The United States’ Operation Epic Fury against Iran does more than mark a military escalation. It shows how Trump revives old national myths: the American frontier, the cowboy, regenerative violence, and Providence – while stripping them of their civic dimension and turning them into narratives of domination.That is what distinguishes him from earlier presidents: he does not draw on these myths to celebrate collective effort or democratic purpose, but to stage domination, purification, and personal omnipotence.A conflict fuelled by mythsSince the start of the war on Iran, Trump has sounded less like a President than a conqueror. He demands Tehran’s “unconditionalsurrender,” promises that “bombs will be dropping everywhere,” and evokes the selection of “great, acceptable leaders” for the postwar period.This language is more than the language of military necessity: it reactivates an old grammar of American power in a brutally hardened form.In Republics of Myth (2022), Hussein Banai, Malcolm Byrne and John Tirman argue that conflict with Iran is driven not only by strategic interests but also by two incompatible national narratives, each of which turns every new crisis into confirmation of older humiliations, fears, myths, and hostilities.On the American side, that narrative remains deeply shaped by, the myth of the frontier: a space to tame, “savages” to defeat, and a mission to fulfil. Applied to the Middle East, that framework casts Iran as an external frontier to be subdued. Trump did not invent this narrative. He radicalised it.The Frontier: from expansion to predationIn his inaugural address on January 20, 2025, Trump presented the frontier as one of the nation’s central founding myths. The United States, he said, must once again become “A growing nation – one that increases our wealth, expands our territory,” and pursues its “manifest destiny.” He added that “the spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts.” Here, the frontier is no longer a metaphor for collective progress. It becomes, once again, a language of power and appropriation.Nor did this rhetoric remain abstract. In the first weeks of his second term, Trump repeatedly said that Canada should become the 51st state and declared of Greenland:“I think we’re going to get it one way or the other.”This narrative is rooted in a Puritan imaginary of mission in the wilderness, of a “New Jerusalem,” and of the violent conquest of a territory populated by figures deemed as “barbaric savages.” Republics of Myth also shows how this grammar was projected from Latin America to the Middle East.Trump is therefore not simply reusing an old American image; he is reactivating its most expansionist version. The same mechanism operates home. At the southern border, Trump speaks of “invasion,” “migrant occupation” and, again, “savages.” Abroad, he applies the same logic to Iran, describing it in apocalyptic terms as a force of “evil” that must be crushed and as an imminent existential danger. In both cases, the point is less to protect a border than to stage a reconquest through a moral narrative of good versus evil.The cowboy becomes a cult of the leaderThe second myth is that of the individualistic cowboy, as analysed by Historian Heather Cox Richardson: the ideal of the “real” American, typically white who acts alone, expects nothing fromgovernment, protects his own, and imposes his will by dominating others.Richardson shows that this myth, reworked in the modern era by Barry Goldwater and later mainstreamed by Ronald Reagan, has become central to Republican political culture. Under Trump, it is taken to an extreme. One sentence, spoken when he announced the opening of strikes against Iran on February 28, captures the logic:“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight.”The cowboy is no longer a figure of popular autonomy. He becomes the exceptional man, the one who dares alone, above institutional caution.Trump folds the myth into his own person. With the alleged Iranian plot to assassinate him during the 2024 campaign in mind, he even frames the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as an O.K. Corral-style duel:“I got him before he got me.”Where earlier presidents could use frontier imagery to narrate a national effort, Trump turns the cowboy into a template for the charismatic, transgressive leader. The hero no longer stands for a collective order. He externalises conflict, polarises the world into good and evil, and justifies himself only through his ability to win. This pattern is not without precedent. From Reagan’s “evil empire” to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” American presidents have often opposed a virtuous “us” to a threatening “them.” But under Trump, the moral narrative no longer primarily serves to defend values or the “free world.” It serves to magnify a leader whose legitimacy rests on his capacity to prevail. Yet, Trump also undermines the very binary he deploys: even after branding an adversary as evil, he may pivot the next day and embrace the idea of a deal with the enemy. The rhetoric is therefore not only harsher than before; it is also more unstable, more transactional, and more theatrical.Violence as regenerationThe third myth is that of regenerative violence, long identified by historian Richard Slotkin. He has shown the idea that violence can purge disorder and restore a lost order runs through modern American political mythology.Violence is not an accident of the frontier; it is its symbolic engine. It destroys the obstacle, repairs humiliation, for example, the humiliation left by the 1979 hostage crisis, which Trump invoked in his February 28, 2026 address – purifies space, and regenerates the community.As early as 2017, Trump’s inaugural address invoked “American carnage” painting a portrait of a ravaged country that had to be restored through rupture, a narrative drawn from the rhetorical tradition of the Jeremiad.In 2025–2026, that logic extends to foreign policy. At West Point, addressing graduates of the US military academy, Trump said he wanted to refocus the military on “crushing America’s adversaries, killing America’s enemies,” and on the ability to “dominate any foe and annihilate any threat.”Since the start of his second term, that myth has been dramatised even more explicitly through the fusion of entertainment and reality, as in a White House video that mixed images of the strikes on Iran with scenes from Hollywood films and video games under the slogan “American Justice.”Trump promises his enemies “certain death” and links destruction to a supposed political liberation. Violence, then, is no longer simply a means. It becomes the condition of renewal. This is where Trump departs most clearly from a more conventional presidential use of power.Where his predecessors tied violence to an explicit project of political transformation – democratisation, state-building, regional redesign, Trump expresses a more radical belief: power itself becomes a virtue, and crushing the enemy its most dazzling proof. Violence no longer prepares a new order. It becomes an end in itself, as though the demonstration of power alone could produce a political solution.Under Trump, the old American myth of violence is stripped of its universalist trappings. What remains is destruction as proof of power.Providence and the leader’s missionThe fourth myth is religious. From the outset, the American frontier was bound up with a providentialist imagination: a mission in the wilderness, a chosen people, a direct Protestant relationship to God. Trump takes up that tradition, but shifts it onto himself. In his 2025 inaugural address, he said that his “life was saved for a reason” and that he was “saved by God to make America great again. At the National Prayer Breakfast he again declares that God has "a special plan and a glorious mission for America.”Here too, the original myth is distorted. Providence is no longer invoked to recall the nation’s collective vocation. It is used to sacralise the president himself in a quasi-messianic role. Trump’s supporters intensify this drift: part of evangelical Trumpism cast him in the language of anointing, prophecy, or a war between good and evil. Religion does not replace strategy here; it sacralises force.US Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is a particularly revealing embodiment of that dynamic. A modern crusader figure, he fuses nationalist Christianity, martial virility, and the sacred legitimisation of force, with a vision of violence largely unbound by restraint. He invokes divine purpose before troops to justify war.What the conflict against Iran really revealsThe war against Iran throws all of this into sharp relief. It shows how old American myths are not just reused, but hardened and distorted. The frontier becomes predation, the cowboy – a cult of the leader, violence - redemptive crushing, religion – the sacralisation of the leader.Trump does not simply inherit the US presidential tradition. He radicalises its darkest impulses, draining these narratives of their civic, moral, or universalist content and leaving only their most brutal core: conquest, force, divine right, and the annihilation of the enemy. That is also part of what makes them appealing to many Republican sympathisers. A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.