John Ralston Saul’s critique in Voltaire’s Bastards illuminates this tension, where the unchecked expansion of instrumental reason, detached from any deeper purpose, transforms into a form of tyranny. Trump’s mastery of media, coupled with his relentless tapping into public grievances, gave him a decisive edge. In his embrace of emotion over reason, Trump becomes a critique of a system that, as philosopher John Ralston Saul suggests, has lost its humane grounding. For Saul, reason without humanity becomes tyrannical. In this context, the rise of populism and authoritarianism represents a reaction against a system of reason that has lost its moral clarity.