The Power Map of the Trump Regime
Who really works for whom?
The oligarchy
At the top of the power map you’ll see billionaire oligarchs who have extraordinary clout in the Trump regime. In effect, the regime reports to them.
They include:
Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who got JD Vance his job. He has a direct pipeline to Vance.
Stephen Schwarzman, the private equity CEO. Schwarzman takes a variety of roles. For example, he’s behind the scenes in the regime’s fight with Harvard and other major institutions.
Bill Ackman, the investor. He, too, influences the troika. He’s the main intermediary between Trump and Elon Musk.
Musk himself still wields significant influence over Miller, Vought, and Vance.
Marc Andreessen, the unofficial godfather of Silicon Valley and co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He’s heavily invested in artificial intelligence startups and financial technology firms and informally advises the regime.
Also: tech oligarchs Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Tim Cook.
And Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and Jared Kushner. As members of the Trump family, they depend on, and are depended on by, the powers within the regime.
What’s in it for the oligarchs?
Money and power. Most basically, the oligarchs don’t trust democracy. Their definition of freedom is the ability to accumulate and retain as much wealth as they wish.
Their deepest fear is that the majority of Americans, if fully informed, would expropriate their fortunes. As Thiel wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Marc Andreessen’s red line was a proposal that wafted around the Biden administration to tax unrealized capital gains. Others are freaked out by the possibility of a wealth tax on billionaires and multimillionaires.
The oligarchs are not entirely anti-government because they also want government funding for their giant projects, such as AI and the exploration (and exploitation) of space, which require vast amounts of capital and resources.
Hence, their enthusiasm for the defense industry, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds, and Chinese technology and the Chinese market.
Stephen Miller wants to return America to the 1950s, when it was dominated by white, straight, Christian men whose ancestors were born here. Miller is pushing for high tariffs, managing the ICE raids on Democrat-run cities, summoning National Guard and federal troops, and seeking to provoke enough violence to justify invocation of the Insurrection Act.
Russell Vought wants to create an all-powerful executive branch dictatorship, usurping the roles of the other branches. Vought has illegally impounded over $410 billion so far. During the shutdown, he has frozen nearly $28 billion for more than 200 projects mostly in Democrat-led cities and congressional districts, has fired thousands of federal employees, and is threatening not to provide back pay to furloughed federal employees.
JD Vance wants to prevent the Democrats from taking control of one or both chambers of Congress in the 2026 midterms and become president after Trump. He’s urging Republican states to engage in more gerrymandering to eke out more Republican House seats, managing the legal assault on the Voting Rights Act and mail-in voting, and pushing universities and the media to the right.
No comments:
Post a Comment