We build be adding, by growing, not by tearing down….We can love each other despite the disagreement.

JD Vance – Turning Point speech, Dec 21st, 2025

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world…. We’re a superpower. And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

Stephen Miller – January 2026

First thing, let’s look at some terminology. In my view, the best, but certainly not only, word to describe the current format of the United States is plutocracy, which is simply defined as government by the wealthy, or as an elite or ruling class whose power is derived from its wealth. I think this term better captures the nature of our country than alternate labels like oligarchy or authoritarianism, at least for the present moment. While those terms certainly have their usefulness, they don’t directly implicate wealth as the source of our current dilemma. And the accumulation of power through wealth is the key to understanding the clashes that are now emerging inside the Trump regime.

Up until the invasion of Venezuela, plutocrats had a natural fit with Trumpism. In both his first term and the new one, Trump delivered great things for the moneyed class: tax cuts, deregulation, dismantling of government oversight bodies and departments, the slashing of public sector jobs, which forces people into the private sphere, driving down wages, and other business-friendly policies. While the tariffs were certainly unsettling to some specific business sectors, the biggest players, who form the backbone of the plutocracy, were able to pass those costs on to consumers, which the latter were forced to tolerate, due to the oligopolistic nature of much of the US economy.

The things that liberals are so up in arms about with the Trump regime — ICE terrorizing of the public, mass deportations, civil rights violations, suspension of habeas corpus, the overturning of Roe-v-Wade, the bullying and blackmail of universities, the erasure of non-white and non-male histories of struggle and achievement, the illegal occupation of Democratic cities, and all the rest — these are not really issues of concern for plutocrats, as they live in a completely different world, one where they are easily able to avoid and evade the social chaos created by these draconian actions.

Even the SCOTUS giving the POTUS carte blanche to violate the law with impunity is not a big deal for plutocrats, because Trump could be relied on to keep the gravy train of cash flowing in their direction. Trump is one of them, after all, a billionaire in his own right. And he won’t bite the hands of the real masters of the universe.

But with Venezuela and the subsequent saber-rattling against Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and Iran, Trump has set off on a much more disruptive, potentially disastrous pursuit of a Superpower-laden world, a vision that is now incredibly naive if not completely obsolete. No matter how much Russia, China, North Korea, and other authoritarian states (now including, apparently, the US) want to resuscitate the old international sphere of conflict and intrigue, where armies, brute force, and sheer power can accrue to national glory and success, that ship has actually long-since sailed, no matter how much Cold War cosplay is performed. Trying to breathe new life into these old fascist dreams can only do harm, and a lot of it. And any national “success” achieved inside this Superpower simulacrum will prove to be empty, at best.

Why? Because the entire global consumer-industrial system is unsustainable at its core, and is in fact tottering on the edge of full-scale ecological, and thus total, collapse. And there are more layers to this nesting-doll set of catastrophes, The unsustainability of the whole thing is not just ecological, but also economic (due to rising inter- and intra-national inequality), political (which springs from economic inequality), and even psychological, as more and more people are experiencing chronic dread, anxiety, stress, precariousness, and despair.

No matter how much Trump and his media minions are enamored with precision military strikes and the internal application of force, via ICE and the National Guard, to the residents of the US, this does not render the staggering, shambling corpse of infinite-growth capitalism any more likely to last beyond a very few years.

China, for its part, seems to caught in between an honest acknowledgement of the dead-end of the current system and their ongoing commitment to an authoritarian regime bent on expanding its superpower footprint. China wouldn’t be pushing so hard on solar energy, EVs, and other renewables if they didn’t understand the dire ecological straits in which we’re living. But they are too locked in to the need for economic growth; and the psychology of previous investment won’t let them walk away from endless expansion and walk towards sensible economic contraction.

But back to the plutocrats. Why would the Venezuela takeover and the now-very-serious noises from Trump and the Dark Lord Nebbish Stephen Miller (doesn’t he always look like he’s wringing his hands in an evil way under the table?) regarding a new hemispheric domination — why would that worry the rich and powerful?

Well, first of all, war and/or forceful occupation is not a great boon to international trade, While it is certainly good for defense contractors, other parts of the business world would not be crazy about Trump annexing a territory controlled by a NATO ally — a territory, by the way, where at least 85% of the population wants nothing to do with the US or US control.

Secondly, invading, occupying, and/or looting Venezuela, Greenland, and other sovereign nations and territories also opens up the likely application of sanctions and other economic tactics against the US. The potential for supply chain disruption is significant, as any observer of the Russian invasion of Ukraine knows full well.

Finally, there is also the issue of the end of US dollar hegemony. Much of the world is desperate to move away from the USD as the global reserve currency, and imperial projects that result in the shattering of international laws and accords is likely to drive more countries away from dealing with the US economically. China is more than happy to fill the void, but the ensuing global chaos could crush the fragile buttresses of international trade for good. And as America First morphs into America Alone under Trumpism, the US is poised to find out how tenuous its superpower status really is.

The current thinking is that Trump will get his way in Greenland, one way or another. If he does, then we have truly entered the death-throes of the United States as we know it. We will become Russia-East, despised around the globe, except to other authoritarian regimes.

And that brings us to MAGA. Are Trump’s die-hard supporters truly ready for an Imperial America, an America even more loathed around the world than we already are? Maybe they don’t care at all. Maybe to them, America First really means America Alone, or more accurately, Fuck Everybody Else!

Here’s the thing though. MAGA peeps are already uncomfortable with Trump taking his eye off the ball, by his focusing more on gilded ballrooms than inflation, more on renaming buildings and battleships than on delivering actual economic security to regular people who are already hurting, and who are now about to get kicked in the nutsack by vanishing health care.

And when all of Trump’s international machinations lead to no actual improvement in people’s lives, instead lining the pockets of Trump himself and his kleptocratic cronies, how long will MAGA be able to sup only on rage and the vicarious enjoyment of Trump’s golf championships and sweet new Qatari jet? In short, will MAGA folks ever actually wake up to the con job being put over on them by Emperor Bone Spurs?

If MAGA defects in the midterms, or just stays home in protest, then a Democratic House could really put a crimp in Trump and Lord Baldemort Miller’s imperial project. This would also be something that the plutocrats wouldn’t like, as a Democratic resurgence could end the gravy train of tax cuts, deregulation, and privatization.

Which finally brings us to the diverging interests of JD Vance (the five o’clock shadow prez) and Stephen Miller. Vance has been counting on the easy transfer of MAGA world over to his camp for 2028. But that requires keeping things somewhat stable: keep deporting people, keep attacking libs as un-American groomers and baby-killers, keep obsessing over trans stuff, etc. Basically, Vance is counting on the continuation of the cash-machine that is the Polarization Industrial Complex, the system that keeps the votes and the money flowing from rural Americans and big-money conservatives into the pockets of the most reliably anti-lib candidates, podcasts, and think tanks.

But Trump’s new imperial fixation, goosed on by Miller, threatens to derail Vance’s easy assumption of the crown, especially if the GOP takes a beating in the mid-terms, and if MAGA sours on the international war agenda that Trump campaigned so forcefully against in his 2024 run. In essence, Trump and Miller are behaving as if American democracy is already dead, which gives them an unlimited canvas on which to paint the most extreme, tyrannical, and batshit-crazy stuff. But despite saying all the right things in the present moment, Vance knows better. He knows that this fascist fever-dream cannot just erase the huge, sprawling, and unruly reality that is the US. What plays well on Fox News and OAN cannot just magically make cities, universities, and liberals disappear. Elections will keep happening, and what the public giveth today, they can take away tomorrow.

In the bigger picture, Vance, Miller, and even Trump himself are really just the support staff for the plutocracy. Vance’s net worth is somewhere in the $5-11 million range. His hero Peter Thiel (net worth $27B) wipes his ass with that kind of chump change. Miller is worth even less, maybe $2-3 million. Elon Musk probably has that much in his cybertruck’s e-cig tray. Even Trump, after years of abusing his office for illegal personal enrichment (he should be called President Emolument) is probably only worth $5-7 billion, which would only be in the top 150-250 people in the world.

All three of these guys desperately want to be in the plutocracy proper, where the real and perpetual power resides. As Gordon Gekko said, “I’m talking about liquid.” But they’re really just valet attendants, providing a curbside service while the real players are inside the swanky restaurant, eating the tartare.

When they leave office, they will be back pounding the pavement, hawking supplements and survival bunker supplies, or touring the country with TPUSA to bash libs and save Western civilization, just like other wannabe plutocrats. Even Trump, when he’s out of office, will likely burn through his fortune quickly, once he is deprived of the official position that allows him to pad his own pockets, using the authority of the American people as his profiteering sledge hammer. Left to his own devices, we know that he tends to end up declaring bankruptcy. And I doubt his NFTs will continue to fly off the virtual shelves, and I don’t think that “Trump Bible 2-Revenge of the Killer Bible” will get much traction.

So there is a storm brewing in the current regime. While originally in sync, plutocracy and Trumpism are now about to be driven apart by the overreaching imperial project of Miller. Voters were already souring on the domestic brutalities of ICE and the stubborn persistence of inflation and job insecurity. And now, if Trump starts squandering tax money and soldiers’ lives on international “entanglements,” even the MAGA faithful may finally awaken from their reality-denying slumber.

JD Vance is the wild card. He’s in a tough spot. He’s trying to perpetuate the profitable polarization ATM, and he needs stability to smooth the transfer of power to himself in 2028. But if Miller and Trump are just going to blow their wad on an apocalyptic attempt to recreate an anachronistic superpower world, then the GOP itself could be sunk into irrelevance pretty quickly. How this conflict plays out is TBD.