By John Seiler
John's Newsletter
January 22, 2026
Back when I was a kid I read science fiction day and night. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Philip K. Dick. Only "hard" S.F. based on plausible scientific speculation: Space ships, robots, lasers. No talking dolphins.
One was " The Foundation," a collection of three related novels by Isaac Asimov. It recently was turned into a horrible, PC, DEI TV series, although I still watched all 30 episodes.
Asimov's "Foundation" was Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" by way of Marxian determinism and the tropes of what's now called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. It follows mathematician Hari Seldon, who uses the science of psychohistory to predict the collapse of a vast Galactic Empire. He establishes a Foundation to preserve knowledge and shorten the coming dark age. Over generations, the Foundation survives political, religious and economic crises through intelligence and foresight rather than force, revealing the power-and limits-of predicting human history.
A key character is The Mule, a mutant conqueror who can control and alter human emotions, allowing him to dominate others without conventional military strength. He represents the fatal flaw in psychohistory: the unpredictable power of a single extraordinary individual. Asimov writes, "He couldn't exist, therefore he did."
Back to our day. The System was broken in 2015. Trump came down the elevator at Trump Tower at 401 Fifth Avenue in New York City, the economic and cultural center of our Foundation, and announced his candidacy. It was obvious neither Hillary, Jeb!, Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, and even my favorite, Rand Paul, could give our Foundation the shaking it needed. Typical was the slogan, "Let Jeb ! fix it!" But the system was unfixable. It only could smashed and followed by something else, even now as yet unknowable.
Enter The Mule, Trump.
This idea is not original with me. The guy who advanced it years ago was a fella named Chris Zander. Under the nom de keyboard the Z Man, he came up with the analogy. In 2020, Z Man summarized in a post, " The Mule's Work":
When Trump miraculously won the election in 2016, the smarter observers saw that he was not going to be a reform agent, but a chaos agent.... In the Asimov novels, The Mule is a special character, so special in fact that he is assumed to not exist. In fact, according to the known rules of the universe, he cannot exist. Because he does exist, thus invalidating the rules of the universe, he is the ultimate destroyer of worlds. His ability is to reach into the minds of others and "adjust" their emotions, individually or en masse, using this capability to conscript individuals to his cause.
And on June 20, 2025, seven months ago, the soon to be departed Z Man wrote "The Foreign Policy Mule," an introduction to a podcast on that topic, which you later can listen to:
Trump has only been in office for five months, but he has quickly managed to smash up a bunch of things. One of those things is the relationship with Europe, which has been in place since the end of the Cold War. By walking away from Project Ukraine, he is putting the world on notice that things will never be the same between the United States and the rest of the NATO countries.
Something similar seems to be developing in the Middle East. He went for the homerun shot against Iran, but that failed, leaving the region on the edge of war and Israel scrambling to avoid Iranian missiles.
As with so many other things, Trump is not the man with a plan, but a man with a hammer. He breaks the old stuff, often by his mere existence, but this opens the way for new stuff. He has broken the political order in Washington and now that he has real power, he is breaking the order abroad. He is the Mule, the destroyer of worlds, bringing the end of empire.
Today now is the one-year anniversary of Trump 2.0, with three more years remaining. Let me list three things in the global order The Mule has broken so far:
Unipolarity. This was the belief, especially advance in the 1990s, of America as "the sole remaining superpower." Starting when the Soviet Union dissolved itself on Christmas Day 1991, I've advocated America lead the world into "multipolarity." We already were seeing a rapidly rising China. The third possible great power in multipolarity was Russia, if it could repair its dilapidation after 1991 as it transitioned shambolically to markets.
That didn't happen. America kept insisting it would rule everything. Trump broke that, and keeps breaking it. As I described in my article, " Trump's new National Security Strategy pushes global realism," his NSS embraces a world of three great powers: the U.S., Russia and China. Unfortunately for us, instead of America leading the transition to this new reality, as I had hoped for 34 years, it's Russia and China doing so now, with America's role undetermined until The Mule finishes his work and his successors craft something else.
Russia. The Ukraine War turned about to be a " proof test" of Russia's rise back to global power. When it started almost four years ago, Biden mumbled, "The ruble is rubble." Wong, as always. And last year, as I noted here, the EU produced a paper continuing that theme, " Unpowering Russia: How the EU can counter and undermine the Kremlin." I wrote: "Note the word 'unpowering.' How do you 'unpower' a nuclear superpower with '~6,000 warheads, 1,584 of which are deployed,' according to the Union of Concerned Scientists?"
The Mule has pushed beyond that, as Z Man wrote seven months ago, forgetting Project Ukraine while still selling U.S. weapons to the clueless Eurotrash for them to give to the Ukraine regime. This also shows how Trump basically has no plan for Russia or anything.
China. Trump tried to bully China with tariffs and sanctions. China responded by unfurling the immense powers of its own rise to economic preeminence. It withheld the rare earth metals needed to build the advanced weapons of the U.S. war machine, as well as such mundane items as autos. A Jan. 1 article in Discovery Alert explains:
The global rare earth elements market operates on fundamentally different principles than traditional commodities, where human expertise often matters more than raw material access. While Western nations focus primarily on securing mining rights and building processing facilities, China has constructed a comprehensive talent development ecosystem that systematically creates the specialised workforce needed to maintain technological superiority in critical minerals energy transition processing.
While Trump grabs Greenland to keep its rare earth minerals from China, supposedly, America lacks the advanced system of scientific discovery, engineering prowess and production facilities to exploit those commodities at a larger scale. As I also have noted, China has bounded way ahead of us in science. The latest survey of scientific institutions dropped Harvard from second to third place. China now occupies the first two spots, with Zhejiang U. at No. 1 and Shanghai Jiao Tong U. at No. 2. China owns eight of the top 10 places. Toronto U. is No. 10.
Trump The Mule revealed Chinese scientific supremacy. That revelation also uncovered the stupidity of America's ruling class allowing us to fall so fast.
I'll haul up here and come up with some more examples in a future post.
Trump is The Mule, Breaker of Worlds.
This article was originally published on John's Newsletter.