Zeus the Trump

I saw a comment on Reddit the other night — buried under all the usual snark and performative keyboard warrioring — and it just said the quiet thing out loud: “Well, technically Trump really is a god.”

Not a god in the sense of worship and hymns and incense — a god in the raw, literal way the old Greeks and Hebrews and desert nomads meant it: an all-powerful father figure who can smite a village or flood your fields or wipe a camp off the map with one flick of the wrist.

Somewhere deep in the archive of half-forgotten American fables is Garrison Keillor’s “Zeus the Lutheran,” a sly New Yorker short story about the old thunder god slipping into the body of a dumpy Pennsylvania pastor. Zeus wants to seduce a mortal housewife, so he shoves the pastor’s soul into a dog, tries on the flabby mortal suit, and discovers just how humiliating it is to be worshipped in a language that doesn’t fit. The joke is that the mighty Greek king of gods ends up stuck in the suburbs — petulant, horny, not quite powerful enough to bend the world to his will. It’s all petty and sad and human — yet somehow the fear of him lingers.

“Zeus the Trump” flips that fable inside out. The modern storm god didn’t sneak into an unwilling pastor — he lumbered down an escalator, orange and grinning, and half the country turned him into the scapegoat for every hurricane, every plague, every bad harvest, every secret dread that the sky still wants blood. He’s mortal — petty, flawed, combed-over, clumsy — but in the heads of his enemies, he’s the bunker-busting Zeus. He’s the Trickster who grew thunderbolts. He’s the father-god who devours the field when the lintel’s not marked.

And unlike Keillor’s Zeus, there’s no cosmic lawyer coming to drag him back to the mountain — because they keep the fire burning. They feed him dread. They keep him immortal, right here in the modern burbs, floating like a storm cloud over every podcast and every bedtime panic scroll.

People forget how much real power the modern American presidency carries — especially since 2001, since the towers fell, since we collectively agreed to break the locks on the executive branch in the name of safety and eternal war and permanent surveillance. We gave our Zeus a drone fleet and 800 billion a year in open defense spending and trillions more tucked away in black budgets and shell contracts and off-books cyber ops. At least eight hundred acknowledged bases, and those are just the ones you can find on Wikipedia. Who knows how many more in the shadows, in the air, under the sea? Who knows how many little sparks he can snuff out with the nod of a head or the swipe of a Sharpie on an executive order at 3 in the morning?

And now here we are, 168 days into his second term — Trump the 47th. He did it. He got the swing states. He got the popular vote, which they said could never happen. He won the Electoral College by a landslide that made all the pearl-clutching “save democracy” types rip their hair out while the normies just poured another cup of gas station coffee and said, Well, it’s done. He has the House. He has the Senate, at least until the midterms, and if you’ve been paying attention, he has the Supreme Court locked down tighter than Fort Knox — every big ruling slicing his way, like the storm god himself nudging the scales.

You want to talk about gods? You think the Pharaohs weren’t just men in shiny hats who knew how to swing a sword and claim divine blood? You think Caesar wasn’t just a mortal until the Senate made him immortal in name because the crowds needed him to be bigger than death? Every god in the old stories was just a man who could kill you if you crossed him and bless you if you bent the knee. That’s Trump now. This time around, he didn’t come in blind and surrounded by vipers like his first rodeo. No more Brutus at his shoulder. This time he spent four years in the political wilderness, brooding like an exiled king, running endless scenario drills the way JSOC builds plywood cities in the desert to practice the perfect raid. He built the maps, built the traps, built the kill switches. He didn’t come back for a second term to make deals. He came back to finish what he thought was stolen from him the first time — and he’s doing it before the bureaucratic white blood cells can even get their shoes on.

It’s not like he’s even pretending to be a kind god. He’s Zeus in full thunder mode, roaming the sky, chucking bunker busters when the mood hits him, signing kill lists with a grin. He’s pulling strings on the southern border, ICE raids rolling like armored locusts through every apartment block where the papers don’t match up, and everybody knows the dolphin meat comes with the tuna — the sweeps aren’t just about who’s legal and who’s not, they’re about putting fear back in the air. You either have the blood over the door or you don’t. That’s it.

And the funniest part — if any of this is funny — is how the same people who swore he was just an incompetent clown, a poopy-pants dotard shuffling around like a sedated grandpa, now can’t shut up about how omnipotent he is. How he’s pulling the strings in Israel and Palestine. How he’s orchestrating the world’s genocides from a golf course in Florida. How he’s vanishing dissenters into black sites and turning local cops into federal snitches. These people say he’s a fool, but they also say he’s God. They don’t even hear themselves.

The villagers — the 66% — they wanted a champion, not a sun god. But the 33%? They’ve turned him into Zeus by treating him like he can see every secret, punish every sin, reroute every storm. He’s the president, yes. But he’s the president of a machine that can flip the pH of the entire planet in an hour if he gets bored enough. That’s not a cult. That’s not superstition. That’s just what happens when you build the biggest, baddest executive hammer in human history and then hand it to a man who spent his entire life learning how to make the whole room chant his name.

It’s only July. He’s got a year and a half until the midterms. He’s riding every lever like a kid in a junkyard mech suit, surrounded by generals and guys in blue suits who will do anything to keep the machine humming. And while the “never Trumpers” run around shrieking “Fascism! Literally Hitler!” again for the millionth time, the Normies just shrug. The wolf has been cried so often that the villagers see the big orange thunder god stomping through the clouds and they just pour another coffee, check their paycheck, and say, Well, at least he’s our Zeus.

So yeah. Maybe that Reddit kid was right. Not a god because he wants to be worshipped. Not a god because he wants your babies on an altar. Not even a god because he deserves it. He’s a god because he is the storm, the drone strike, the IRS letter in your mailbox, the bunker buster that rattles the glass on the other side of the world while you’re watching your kid’s soccer game. He’s not asking for praise. He’s demanding obedience. Or at least fear. Same thing, in the end.

And if you think this ends clean — if you think the angel of death only wants the firstborn — you haven’t been paying attention. Some doors are marked. Some doors aren’t. The priesthood that pretends they don’t believe in gods is about to find out the hard way that when you conjure a Zeus, the thunder doesn’t care about your think pieces. It cares that you kept the fire burning.

May you enjoy the show. Keep your lintel painted.

Amen.

APPENDIX: THE ZEUS FILES

❖ A Few More Notes on the American Zeus

He’s not the first mortal to wear this crown, but he’s the first in a long time to do it in the 4K, surveillance-saturated, 24/7 doomscroll age. When Caesar grabbed it, the Forum was stone and gossip. When the Pharaohs wore it, the pyramid walls could lie for them. But now the whole world sees the mole on his ear in real time, and yet it only makes him more mythical — because the hyper-exposed flaws make him seem human, so when the storm comes it feels personal.

He’s the first Zeus with a drone fleet and a CNN panel devoted 24 hours a day to parsing every belch and tweet for signs of the next thunderbolt. He’s the first god whose believers and enemies alike get to perform their fear live while the Normies decide if they’ll mark the door or just wait to see whose house floods.

❖ Why the Golem Matters

The villagers didn’t want Zeus at first. They wanted a Champion Golem. A QB. A slab of clay to yell at the other side and swing a big foam finger while they mowed their lawns and sent their kids to camp. But every Champion Golem that sticks around too long grows an ego — ask Napoleon, ask Caesar, ask any strongman that starts believing the hero chants. He gets struck by the lightning and thinks it’s him throwing it, not the crowd. That’s the danger of any golem: eventually it believes it’s the spell.

❖ The Tulpa Effect

Tulpa. Thoughtform. The thing you make real by feeding it dread. This is the weirdest part: the 33% rational, coastal, “pure reason” priesthood think they’re immune to magic and spirits — but they do the old work every day. They talk about him, fear him, meme him, hate-binge him. That’s how you pump psychic helium into the Trickster until he rips the clown suit off and puts on the thunder crown.

❖ The Passover Lintel

The blood over the doorframe. That’s the oldest hedge against wrath — a mark that says “not this house, we’re faithful, keep moving.” The villagers still believe in this. Their lintel isn’t literal lamb’s blood — it’s the AR in the closet, the bumper sticker, the Sunday potluck, the “don’t tread on me” flag that’s really just shorthand for “I’m inside the covenant, Zeus will smite someone else.” But the 33% traded the lintel for an abstract moral superiority. They think they can reason with the thunder. They can’t.

❖ The ICE Dolphin Trick

The tuna is the excuse. The dolphins are the real meal. “We’re just rounding up illegals” is just the bait. The real flex is the show of power that reminds everyone: the door-kickers can stand in your living room at dawn because the storm father says so. It’s not about the fish. It’s about reminding you the net fits over your whole street.

❖ The Wolf Cry

They screamed “dictator!” “literal fascist!” “Hitler!” for ten straight years. But if the crops keep growing and the Amazon boxes keep arriving on time, the villagers tune it out. The more the wolf cry echoes, the less the Normies care — until they shrug and say, “Better Zeus than locusts.” The tragedy is the priesthood never updated their script. Same lines, same signs, same burn barrel effigies. The Trickster laughs. Zeus cracks his knuckles.

❖ The God-Shape vs. the Head-Shape

People keep calling it a “God-shaped hole in their heart,” but it might be worse than that now. The hole migrated: it’s in the head. The dread lives there rent-free, same as a tulpa. At first he rented space like a bad viral jingle. Now he’s an entire cathedral of anxiety. If you’ve ever had a panic spiral at 3 AM, you know how that works: the monster you keep feeding never moves out.

❖ Real Thunder

This isn’t just metaphorical Zeus, by the way. People forget: the post-9/11 presidency is real thunder. Secret kill lists, special operators, multi-billion black ops, a drone fleet the size of a Roman legion. “Ask forgiveness, not permission.” That’s the thunder. When the president of the United States wants to turn your village into a smoking hole, there is no vote, no protest, no hashtag that stops him. The villagers know it. The priesthood knows it but pretends it’s just performance art.

❖ The Comedy of Immortality

You can taste the envy. The priesthood wants immortality too. They want their moral arc to be recorded forever — the ancestors who fought racism, the brave souls who stormed Selma, the uncle who liberated the camps in ’45. They want their grandchildren to say “I was on the right side of history.” But this is the tragedy: the same people who say they hate Zeus spend every waking hour feeding him their fear, keeping him immortal. Meanwhile they still turn to dust and worms — same as always.

❖ So What Now?

He’s Zeus until he’s not. He’s the storm father until the villagers bench him or the priesthood runs out of fear to feed him. But don’t bet on that happening soon. People need a god. They need something to blame when the flood comes. And they’ll stand in the street, door unmarked, burning the effigy until the flames slip their chain and burn the barn too.

❖ One Last Word: Amen

Zeus never asks for praise. He demands obedience. He doesn’t want your child on an altar — he wants your door marked or your door smashed. The villagers know this in their bones. The priesthood pretends they don’t. And the storm rolls on.

May you mark your lintel or at least know who you’re feeding when you scream at the eclipse.

Amen.

FAQ: The Zeus the Trump Edition

Q: Why do you call Trump ‘Zeus’?
Because he’s not just a political figure anymore — to millions of people who fear or loathe him, he’s a near-mythic god of chaos and punishment. Like Zeus, he’s flawed, vengeful, unpredictable, and, in their minds, all-powerful. They don’t consciously worship him — but they talk about him, blame him, and fear him like ancient people feared thunder gods.

Q: What’s this about ‘Zeus the Lutheran’?
It’s a short story by Garrison Keillor, where Zeus possesses a Lutheran pastor’s body to chase mortal pleasure but ends up stuck, petty and powerless in suburbia. This piece flips it: Trump is mortal, but millions keep him thunderous by giving him fear and blame. It’s the same story, but the pastor body is president — and the god keeps the crown.

Q: What does ‘God-shaped hole’ mean?
It’s an old spiritual idea that humans naturally crave a higher meaning or power — something bigger than themselves to explain chaos, loss, and fear. When traditional faith is rejected, that “hole” often gets filled with politics, ideology, or scapegoats. In this essay, that hole has been filled with Trump — not by his supporters, but by his haters.

Q: So you’re saying people worship Trump?
Not like a loving religion. More like an accidental pagan cult of blame and dread. When every disaster or tragedy gets pinned on one man — floods, suicides, foreign wars — that’s god-like projection. It’s old scapegoat logic in modern hashtags.

Q: Why do you talk about effigies and burning?
Burning an effigy is an ancient ritual to symbolically destroy an enemy’s power. But when you do it over and over — baby blimps, piñatas, digital memes — you risk turning the ritual into a dark offering that keeps the “god” alive. It’s the same energy that makes a tulpa.

Q: What’s a tulpa?
A tulpa is a thoughtform: something made real by collective belief and focus. In Tibetan mysticism, it’s an illusory being conjured by the mind. Here, the constant obsession with Trump makes him larger than life, like a tulpa that feeds on attention.

Q: What is the Passover door thing?
In the Old Testament, the Israelites marked their doors with lamb’s blood so the angel of death would “pass over.” The piece uses this to show how the “villagers” (Trump’s supporters) believe they’re protected — they see themselves inside the covenant, while the priesthood (the secular moral class) stands doorless, exposed to the god’s wrath.

Q: Why dolphins and tuna?
It’s a metaphor. The official reason for raids (the “tuna”) is immigrants or crime. But the net is big enough to catch “dolphins” — anyone nearby, the innocent or unrelated, showing the god’s power reaches further than the excuse.

Q: Do you actually think Trump is immortal?
No. But the idea is he’s achieved a kind of cultural immortality — he’ll live rent-free in people’s heads as a thunder god until they stop feeding him dread and blame.

Glossary: Terms Explained

Zeus — The top Greek god, famous for throwing thunderbolts, sleeping around, punishing mortals for defiance. Here, it means a leader who’s feared as all-powerful and unpredictable.

Trickster — A mythic figure who causes chaos and exposes flaws in humans. Trump started as a Trickster in the public imagination — a clownish disruptor — but grew into Zeus through constant obsession.

Tulpa — A thoughtform or being created by collective belief. The more you focus on it, the more “real” it feels. In this essay, Trump becomes a tulpa through relentless fear and attention.

God-Shaped Hole — A human need for something bigger than ourselves — when spiritual belief goes away, it often gets replaced by politics, ideology, or scapegoats.

Effigy — An image or figure that represents someone hated or feared. Burning it is symbolic. But repeated burning can backfire, turning the enemy into something mythic.

Scapegoat — An innocent or single figure blamed for the sins or chaos of a whole group. Ancient cultures sacrificed scapegoats to purify the tribe.

Golem — From Jewish folklore: a creature made of clay, brought to life to protect a village. Trump’s supporters see him like this — a champion, not a god, but useful for defending the tribe.

Passover Lintel — The doorframe marked to keep the angel of death away. A symbol for who’s protected and who’s exposed when the thunder god comes.

Dolphin/Tuna Net — The “tuna” is the target. The “dolphin” is collateral damage. Shows how power nets catch more than the stated prey.

Normie Shrug — The regular people who’ve heard “fascist! dictator!” so many times they tune out. They know the wolf cry by heart.

Bunker Busters — Massive bombs that smash underground targets. Used here to show real presidential power: it’s not just words — the thunder god has teeth.

Immortality Anxiety — The craving to live forever through legacy, moral purity, or hero stories. Many feed Trump’s immortality with their obsession.

Final Note

If you read all that and think, “Wait, this is too mythical, too weird,” that’s the point.
The rational mind hates to admit it still worships anything.
But the eclipse fear never dies. The effigy still burns.
The thunder still rolls.

Amen.

tl;dr

The provided text from "Zeus the Trump" analyzes how former President Donald Trump is perceived as a modern-day thunder god, akin to Zeus, by both his detractors and supporters, though for different reasons. It argues that the fear and blame directed at him by his opponents, along with the immense power of the modern American presidency, have elevated him beyond a mere mortal figure into a mythical entity. The source employs various mythological and folkloric concepts, such as the tulpa effect, the golem, and the scapegoat, to explain this transformation, suggesting that constant attention and dread effectively make him an "immortal" cultural force. Ultimately, the piece posits that this perceived god-like status, fueled by collective societal anxieties, allows him to wield a "real thunder" of executive power that impacts everyday life.