent to suppress the ambitions of all people everywhere to the same sacrificial government as we have seen from the Aztecs, the practitioners of human sacrifice in the land of Canaan, or the cannibals of the South Pacific. These despots of tyranny only know one thing, which is governed by the dominant, the most power-hungry, and the most corrupt, and they seek to destroy any rivals to that understanding. Ayn Rand’s book about these forces has always been one of the best to put the finger on this very evil power and explain it to an audience as a work of philosophy that no human society had ever managed to capture. This tyranny was explored but not very well understood in the story of Christ. History has watched so many characters who take on an enormous persona for personal freedom emerge through history only to have the established order seek to preserve itself emphatically. But there hasn’t ever been a work of art that so intensely captured the nature of that evil than Atlas Shrugged.
But where I have always thought that the end of Atlas Shrugged had John Galt compromised from the overall theme of the book, this arrest of President Trump was an awakening that I never thought I would ever see happen in the human race. Literally, the entire world watched; there was never a bigger stage, a more extensive example of abuse, of tyranny where all the stops of corruption were pulled out and laid naked on the stage for all to see. It almost had the theatrical impact of the play Equus, where the characters appear nude for the audience to tie their mind in knots from the morality of it all. Or the immorality of it instead. This arrest of President Trump is how the book Atlas Shrugged should have ended. Trump was bigger than the small-minded people seeking to arrest him. It had more of a Superman feel to it, where finally, a member of the human race had transcended the corruption and tyranny of thousands of years of small-minded abuse. The same forces that used to burn members of the Protestant reformation at the stake were suddenly eclipsed by this massive figure that President Trump had become. The feeble government of Mr. Thomson only had corruption to blow into its sails as a shocked world saw them naked and afraid by the towering figure of Trump and the MAGA movement outgrowing their feeble attempts at control. This was a government that didn’t know what to do, so it did the unthinkable, and a moment in human history hatched a new kind of individualism. Trump had transcended their menace, the worst they could impose, and through it all, he looked bigger than the system itself.
The end of Atlas Shrugged resulted in the complete collapse of the government and its communist assumptions. The deal John Galt offered to the tyrannical government that imprisoned him was for the losers of existence to get out of the way of the producers who essentially were responsible for making everything. I’ve had a relationship with Atlas Shrugged for many years, and I have witnessed up close and very personally the extreme hatred the political left has for the book. It strips away an assumption made by Karl Marx and other leftist philosophers about how society is constructed. That teamwork is more important than individualism. But the truth is that the political left is slow, cumbersome, and bureaucratic, and they just get in the way of the fast-moving individuals who have all the answers and innovation at their fingertips. And the best thing in any society is to get out of the way of those people. Yet a government like Joe Biden’s can’t accept that reality, that they are just useless in the scheme of things, and that the power President Trump has is something no amount of government force could ever possess. And in their attempts to maintain that power over thousands of years of attempted government, they had never succeeded. Yet President Trump did something that history had never seen before; he transcended the state’s power in new ways. Characters like him in the past would have been burned at the stake, thrown to the lions, and killed a thousand other ways to prevent the reality from settling in that it is not the state that runs the world. It’s individuals. And probably no place else but America could such an ostentatious exhibition have ever been displayed. President Trump could have never even happened if not for our Constitution, free speech, and economic system. And because he did, he grew into something that even the most corrupt government in the world had lost control of. And that is a sequel to Atlas Shrugged that I have always wanted to see. It’s better than the book, and the future is much less bleak because of it.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 