“Oh, no! I told them once, I told them a hundred times: put ‘Trump’ first and ‘Puppet Show’ last.”

Merriam-Webster: Kleptocracy (noun). klep·​toc·​ra·​cy. A government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.

So it begins: Elderly convicted felon Donald Trump is back in the White House, launching his second reign with his white nationalist South African bag man giving two Nazi salutes on national TV, and Trump himself signing a flurry of mostly theatrical but damaging executive orders that wouldn’t have been out of place in 1930s Germany.

Fascism, like all bullying, is inherently weak at its core and requires flashy shows of power to convince the masses that the Dear Leader is too powerful to resist.

On Monday, Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord — definitely the smart move while Los Angeles is on fire and the South just emerged from fucking blizzards — and began efforts at the federal level of erasing trans identity and to end diversity efforts. Oh, and he exited the country from the World Health Organization amid plans to put weird anti-vax crank Robert Kennedy Jr. in charge of Health & Human Services. Cool, cool.

Perhaps worst of all, just hours after departing President Joe Biden gave preemptive pardons to the Capitol Police that testified against Trump and the MAGA coup effort to overthrow the U.S. government on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump pardoned and ordered the release of the 1,500-plus people that looted the Capitol and attacked those cops.

It’s all petulant trolling bullshit and self-aggrandizing in place of actual public policy. It’s an administration based on antagonizing Democrats and Leftists rather than trying to accomplish anything of substance for the common good. It’s another four dismal years of tantrums, petty grievance whining, threats of retribution, fantastical North Korean-style boasts, recreational cruelty, cozying up to loathsome geopolitical adversaries, bungling, and Orwellian lies purely intended to provide cover for crimes and failures. Trump’s mouth is a firehose of grandiose sophistry and batshittery that’s increasingly demented senile gibberish, or aimed at dominating and distracting news cycles to keep himself in total command of the attention economy.

That’s basically a lukewarm rehash of his first administration. Perhaps the only surprising thing about Trump 2.0 is how much the sleazy cabal of obscenely wealthy fascist nerds and soulless corporations have been pushed to the forefront of his new administration and of his policy making. Cracks are appearing in the paint on his populist facade. Trump cares about the billionaires and about making more money for himself (he’s already ensured he won’t face prison time for his crimes), and he cares about these things far more than he cares about rank and file MAGA apart from their votes, their cheers, and their wallets.

I promise you, I am as tired about writing about this comic book villain motherfucker as you are tired about reading about his squalid Atlantic City fascism. I wrote my first Trump story (a phone interview with him) in 2013. But 12 years later, I cannot in good conscience not still write about this asshole, because it feels like our options to hold him accountable in any way are rapidly dwindling. I will not go down into the darkness without a written middle finger (or two) held firmly aloft.

That’s because our accountability institutions have been enfeebled and rotted, intentionally or by neglect. The top court is openly corrupt and Congress is MAGA-controlled. Democrats, often useless as the Loyal Opposition anyways, are kissing his ring. Media and corporations that once attempted to hold Trump accountable this time have preemptively bent the knee, or like Meta’s cis-twink-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg, have gone from banning Trump on their social media apps to eagerly vying to be one of his pet oligarchs. Zuck, who began Facebook as a way to sexualize his Harvard classmates, also threw Trump an inauguration party.

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has lavished Trump with money and praise, and gelded his Washington Post in its bid to endorse Kamala Harris. If the supernatural realm were an actual thing, the ghosts of Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham would strangle Bezos in his sleep. But, sadly, he endures and did not die in darkness.

And we also have Elon Musk financing Trump’s return from Elba and now throwing up the fascist salute. Just fucking awesome. It makes calling his grotesque Cybertrucks “wankpanzers” even more apt. Oh, and in case you missed it, Musk recently endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD political party as that nation’s only savior. So in case you were thinking maybe that wasn’t a real Nazi salute or just trolling, it’s ultimately a distinction without a difference. Twitter didn’t become overrun with actual Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, and other intellectual gutter trash by accident. It’s what Musk wanted, and got. Sieg heil, indeed.

Part of the Trump movement’s attractiveness to the mob (more on that term later) is the crudely orchestrated lie that conditions in America are bad to the point of dystopia — they’re not, even if profiteering inflation remains and the American Dream itself is in end-stage hospice — and blaming everyone for that dystopia except the true instigator, as the cause of our national malaise, which is the ruling class.

The emboldened oligarchs used Trump and his white nationalist allies to convince voters that everything sucks because of the woke, Democrats, Liberals, Leftists, women, minorities, fairness in hiring, and especially transgender people. The truth is most problems in America can be traced to the ultra wealthy and their paid political henchmen, who use the nation’s ancient and innate predilection for casual or overt racism and sexism in fomenting racial and gender wars in which rich white men are viewed as the good guys.

They’re deeply aware that class solidarity across the working and middle classes would doom their crony capitalist project, denuding it of its Potemkin Village sheen of patriotism and appeals to the bullshit boot-strapping and trickle-down mythologies.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Joe Biden said, in his televised farewell address last week.

News flash, Joe: Oligarchy isn’t taking shape. The shape is taken, and it’s here now, and on Monday it was given the Constitutional imprimatur when Trump was sworn in for a second term. Neoliberal Democrats share some of the blame, too.

In the last century, oligarchs got themselves some tax breaks and a measure of immortality by donating money for things like public libraries, museums, and other public edifices. The rich don’t even bother to placate the masses with such stone and marble scraps anymore. They go straight for profits and tax cuts, and fuck anything that gets in their way, including laws and ethics and humanity.

What has the modern U.S. oligarch accomplished? Fatally corrosive wealth hoarding, for starters. It mirrors pre-revolutionary France’s levels of unequal and fatally unsustainable wealth distribution. How did that turn out?

Historian and Boston College professor Heather Cox Richardson, in her “Letters from an American” newsletter, recently explained what occurred when the rich basically took full control of American politics and economy:

“Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the ‘Great Compression,’ for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing,” she wrote. “That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the ‘Great Divergence.’ Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.”

That’s pretty fucking stark. And we all know who became president in January 1981: Reagan, who ushered in the “greed is good” era that was the natural outcome of corporate America adopting the profit-at-any-cost Friedman Doctrine.

While unchecked crony capitalism has come under fire and young people adopt jaded online attitudes about our relentlessly consumerist society, the mindless profiteering at the highest levels will continue unabated under Trump, while the rest of us get jack/shit.

As Richardson also wrote: “At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was ‘the single most important economic issue of the day.’ But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.”

In other words: The rich will get richer, the poor can eat cake, and if they cannot afford it, they can just fucking die.

No help will be coming from Washington, D.C., for the working and middle classes. The federal government under Trump exists to further enrich the powerful while tossing some fascism and cult-maintaining propaganda at MAGA, like mass deportations, freeing the J6 traitors, the staged TikTok ban reversal, and further marginalization and dehumanization of trans people.

That’s why joining Trump for his coronation spectacle was a rogue’s gallery of obscenely rich geeks that, instead of being properly stuffed into a school locker, are cementing their place at the highest levels of American political power. These people sat in front of Trump’s cabinet appointees at the inauguration, and were permitted to bring their spouses when all other dignitaries were forbidden from doing so. Aside from Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos at the swearing-in were TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, OpenAI boss Sam Altman, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Collectively, they’re worth a trillion dollars.

Expect Earth-killing AI slop and crypto scams — the latter now Trump’s latest grift and an open invitation for bribes — to be the relentless tech hallmarks of the new administration (and they will be expensive failures). Google has been made much shittier by useless artificial intelligence nonsense fucking up search results, while Amazon is maddening not just by AI but the endless sponsored results and cheap Chinese garbage that have replaced simple and useless search results. This is now America: Tech makes everything more expensive and the user experience sucks.

Trump is far, far too stupid and lazy to understand how these technologies work and mostly don’t work for consumers, but he likes fancy things and money, so they get his stamp of approval. It’s why on Tuesday, as a sop to the crypto industry and to Libertarian freaks, he freed Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison a decade ago for his role in founding and operating the online Silk Road drug and gun-running marketplace that transacted crimes in Bitcoin.

It’s also why Elon Musk also will have an office inside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. The so-called Robber Barons of the 19th century’s Gilded Age would be incredibly jealous to see such openly corrupt and unaccountable proximity to power.

Musk gets such an office as part of the legally and morally bogus Department of Government Efficiency scheme to strip the federal government of its ability to operate. This fraud does not give one-fifth of a fuck about efficiency; this is about stripping the government for parts, declaring it ineffective, and then handing out privatization contracts to their cronies. Expect the U.S. Postal Service to be targeted for dismantling and sale, long a conservative dream.

A subplot to all of this is whether Trump’s ruling-class financiers believe they, like the Germans industrialists of the 1930s, have Trump under their financial control, or if they’re genuinely supplicants to him.

Either way, Trump and these oligarchs are there to loot the nation, and they’re not bothering to be slick about it. It’s occurring in the open because there are zero consequences to anything.

Look at Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship – that’s firmly and clearly written into the 14th Amendment. The pundits are assuring us that the order is meaningless because it’s clearly unconstitutional and will be dropped-kicked by the courts.

Do you trust the U.S. judicial system, rotten with odious Trump appointees like Aileen Cannon, to fairly adjudicate such things? Trump stacked SCOTUS to deliver favorable decisions on behalf of the ruling class’ right wing, and I do not trust that these corrupt shitheads won’t let him freely rewrite the Constitution to benefit populist white nationalism and corporate profiteers.

Trump has little to stop him from reshaping America into a type of modern fascist state. He’s not Hitler and MAGA isn’t National Socialism, even if there are echoes and rhymes. An American fascist state will be its own thing, mostly likely a bleak Vichyite collaborationist state. Resistance is hard work and people are worn out. It’s depressing for good people to battle this mob year after year.

And a mob is exactly what is at work here. The political writer John Ganz, notable for his recent bestseller that traces the origins of today’s problems to the 1990s, explained in a recent essay in his “Unpopular Front” newsletter how mobs are not just street brawlers.

He wrote: “Today, it encompasses—but is not limited to—the worlds of inceldom, 4chan and 8chan message board culture, porn addicts, crypto bugs, Andrew Tate fans, internet Neo-Nazis, and Groypers. The mob is the domain of would-be brownshirts—if they would only log off and go into the streets. The mob is now the dominant force on ‘X’—much to the growing chagrin of the bougie right—because Musk made it so and he has become a chieftain of the mob.

“The mob should not be identified with the ‘working class’ or ‘poor.’ Rich and poor can be found together in the mob. Marx wrote that it contained ‘the scum, offal, refuse of all classes.’”

Ganz writes, quoting Hegel: “The rabble, the mob, is not simply the condition of poverty, but a subjective experience, a disposition of mind of ‘inner indignation…against the rich, against society, against the government, etc.’”

That’s why you had January 6th goons flying to Washington in private jets.

Ganz and others explain that the wealthy and ruling class can be its own mob, too, still meaning an angry rabble rather than organized crime – although at this level, that’s increasingly a distinction without a difference.

“The most obvious example of this is rich mob member Donald Trump, for whom conspicuous consumption, showing up the ‘haters,’ and ‘bigness’ is life itself,” Ganz writes.

He continues: “The mob, both rich and poor, is attracted to ideologies that reintroduce or find the state of nature continuing by other means within the apparent lawfulness of civil society; it is fascinated by whatever reifies inequality and domination as the natural condition of man. It valorizes vitality, violence, and power and sees society as unnatural and stifling. Not only mercy but also justice are seen as ‘feminine’ and weak.”

That certainly sounds like every level of MAGA, which is simultaneously a mob and a cult, with its own distant and unaccountable leadership that doesn’t suffer any of the travails of the rank and file membership. It’s also why we see MAGA’s upper caste filled with dopey figures like Joe Rogan, Hulk Hogan, Jake Paul, and other meathead dipshits.

“They find the ideological reflection of their mentality in Social Darwinism, racism, misogyny, and pseudo-historical doctrines of eternal tribal warfare. After misogyny, antisemitism is perhaps the most characteristic mob ideology and it is usually found among all those who are the most extreme and committed members of the mob, because of the way it combines naturalization and conspiracy: it creates a permanent, natural anti-mob, constantly oppressing and humiliating, denying entitled recognition,” Ganz continues.

This is how we arrive, in this stupid age, at things like Jewish Space Lasers and Musk replying in the affirmative to antisemitism on Twitter (fuck calling it X) and tossing up Nazi salutes.

Hamilton Nolan, the noted labor writer, also recently made the case Trump is functionally the head of the plutocracy’s mob.

“The strongman president demands the loyalty of the oligarchs, and the oligarchs in turn are granted the blessing of the state to loot an ever greater share of the nation’s wealth,” he wrote about the traditional autocratic governance model found globally.

“Why would you assume that America is any different from the many nations around the world that already practice this political method in earnest? This is the system most conducive to the perpetuation of the oligarchs’ interests. They financially support the political revenge and repression that will flow forth from the strongman, and they themselves are insulated from its consequences, and granted license to get as rich as they want, however they want. The arrangement works for both sides. This is gangster capitalism in full flower.”

Like in other totalitarian nations, America’s gangster capitalist state comes with not just the religious fervor of the strongman’s cult of personality, but genuine liturgical blessing in the form of evangelical Protestant veneration and donations. Can you imagine, if you believe in a divine figure of charity and goodness like Jesus Christ, trying to justify to him the deeply vulgar and extremely Republican concept of prosperity gospel?

That is is why I want to end this section with a famous quote from Denis Diderot, the French philosopher from the Age of Enlightenment and co-author of the Encyclopédie that was a sort of secular Wikipedia of its time. This line has been bouncing around in my head since Trump’s re-election and again since his recent coronation, after what FBI director-nominee (and extreme shithead) Kash Patel described as America’s “new dynasty” anointed by god:

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

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