Newly sworn-in President Donald Trump speaks with House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) following a signing ceremony in the President?s Room following the 60th inaugural ceremony on January 20, 2025, at the US Capitol in Washington, DC.
The New York Timesdescribes Trump as leading “a global wave of hard-line conservative populism.”
Rubbish.
What Trump is undertaking has nothing whatever to do with conservatism, which is about conserving institutions and shrinking the size of government. And it has nothing to do with populism, which is about confronting elites.
Trump is leading a move to replace democracy with oligarchy.
He’s implementing a plan to make the wealthiest people in America far wealthier and more powerful, including Trump himself, and to turn American democracy into a giant corporation run by a handful of absurdly rich men.
He thinks he can accomplish this by getting the rest of us so angry at one another — over immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, diversity, and the like — that we don’t look upward and see where most of the wealth and power have gone.
Trump’s divisive policies will cause great harm, to be sure, and we must do everything we can to protect those who are vulnerable to them. But his cruel divisiveness is deflecting attention from the main event.
The media reported on all the hot-buttons Trump pushed: The government now recognizes only two “immutable” genders, male and female. Migrants (now referred to as “aliens”) are being turned away at the border. Immigration agents are freed to target hospitals, schools, and churches in search of people to deport. Diversity efforts in the federal government have been dismantled and employees turned into snitches. Federal money will be barred from paying for many abortions.
All awful to be sure, but the bigger story is Trump’s consolidation of power — substituting loyalists for experts across the government, using retribution to intimidate others, purging the government’s independent inspectors general, giving the Defense Department more authority over civilian life (and putting a raving loyalist in charge), giving Elon Musk authority to cut spending and roll back regulations, and readying a massive tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations.
Americans aren’t seeing this big story yet because Trump’s divisiveness is masking it.
One example: Trump fired Lina Khan, the aggressive monopoly-buster chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and replaced her with corporate stooge Andrew Ferguson. As a result, giant corporations and their CEOs are now free to get even bigger — merging with one another, acquiring smaller companies, and using predatory bullying to wipe out competitors. These are key steps on the road toward even more concentrated oligarchic control.
Yet what’s been reported this week is that Ferguson is purging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies from the Federal Trade Commission.
I’m not playing down the importance of DEI. I’m just saying that the really big shift is happening behind the rightward flip. In fact, the terms “left” and “right” mean less and less now. The big story is about power and wealth moving into fewer and fewer hands.
Trump is the frontman. The three richest men in the world (Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) stood prominently before him when he was sworn in last week. Trump has appointed other billionaires to key positions.
Behind them is a coterie of billionaires pushing for more oligarchic control of America (among them, Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, and Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone).
Their two key inside players are Musk and JD Vance.
The oligarchs are counting on Vance to become president when Trump is incapacitated or dies in office, or clings to power beyond 2028 and turns power over to Vance. Vance will manage the final transition to an oligarchic form of government.
Recall that Vance would never have been elected senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for Thiel’s $15 million investment in him (by far the largest portion of Vance’s campaign fund).
Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s group of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for vice president.
Thiel once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.
That’s the whole point. Thiel and his fellow billionaire oligarchs want it all.
Their intellectual godfather is Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer who believes that political power in the United States has been held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.
Yarvin thinks democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
The first step toward achieving Yarvin’s vision was offered by Vance in a 2021 podcast — replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Yarvin’s emphasis on the inefficiency of democratic government is the seed for Musk’s department of government efficiency, itself another step toward Yarvin’s joint-stock corporation of oligarchs.
A third step: cryptocurrency substitutes for the U.S. dollar. This would shift financial controls out of a democratically elected system of government and into the hands of oligarchs who control crypto.
Make no mistake: Trump’s first week was a catastrophe for many vulnerable people. But the biggest story was his startling initial moves from democracy to oligarchy.
My hope lies in Americans noticing this.
As I’ve said, not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century has such vast wealth turned itself into power so unapologetically, unashamedly, and defiantly.
Americans don’t abide aristocracy. We were founded in revolt against unaccountable power and wealth. We will not tolerate this barefaced takeover.
The backlash, when it comes, will be stunning.
NOW READ: Get ready for 'The Great Revenge' as Trump’s Orwellian America takes shape
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
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