THE TRUMP RUNGS OF HELL

HAVEN’T WE ALL felt like we were burning in Hell since Trump was elected? Well, imagine walking through the abode of the damned with your childhood hero, which is basically the premise of Dante’s Inferno. In the 14th-century epic, Dante writes himself as a lost and terrified man who gets the ultimate guide through Hell by his hero, the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil acts like an older, wiser brother, keeping Dante safe from monsters while showing him how bad choices lead to custom-made punishments across nine circles of the Inferno. It’s a deeply personal story about hitting rock bottom. But it’s also Dante’s gloriously petty way of throwing his real-life political enemies into the literal pits of Hell. And I thought, why not take the same tour with Donald Trump and his monsters? ✨😉 Who goes where? I asked AI to tell me what it thought. I started out thinking of this as satire…but the more I got into it, what Trump and his sycophants are doing is just not funny.

Donald Trump did not descend through the abyss alone. The Heritage Foundation drew the map. Project 2025 assembled the personnel and wrote the operating manual. Russell Vought converted the plan into budgets, regulations, and administrative machinery. Stephen Miller converted hatred into policy. Lawyers converted vengeance into law. Judges converted impunity into constitutional doctrine. Christian nationalists converted submission to Trump into obedience to God. Billionaires paid for the machinery. Propagandists made the lies breathable. Enforcers gave them uniforms, detention centers, weapons, and official seals.

But by the time we reach the bottom, there are no mere enablers left. Only collaborators.

RUNG ONE: LIMBO

The Surrender of Moral Judgment

THE FIRST RUNG is not spectacular. No one is dragged away. No institution visibly collapses. No one announces that the Republic has entered Hell. People simply begin pretending that what they see is normal.

Here stand the Republican officials who knew Trump was unfit but decided he could be managed: Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, corporate executives, major donors, establishment conservatives, and political professionals who saw the danger clearly enough in private but accommodated it in public—and still do.

Here, too, stand Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch and the media executives who transformed authoritarian behavior into profitable entertainment. The television panels, the false equivalence, the endless fascination with Trump’s spectacle—all helped turn the grotesque into the familiar.

The inhabitants of this rung tell themselves that they did nothing terrible. They merely remained calm, kept their options open, and waited for someone else to act. They called each new violation unprecedented, then covered the next as though no precedent had been broken. They said the institutions would hold while declining to hold them. They didn’t merely fail to close the gate. They taught the country to walk through it.

RUNG TWO: LUST

The Worship of Power

DANTE’S LUSTFUL ARE blown forever through a violent storm, unable to govern the passion that governed them. The lust of Trumpism is larger than sex, though Trump’s history of sexual degradation belongs within it, as well as his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” Trump wrote in his infamous birthday note to Epstein—and he refuses to let the unredacted Epstein Files be revealed. This is the desire to possess power, to stand beside it, to be noticed by it, to submit to it, and to receive its protection.

Donald Trump hungers to be watched, praised, obeyed, and adored. He surrounds himself with people willing to perform their submission publicly. Here are JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Tim Scott, Elise Stefanik, Mike Johnson, and the long procession of elected officials who have competed for Trump’s approval. Some once warned against him. Some mocked him. Some recognized the danger. But ambition overcame judgment, and proximity to power became more valuable than dignity.

Now every surrender makes them more dependent upon him. Every humiliation creates the need for another. Every principle abandoned must be justified by abandoning the next. Their punishment is to audition forever for Trump’s favor. But Trump never turns toward them. His face remains fixed upon a mirror.

RUNG THREE: GLUTTONY

Appetite Without Limit

GLUTTONY ISN’T HUNGER, because hunger can be satisfied. Gluttony is consumption without purpose and appetite without end. Trump doesn’t merely want money, power, applause, loyalty, revenge, and immunity. He must consume them continuously.

Here stand Trump and the members of his family who have treated the presidency as an extension of the family business: Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, and the expanding network of partners, promoters, lobbyists, contractors, investors, and political associates feeding upon proximity to presidential power.

The presidency can be branded. A pardon can be transactional. A diplomatic relationship can produce a business opening. A political movement can sell merchandise, memberships, tokens, access, information, and devotion. Public attention itself becomes a commodity. The country is no longer a Republic to be governed. It’s something to be consumed.

RUNG FOUR: GREED

Government for Sale

GREED IS MORE than the desire to possess wealth. It’s the belief that everything has a price and that nothing has value unless it can be owned, monetized, or converted into power. Here stand the oligarchs and financiers: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, David Sacks, Marc Andreessen, Miriam Adelson, Timothy Mellon, Jeff Yass, crypto billionaires, corporate donors, government contractors, and industries seeking tax advantages, deregulation, favorable appointments, public contracts, and access.

They didn’t all want precisely the same policies. What united them was the conviction that democratic government was an obstacle to be purchased, captured, weakened, or reorganized around private wealth. Trump’s own business and cryptocurrency ventures have produced extraordinary conflicts-of-interest concerns, allowing industries affected by presidential policy to direct money toward enterprises connected to the president and his family.

The sin isn’t wealth. The sin is the conversion of citizenship into a market and government into an asset class. Under oligarchy, influence is not earned through persuasion or participation; it’s purchased. The billionaire’s preferences become policy. The worker’s needs become an expense. The public interest becomes whatever enriches those already powerful enough to define it.

RUNG FIVE: WRATH

Revenge as a System of Rule

WRATH IS THE emotional engine of Trumpism. Its deepest promise is not prosperity or security—but revenge. Trump’s followers are told that they’ve been humiliated, displaced, mocked, cheated, and robbed—and that someone must be made to suffer for it. Immigrants. Black citizens. Women. Queer and transgender people. Journalists. Teachers. Civil servants. Scientists. Prosecutors. Judges. Democrats. Universities. Cities. Foreigners. The poor. A politics built on grievance cannot permit reconciliation. It requires an inexhaustible supply of enemies.

Here stand Pam Bondi, Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, and officials such as Harmeet Dhillon, who now directs the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Their place in this moral inferno lies in the collapse of the essential boundary between justice and vengeance—between the public obligations of law enforcement and the private grievances of the ruler. The enemy is investigated. The loyalist is protected. The critic is threatened. The president’s injuries become the nation’s prosecutorial priorities.

The administration calls this accountability. But accountability begins with a common law applied to friend and enemy alike; it’s bound to the Constitution. Revenge begins when guilt is determined by opposition to the leader. Here the wrathful fight forever in a swamp made from their own resentments. Every enemy they destroy rises again with another face. They can never win, because victory would deprive them of the hatred that gives their power meaning.

RUNG SIX: HERESY

The Rejection of Moral and Factual Reality

HERESY MEANS MORE here than just a religious mistake. It’s a willful refusal to follow the facts and moral boundaries that protect ordinary people from unchecked power. This rung has two chambers.

In the first are the False Prophets. Here stand the Christian nationalists and religious leaders who have partnered with Trump for political power to get the dominating, racist, misogynist policies they want. Here are Russell Vought, Kevin Roberts, Mike Johnson, Paula White-Cain, Tony Perkins, Ralph Reed, Franklin Graham, and the larger collection of pastors, activists, donors, legal organizations, and political ministries who have turned Trump into their savior.

These false prophets don’t merely excuse Trump’s cruelty, vengeance, corruption, and sexual degradation. They convert his vices into virtues. Domination becomes strength. Exclusion becomes moral order. Cruelty becomes righteousness. Submission becomes faith. Trump is presented as an anointed instrument who may violate the teachings of Christianity because he promises selected Christians political power.

Christian nationalism then descends into other rungs. It enters Fraud when sectarian control is disguised as religious freedom. It enters Violence when the rights of women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, religious minorities, and nonbelievers are sacrificed to its vision. It enters Treachery when loyalty to a religious-political faction is placed above fidelity to the Constitution.

Their punishment is to preach eternally in burning churches. Every Bible they open contains only the passages they ignored: the stranger, the hungry, the prisoner, the poor, the merciful, the peacemakers, the immigrants.

In the second chamber, The Enemies of Knowledge, stands Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services. His moral transgression is not simply that he’s willfully wrong. It’s that he has elevated suspicion into doctrine, giving his harmful convictions the authority of the nation’s leading health institutions. He has unilaterally slashed the childhood immunization schedule, purged independent scientific panels, and choked off research funding for life-saving science to chase debunked conspiracies.

Kennedy belongs in Heresy because he places unscientific theories above disciplined evidence, actively suppressing internal data that contradicts his narrative. He belongs in Fraud because the prestige of federal office allows him to pass off raw speculation and fabricated research as established fact. And he belongs in Violence because the rejection of medical consensus doesn’t remain a mere argument. Its consequences arrive in actual bodies—in outbreaks, preventable illnesses, disabilities, and deaths.

His punishment is to receive perfect knowledge of every preventable disease, but no one believes him. He destroyed the very authority upon which belief depended.

Share

RUNG SEVEN: VIOLENCE

Cruelty Made Law

VIOLENCE ISN’T LIMITED to the person who strikes the blow. It includes the person who identifies the target, invents the threat, writes the policy, appropriates the money, issues the order, constructs the detention center, supplies the weapon, and assures the public that suffering is necessary. Here stand Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Pete Hegseth, immigration commanders, detention officials, private-prison profiteers, political propagandists, and lawmakers who transform vulnerable human beings into objects of fear.

Stephen Miller is the central figure here because his distinctive work is the conversion of dehumanizing language into administrative action. He gives hatred a vocabulary. Homan and the immigration apparatus give it agents, raids, vehicles, detention beds, transport contracts, and numerical targets. Hegseth gives domination a uniform and presents aggression as masculine virtue, ideological obedience as military strength, and the overwhelming violence of the state as political theater.

As in Dante, this rung has three rings:

Violence Against Human Beings: Here belong those who turn immigrants, refugees, protesters, prisoners, political opponents, women, children, and marginalized communities into targets. Cruelty becomes deterrence. Suffering becomes policy. Humiliation becomes spectacle. A human being is first called an invader, an animal, a criminal, a contaminant, or an enemy—then the machinery of government is permitted to treat that person accordingly.

Violence Against the Republic: Here belong those who attack elections, courts, Congress, the civil service, the press, universities, and the peaceful transfer of power. Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation return here—not because they personally carry out raids, but because administrative violence is still violence. To strip an institution of its independent personnel, destroy its capacity, impound its funds, replace expertise with loyalty, and place it under personal presidential control is to attack the structure of republican government.

Violence Against the Future: Here stand those who destroy the conditions under which future generations might live freely: public health, climate stability, scientific capacity, historical memory, public education, and the expectation that knowledge accumulated over generations will survive the appetites of a single government.

RUNG EIGHT: FRAUD

The Destruction of Truth and Trust

THIS IS THE most crowded rung because fraud is the operating system of Trumpism.

I am not using fraud here only as the name of a prosecutable financial crime. Dante understood fraud more broadly: the malicious use of the uniquely human powers of language and reason to deceive another person. It’s worse than uncontrolled appetite because it’s calculated. It requires intelligence put into the service of betrayal.

Here stand Kevin Roberts and the Heritage Foundation; Russell Vought and the Center for Renewing America; Stephen Miller and America First Legal; Leonard Leo and the judicial network he helped construct; the lawyers who advanced the effort to overturn the 2020 election; and the officials who continue making personal loyalty appear to be neutral administration.

Here also stand Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Fox News, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Steve Bannon, Newsmax, and the wider propaganda industry that has learned how to turn fear, resentment, conspiracy, and falsehood into profit and political power.

The Policy Architects: The Heritage Foundation belongs at the center of this rung. Project 2025 did not hide its existence. It published its plans openly. The deeper deception was to present an ideological capture of government as ordinary policy reform—to describe the concentration of presidential authority, weakening of independent institutions, replacement of expertise with loyalty, and imposition of a particular religious and social order as nothing more than competent conservative administration.

The Lawyers perform another essential function. They dress raw power in respectable language. They make illegality sound constitutional, retaliation sound procedural, personal immunity sound institutionally necessary, and the subordination of law enforcement sound like democratic accountability. John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, and the other legal figures associated with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election belong here. So do Bondi and Blanche when the defense of Trump’s personal interests merges with the public administration of justice.

The Propagandists’ task is not always to make one falsehood universally believed. It’s to destroy the possibility of shared judgment. An election is legitimate only when Trump wins. A court is honorable only when it protects him. A statistic is real only when it serves him. A crime is whatever his enemies do. Corruption becomes patriotism. Cruelty becomes security.

The inhabitants of this rung speak forever in a courtroom where words no longer possess stable meaning. No witness can be believed. No document can be authenticated. No fact can be established. No verdict can be reached. They have destroyed the idea of proof.

RUNG NINE: TREACHERY

The Betrayal of the Republic

TREACHERY IS THE final rung because it’s not merely wrongdoing. It’s wrongdoing against those to whom loyalty is owed. A president owes loyalty to the Constitution and the people—not to himself. A legislator owes loyalty to the oath—not to the leader of his party. A judge owes loyalty to law—not to the political movement that secured his appointment. A lawyer holding public office owes loyalty to the legal order—not to a former private client. A religious leader owes loyalty to the moral principles he professes—not to the politician who promises him power. A citizen owes something to the country beyond the victory of his faction.

Here stands Donald Trump. Around him stand JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Russell Vought, Stephen Miller, Todd Blanche, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Tom Homan, Kevin Roberts, the Heritage Foundation, the Christian-nationalist leadership, the oligarchs, the propagandists, the election subverters, and the officials who have placed loyalty to Trump above the obligations of their offices.

Here, too, stand Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. In Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court’s six-justice majority held that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for acts within their core constitutional authority and at least presumptive immunity for other official acts.

This rung belongs at the border between Fraud and Treachery because it helped place the person entrusted with enforcing the law beyond significant reaches of that law. Leonard Leo belongs nearby for his role in building the conservative legal and judicial network. Mitch McConnell descends here from Limbo for helping construct and confirm the Court that delivered the ruling.

At the center of Dante’s final circle, Satan does not sit upon a flaming throne. He is frozen. He is enormous but impotent. His wings beat constantly as he attempts to escape, but their wind only freezes the lake more solidly around him. That is Trump at the bottom of this inferno. Still talking, threatening, demanding praise. Still insisting that he alone possesses the power to save everyone trapped beside him. But every movement freezes the darkness more firmly into place.

THE WAY OUT

DANTE’S JOURNEY DOESN’T end at the center of Hell. He and Virgil climb down Satan’s body, pass through the center of the earth, and discover that what felt like descent has become ascent. They emerge beneath the stars.

America isn’t irretrievably frozen at the bottom—but escape begins by recognizing where we are. We must stop treating each rung as an isolated scandal, an unfortunate appointment, an overheated statement, an aggressive policy, a questionable ruling, or merely another strange day in American politics.

The rungs form a system. The billionaires finance what the architects design. The lawyers legalize it. The propagandists disguise it. The Christian nationalists sanctify it. The enforcers carry it out. The judges protect it. And Trump presides over the descent until all of them arrive together at treachery.

The question isn’t simply how far Donald Trump has fallen. He’s always been at rock bottom; that’s where he lives. But the question is how many people, institutions, and leaders have chosen to descend with him—and whether the rest of us will continue following them down.

A ladder can be descended, but it can also be climbed…though not for Trump. He’ll be there through eternity. ✨😉

Thank you for joining me on this cheerful little descent through the moral underworld.

And a special thank-you to my paid subscribers. Your support makes it possible for me to keep doing this work—and to keep writing about the Republic, the people setting fire to it, and the rest of us trying to find the ladder back out.

If you found this illuminating—or simply enjoyed imagining Trump and his collaborators receiving punishments tailored to their particular talents—please share it with someone who could use a clearer map of how we arrived here.

Share

You can subscribe for free, become a paid subscriber, or leave a tip. Every form of support matters.

yes, please tip me a cup of coffee

Thank you, as always, for reading—and for refusing to take the next step down.

SECRET ENDING…