Tag: The Foundation Saga

Is Trump ‘The Mule?’ A Foundation Thought Experiment

One of the most unsettling characters in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series isn’t a tyrant, a general, or a genius strategist. It’s the Mule—a historical anomaly so emotionally disruptive that he breaks the predictive power of psychohistory itself. The entire Foundation project is built on the assumption that individuals don’t matter, that history unfolds according to vast statistical forces. The Mule matters precisely because he proves that assumption wrong.

Which raises a fun—and slightly uncomfortable—question: could Donald Trump be metaphorically understood as the Mule?

The Case For Trump as the Mule

In the Foundation universe, the Plan works only if people behave predictably. It assumes elites will act in good faith, institutions will be respected, and historical momentum will gently guide civilization from chaos back toward stability. In a very loose but evocative sense, the U.S. Constitution plays a similar role in our own story. It isn’t just a legal document; it’s a behavioral assumption machine. It presumes norms, restraint, legitimacy, and a shared belief in the system itself.

Trump enters this picture like an error term no one modeled.

He doesn’t succeed by mastering institutions. He succeeds by bypassing them—by appealing directly to emotion, grievance, identity, and loyalty. His power doesn’t come from policy coherence or ideological rigor but from his ability to function as a focal point for belief. To supporters, he doesn’t need to make sense. He feels right. To opponents, he doesn’t behave rationally. He feels impossible.

This is very Mule-like.

In Asimov’s story, the Mule isn’t dangerous because he has the biggest fleet; he’s dangerous because he can make people do things that are wildly against their own interests—and feel good about it. Trump’s political gravity operates similarly. People excuse contradictions, abandon previously sacred principles, and accept behavior that would have been disqualifying coming from literally anyone else. From the outside, it looks inexplicable. From the inside, it feels inevitable.

Most tellingly, Trump didn’t just win elections—he invalidated the experts. Pollsters, political scientists, journalists, and institutional gatekeepers repeatedly said, “This shouldn’t be happening,” right up until it very clearly was. That’s the Mule’s signature move: not conquering territory, but conquering confidence in the model.

The Case Against Trump as the Mule

There’s a strong counterargument, though—and it cuts deep.

The Mule, by definition, is unpredictable. He’s a true anomaly. But on a macro-historical level, it’s hard to argue that someone like Trump wasn’t foreseeable. As empires stagnate or contract, trust in elites erodes. Media ecosystems fracture. Economic anxiety mixes with cultural resentment. Charismatic strongmen don’t appear out of nowhere; they emerge from fertile ground.

From this perspective, Trump isn’t outside the Plan—he’s what happens when the Plan quietly stops working.

If you zoom out far enough, Trump looks less like a singular historical glitch and more like a symptom. A loud one. A destabilizing one. But still legible. Many countries have produced similar figures under similar conditions. That makes him less Mule and more… history doing what history does when institutions fail to adapt.

And that distinction matters. In Foundation, once the Mule is removed, psychohistory can resume. The system was sound; it just encountered a freak event. In the real world, Trump’s rise suggests something more troubling: that our predictive confidence was misplaced all along.

The Unsettling Synthesis

Which leads to a more interesting possibility.

Trump may not be the Mule—but he might be the proof that our “Plan” was never as predictive as we thought.

The Constitution, like psychohistory, works beautifully when irrationality remains background noise. It assumes bad actors are rare, norms are sticky, and belief in the system is self-sustaining. Trump revealed how much of American stability was held together not by laws, but by vibes. Not by enforcement, but by mutual agreement to play along.

In that sense, the Mule moment isn’t Trump himself. It’s the realization that history never stopped being driven by emotion—it just politely pretended otherwise for a while.

And once you see that, the really uncomfortable question isn’t whether Trump was inevitable.

It’s whether the next Mule is already loading.

Trump Is ‘The Mule’ From The Foundation Series



by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have repeatedly ranted about this off and on since Trump became president, but the fact remains — the “Network” of the Trump Era is waiting to be made in the guise of “The Mule” portion of The Foundation Saga.

The perfect person to play The Mule, of course, is 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer. If it was a movie and it was written well enough, McBrayer would easily win an Oscar for his performance given what would happen to him at the end of the movie. (Though, I guess you could stretch the whole thing out to at least two movies if you really thought about it.)

Now, I’m well aware that Apple+ is working on adapting The Foundation Saga, so it could be that they effort is ultimately how The Mule will come to be seen by a larger audience. It would be too bad, however, if it wasn’t made into a movie. The Mule is so much like Trump that I think audiences would really love it. It would be an ideal way to address the Trump Era in a non-preachy manner.

But what do I know. No one listens to me.

Jesus, Hollywood, Wake Up: Donald Trump Is ‘The Mule’


By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

As anyone with some knowledge about The Foundation Saga will tell you: Donald Trump is The Mule.

Let’s review exactly why this is the case. According to Wikipedia:

The Mule is a fictional character from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.[1] One of the greatest conquerors the galaxy has ever seen, he is a mentalic who has the ability to reach into the minds of others and “adjust” their emotions, individually or en masse, using this capability to conscript individuals to his cause. Not direct mind-control per se, it is a subtle influence of the subconscious; individuals under the Mule’s influence behave otherwise normally – logic, memories, and personality intact. This gives the Mule the capacity to disrupt Seldon’s plan by invalidating Seldon’s assumption that no single individual could have a measurable effect on galactic socio-historical trends on their own, due to the plan relying on the predictability of the actions of very large numbers of people.

In the Foundation universe, there is the notion that Hari Sheldon came up with something called The Sheldon Plan that predicted a way through which what would otherwise have been 10,000 years of darkness after the fall of the Galactic Empire could be reduced to 1,000 through the use of two Foundations.

Now, as told in The Foundation Saga, The Mule is a comic character who has the ability to subtly influence people’s minds. He is a threat to the Foundation and the Shelton Plan because he disrupts the Sheldon Plan’s basic notion that no one person can disrupt history significantly.

In my reading of all of this, the American Constitution is analogous to The Sheldon Plan. One of the interesting plot points of the novel’s universe is that a hologram of Sheldon pops out at crucial junctures in the plan’s progression to reaffirm its success. So, in my imagination, it’s kind of like if James Madison was to pop out steampunk style every four years and tell us, in general terms, who had just won the presidential election and why.

There’s a scene where Sheldon does this and everything is out of whack because of The Mule. It seems as though if you know anything about The Foundation Saga that the similarity between Donald Trump and The Mule is painfully obvious. In the context of fictional Foundation history and real American history, the two characters are almost completely identical.

If someone in Hollywood doesn’t have the wherewithal to do something with this obvious comparison, I give up on the whole industry. A great screenwriter and director could do something really, really powerful with The Mule in the context of Trumplandia. I struggle to understand why no one in Hollywood has yet to notice this and begin production on a movie or even a TV series that addresses this point. I know that HBO, was, at some point in the recent past supposed to be working on something like what I suggest, but I haven’t heard anymore about it.

I, personally, can’t do anything about it because I don’t have the rights to the book and even if I did, I know my limits and I’m struggling to write a novel about the zany nature of Trump’s era. A screenplay would definitely, at this point, be a bridge too far.

But we’ll see, I guess. It still find myself waiting for all the great art to come out of the Trumplandia era. It will happen, eventually, of course. I just worry it may be too late.

More on this subject.

By Shelt Garner

The more I think about it, the more it makes total sense that Jack McBrayer could probably win an Oscar if he played The Mule character as written about in The Foundation series.

The Mule in the series is introduced as something of a goof. Only later do we learn who he really is and the power that he has. So, if I was writing the screenplay for Jack McBrayer, I would break it down like this:

Act I

We introduce The Plan and how it’s supposed to save humanity from 10,000 years of darkness. We introduce the four (if I remember correctly) people who will ultimate race around the galaxy looking for The Mule’s home planet. (I’m too lazy to look the plot of the novels up and this just gives you a general sense of what to do with it, anyway.) At the end of the first act, The Mule’s forces storm Terminous and we’re kicked into the second act’s special world.

Act II

In this act, our four core group of people race around the galaxy, hoping to understand The Mule and as such bring him down. Lots of cool shit happens and we’re introduce to the world of The Foundation (which, of course, unfortunately Star Wars stole huge chunks from.)

At the end of this act, we learn who The Mule is and “all is lost.”

Act III

In this act, we see the Oscar-winning aspect of The Mule character for Jack McBrayer. All along he’s been this goofy-happy guy and in the last act the audience learns he’s actually really evil. And, what’s more, you have the Trump allegory in there as well (if you read exactly what I’m summarizing.)

We have our climax, The Mule is defeated and we leave the door open for a sequel.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation & ‘The Mule’ As A Metaphor For Trumplandia

by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

It is eerie how quiet the movie industry has been when it comes to producing metaphor’s for Trumplandia. It’s weird that no major movie — that I know of — is now in production that is supposed to be the Apocalypse Now of the rule of Trump.

Maybe one is in production right now and I just don’t know about it.

But I would like to gently suggestion that of all the stuff out there for potential creative strip mining there remains one motherload left untouched by the movie industry: The Foundation Saga. Specifically, I am thinking of the subset of the Foundation Saga known as The Mule.

The reason why The Mule is perfect to be turned into a movie is it deals with a comic character who turns out to be the villain. In short, The Mule completely destroys the presumed course of history and I think that would resonate with audiences.

I have heard that at one point HBO was working on turning The Foundation Saga into a TV series similar to Game Of Thrones, but I have not heard any more about it recently.

It’s not like I could do anything about this given that I am not very adept at writing screenplays and I definitely don’t own the rights to any part of the series. So, for the time being, this will be just an idle daydream.

But it would be a shame if nothing came of this.