Ignore the ‘oligarchy,’ Trump has mastered his coalition

The historian Niall Ferguson was in many ways typical of the high-level defectors to Trumpism. He found himself driven to MAGAdom only in extremis: over Biden’s plans to pack the Supreme Court, and over insufficient “deterrence” in the Democrats’ foreign policy.

Last month, however, Ferguson tested the limits of this new coalition. He took to X to rebuke Trump’s handling of negotiations with Russia. Soon popped up no less a figure than J.D. Vance. “Moralistic garbage,” the vice president shot back. Ferguson felt obliged to clarify his position to the MAGA faithful. 

The episode was abrupt, unexpectedly heated, and revealing: for all the talk of a new American “oligarchy,” Trump’s new backers have now manifestly failed to direct Trumpism to their own ends.

By the end of the 2024 campaign, Trumpism had transcended the populist label to become a coalition of the disaffected. The mutiny of much of Silicon Valley, high finance, Hollywood, and defrocked academics against the Democratic Party recast MAGA as one of those catch-all movements — like United Russia or the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan — that’s set up by vested interests to carry out an emergency national reversal. To its critics, Trumpism was no longer a revolt from below but a coup from above: an oligarchy in the making.

What would be the role for Trump and the MAGA foot soldiers in all this? Very little, apparently. Many — like the academic Brooke Harrington — took it for granted that Trump’s own brand of American nationalism would be this oligarchy’s first victim. Issues such as immigration and the welfare of blue-collar voters would now take a back seat to the interests of Trump’s new friends: defense contracts, transhumanism, the merging of the state with corporations, shitcoins. Trump, at 78, would be relegated to a genial figurehead among his new colleagues — who would now take things from here.

To Trump’s critics, this would represent a kind of cosmic justice: MAGA had made a devil’s bargain with the shadowy lords of tech, and the price would now be its own impotence. Even to the more sympathetic, Trump was often spoken of as merely a symptom of a more significant elite coup, not so much a force in and of himself.

Six weeks in, and it’s patently clear that none of this has come to pass. In the short time Trump has been in office, the MAGA movement has achieved complete independence from its new paymasters. If — as left-wing critics often allege — MAGA really does represent a group of roughs hired by the nation’s possessing classes to deal with striking workers, then it is these roughs who now sit in the managing director’s chair and have taken over the concern themselves.

The headline event of the past few weeks has not been the consolidation of an “oligarchy” — as predicted by Anne Applebaum and others — but a revival of the executive powers of the presidency, exercised by Trump himself. There has been no watering down of the MAGA agenda at the behest of anyone except the courts.

To some Trump donors, MAGA was about a general revival of American “global leadership,” after the Biden administration’s clumsy withdrawal from Afghanistan and its hesitations over Gaza. But the hawks have had little influence over Trump’s second term thus far. Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, has taken a firmer line with Netanyahu than the Biden administration ever did, and the president has embarked on a far more radical policy on ending the war in Ukraine than most expected. In this, he now has the support of — of all people — Lindsey Graham.

The same is true for Silicon Valley. There has been no liberalization of visa rules, despite Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy both calling for such a course late last year. The recently announced “Gold Card” — a classic piece of Trumpian whimsy — is a poor substitute for the H-1B expansion that much of the tech world had in mind. Plans are also in motion to abolish birthright citizenship, a key draw for H-1B migrants (whether that will get past the Supreme Court is another question). As for Musk, he has now taken on the messy and difficult job of firing federal employees and defunding programs — and the opprobrium that comes with it: an odd choice of role for this so-called puppet master.

How did MAGA accomplish this? Unlike previous arrangements of this kind, Trump’s new sponsors have almost no leverage against him. The supposed protagonists of “techno-feudalism” seem powerless to defend their interests on their own, for one. In truth, these people had nowhere else to turn. During the Biden years, Silicon Valley was menaced by de-banking, frivolous lawsuits, and regulatory crackdowns; and it was told point-blank by officials that any rival to Sam Altman’s OpenAI would be regulated out of existence. In the event of a Harris victory, people such as Marc Andreessen would have been hit with a tax on unrealized capital gains.

Nor was Silicon Valley able to field a presidential candidate of its own: Ron DeSantis was almost certainly their first choice (Musk co-hosted his campaign launch, remember) — but that soon fizzled out. In the end, only Trump could provide the electoral muscle and the cadres to deliver them from Elizabeth Warren and the FTC. Given how bound up Silicon Valley now is with wider cultural and political battles, a pro-business wing of the Democrats is unlikely to emerge. Musk and his confederates have committed far too much to slink off now. Nor is this arrangement necessarily a cynical one: Musk, Andreessen and Peter Thiel have long been true believers in, if not always Trumpism, then at least some general reform to Western institutions.

Why was it assumed that Trump would be a cipher? Too much emphasis on social forces, too little on individuals. There is no “vibe shift” without Trump himself: a man who, through the $TRUMP memecoin, was able to issue a bond on his name to magic $10 billion from thin air. At the start of 2021, after the riot of January 6, Trumpism as a movement had shrunk to the ambition—and, equally, the instinct for self-preservation—of one man. Look how far that ended up taking him.