Trump appears random, haphazard and out of control. But that's not true. The Tech Bros who stand behind him have a plan – and that is to preserve their wealth by destroying the power of the governments that might oppose them.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
What is Trump's grand plan?
I've been trying to work this out ever since Trump got into office in January because there must be a reason for the mayhem that he is creating. I simply do not believe that he arrived in the Oval Office without some sort of meta-narrative or explanation of what it is that he's trying to achieve. But, he certainly didn't lay that out in advance of becoming President, and he hasn't even now made it very clear since being in the White House.
So, I've had to stand back and have a think about this, and I've come up with one explanation, which to me seems to tie together all the disparate themes that we are seeing with regard to his administration.
It's my opinion that Donald Trump is the willing agent for or representative of the ‘Tech Bros', as we will call them.
That's Musk with X, or Twitter. That's Zuckerberg with Facebook.
And that's Jeff Bezos with Amazon – and, of course, he's also now a media mogul as well.
These people are terrified of one thing. That is having their power clipped.
Their power comes from their control of data - the data that they can collect from you and from me as a result of us using their services.
They know more about us in some ways than we know about ourselves.
They can predict our preferences.
They can direct advertising at us.
They can decide what our political preferences probably are.
They can decide when and where we might wish to go on holiday based on what we've looked at in terms of advertising.
And on and on, and on.
As a result, they believe they can help others to maximize their profit by exploiting us. And, let's be blunt, that's what I think they do, because I think that advertising is manipulative, and as a result, they want to maximize their power over that data because it is the source of their wealth.
This is why we saw those people lined up at the inauguration in the White House in a way that was unprecedented. Business had not previously been seen at such an event in that way before, and that was the signal that this is the administration of Big Tech. And Big Tech is really frightened of two things, both of which were represented by Joe Biden and both of which are represented by the European Union.
Those two things are the power to bust monopolies and the power to control data. The state has both those powers, and remember that if we go back into US history at around the turn of the 19th century into the 20th century, we had a not dissimilar situation of there being some oligarchs who basically controlled a great deal of the US economy.
They were, at the time, the railroad chiefs, and they were the chiefs of the iron and steel industries, plus some bankers, and between them, they pretty much had America sewn up and in their pockets until they came across President Teddy Roosevelt, who was in office in the first decade of the 20th century - in other words, just after 1900. And he used something called antitrust legislation to smash their power.
He brought 43 legal actions against these banks and railroads and iron and steel companies to require that they split up their operations so that the power of competition was restored, because these people had removed that power of competition by creating monopolies, which were extracting supernormal profits from the people of the USA in a way that was deeply manipulative and was going to continue to let them exploit those people forever unless action was taken.
And Teddy Roosevelt was the man who said, this is not the American way, and he succeeded using the antitrust legislation that he created then, plus legislation that was created in the 1930s after the Wall Street Crash, which provided a framework which ensured that America was at least an approximately competitive economy for nearly another century.
But now it isn't.
Nobody anticipated the power of the internet.
Nobody anticipated the ability of the tech world to collect data from us in the way that it has.
Nobody realised that when we went shopping, we might pass over our Club Card, or whatever it might be called in your supermarket, that will let that store know precisely what your shopping preferences are and so on.
And this is what the basis of valuation of the companies that the Tech Bros own really is, but which Biden was threatening using antitrust legislation. And, he was trying to control the power of data. They didn't want that. They saw that their immense wealth running to trillions could be challenged by this.
And there is one thing that the wealthy want above all else, and that is to remain wealthy. Nothing frightens them more than moving from being a trillionaire to only being a billionaire again. This is the sort of thing that gives them sleepless nights because status is everything to them. When you have enough money to do anything you want, and these people very clearly have that way beyond any requirement that they will ever have, then status is king and they want the status of being the rulers of the world, and Donald Trump has provided them with that opportunity.
So, what has happened is this. Musk as agent for Trump, or Trump as agent for Musk - with Musk also acting on behalf of the other Tech Bros, in effect - is trying to do a power grab. Everything that he's doing is trying to claim for the DOGE, as he calls it - the Department of Government Efficiency - the control of the data of the US government.
He is trying to get his hands on social security data, IRS data, the data that is available with regard to veterans and armed services, and, of course, medicine, which is an immensely powerful source of information to the big pharma companies. And he and his colleagues no doubt want to claim this data, whether legally or illegally - and I don't think that really matters to them any more because as we can see, Trump is basically suspending the rule of law in the USA. He is trying to claim that data in a way that either he or he and the other big tech companies can licence in the future to those who want to use it, whether they be big pharma or even government itself.
And let's be clear what they think about government. They do not want to see the perpetuation of the federal government. To them, the federal government is the enemy because it was the federal government that brought the antitrust legislation. It was the federal government that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris wanted to use to stop their power. They want to devolve power from the federal government to the states of the USA, and we're seeing this with regard to education, where the Department of Education is being abolished.
We're seeing it with regard to the undermining of those things that are clearly federal responsibilities, like USAID, and even to some degree in foreign policy.
We are seeing it with regard to the devolution of Social Security powers to the states.
So we are seeing a destruction of the federal government because it is the power that could challenge their prosperity, and this also drives the foreign policy that Trump is doing.
Why is Trump pulling out of Ukraine? Because if he does, the EU is in a mess, in the opinion of those people who are heading the administration. We've seen this. We've seen JD Vance saying he hates the ‘pathetic' Europeans and others, including the Secretary of State, appear to agree with him.
They are actually opposed to Europe, viscerally. They hate it. And what they're trying to do is create an imbalance inside Europe so that Europe has to turn to an internal focus so that it does not look at how it will control the operation of US tech companies in Europe, which is the goal that the Tech Bros have, and therefore they're willing to sacrifice Ukraine to Putin if necessary to achieve this goal of destabilising the power that is in Europe, which is the European Commission, which is the one agency that can threaten them outside the USA. This, I believe, is what explains what is going on.
There is a grand plan to Trump, after all, in my opinion. It's taken me weeks and a couple of months even to try to work out what it might be. But as a political economist, what I look at is how relationships of power are used to reallocate resources within society.
What these tech people know is that data gives them power.
Their challenge is to preserve that power against the authorities that might have had the ability to challenge it - the federal government and the EU, and to claim more of the data that they can in the process so that they will actually reinforce their ability to earn in the future because they will licence information previously held by the federal government back to the states and to big pharma and to medicine and everyone else.
This, I think, is what they're about.
Always follow the money is the golden rule in political economy. These people believe they can make money by destroying the US federal government, and that's why they're trying to do it.
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I don’t doubt there is something in what you say. On the other hand maybe there’s also a simpler explanation:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
I think there is malice though
Oh yes, definitely malice there.
He’s clearly malign, but I’m not convinced he really has a plan (maybe I just can’t see it).
I rather like Paul Krugman’s analysis:
“Under Trump, policy won’t reflect any consistent ideology. It will, instead, change with his perception of personal advantage, his temper tantrums, his whims and his malignant narcisissim.”
A compelling account that seems perfectly believable to me – it’s a collection of the worst possible convergent synergies you could ever have a nightmare about, and its source is the unquestioning relationship between wealth and political funding which is one of the oldest problems in human society and needs sorting out.
[…] By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future […]
Trump is weak & easily manipulated. The Russians knew that for sure in 1987 and others have worked it out since. He is also not that bright, viz, his casino LOST money. His plan as far as it goes is to keep his name in the news (narcissim), make money & revenge, in no particular order of priority.
I agree with comments about the malign influence of the tech-mafia. However, these latter parasites can be eviscerated through the simple expedient of
a) not using their social digital platforms (or using Amazon)
b) having ad strippers fit for purpose on whatever system used to access the Internet.
Sadly, people are hooked on social media & thus keep the parasites in the style (& power) to which they have grown accustomed.
Beats me why the near 80 year old Trump is grabbing more and more money. Aren’t the millions he’s already acquired through cheating, grifting and racketeering enough to keep him until he pops his clogs.
Didn’t his mammy tell him he can’t take it with him.
It’s like an addiction. There can never be ‘just enough’.
Trump 2025 promotes crushing the unions, driving down salaries for the benefit of employers. Bezos has bragged that he wants his workers to be frightened when they go to work.
The state of Florida has introduced a bill to reduce the protection currently enjoyed by young people when working after school and so on. The bill is the response to losing workers to the arrest and deportation of “illegals”.
The general tenor is screw the populace and if the tech bros benefit, so what.
The tech bros are weak, that ‘s why they have flocked to the protection of the bully King Don. Just look at how Musk is gutting the Federal government, emasculating the agencies that that regulate his companies, but is being awarded potentially Federal massive contracts to his companies. Only parts of the US media is picking this up.
Musk and his companies have been kept alive by $34bn of subsidies, grants and so on over the years
Just goes to show that in the USA the private sector cannot survive without Federal, state subsidies and contracts.
Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation – has been in plain sight for several years. That seems to be the essence of Trump’s strategy – the ‘unitary executive theory’ – absolute control by the president over all branches of government – legislature and judiciary.
But as Richard suggests – the clustering of the tech bros around the president indicates that the govt has indeed got the power to dismantle their monopolies – and the antipathy towards the EU is because it is showing signs of wanting to limit their monopolies.
.
In the US firms can hire organisations to break up trade unions. The EU gives rights to labour.
The EU promotes internationalism -not just in trade but freedom of movement and cultural co-operation.
Member states have to abide by the European Convention on Human rights. It is superior to the 1789 Bill of Rights.
The member states of the EU have better electoral systems.
Workers in the EU have rights to paid leave. It is patchy in the US.
EU states have more comprehensive welfare systems-including a comprehensive state funded health system.
The EU promotes measures to deal with climate change.
All of this is an alternative model to the one promoted by the MAGA crowd.
Vance is right. We do have different values. But he is also wrong in that, at least half of the American people share our values more than what he stands for.
The EU is constantly maligned by Russian State media. Its values are a challenge to Putin’s Russia as well.
When Ukraine signed the Association Agreement with the EU President Yanukovych did a U-turn -almost certainly under Russian pressure. That lead to the Maidan protests and his eventual replacement. That was when Russia intervened in Crimea and Donbas.The elections following Yanukovych’s departure saw pro-EU parties win a majority.
I see a pattern with the Trump, Putin and the Brexit people. A desire for a state run by Oligarchs for the Oligarchs but disguised by posturing ‘patriotism’ and religiosity
Thank you, Richard.
One notices that financial institutions with US connections are battening down the hatches. Some risk managers are talking of a 1929 or 2008 crash. There’s political risk from Trump, but also credit risk from private, not public, markets.
When working on avoiding another 2008, I though that the measures were insufficient and taking too long. That allowed the risk to migrate, not be mitigated. It’s like a bubble in a water bed.
We should not forget that Obama was part funded by Microsoft and Google.
I tnhink recession is very likely
I think you’re probably right that control of data is a factor, especially in the thinking of the tech billionaires – but I think Trump is really the ‘useful idiot’ of a number of right-wing agendas (not always compatible, not all in the US) – mixed in with his own sociopathic drive for simple revenge on what he sees as his persecutors, and a good seasoning of narcissistic attention-seeking.
There are indeed ‘grand plans’ involved, I think – in the Heritage Foundation, Silicon Valley, Russia, etc – but they’re not really his.
I think this observation is largely true, but there are other forces at work under the MAGA umbrella: the religious right, the actual racists, and Bannon. It would take too long to go into what that guy wants, but there is a lot of overlap between his ideology and that of Russia (read War for Eternity by Benjamin R. Teiltelbaum for more on his particular brand of crazy.) What these different groups needed was money and a way to multiply their minority voices. I think the Tech Bros saw an opportunity to piggyback on their movements for their ends, supercharging the existing support that business lobby groups and billionaires have always given to the Right in an effort to seek low taxes and a diminished state. Follow the money indeed. Now, we can add data as well, as you point out.
As I’ve mentioned before, and as pointed out at length by Corey Doctorow on his blog, the solution to the tech industry is for the UK and Europe to pull out of all trade agreements and patents involving tech. The precedent already having been set by the US with its tariffs. The EU should allow European companies to develop ‘jailbreak’ software to fix American cars and tractors, phones, and other devices without fear of prosecution. Make it illegal for American companies to only allow their own parts in their products. They should allow people to fix their own phones, break monopolies like Amazon and Google, and limit their use of our data. You want it, you pay for it. Stop eBay from extracting 7% of the value of all transactions made in the UK nearly tax-free to the US. Stop Amazon from taking 49p in the pound for everything sold on their platform and preventing sellers from selling cheaper elsewhere, artificially inflating prices everywhere due to their size. If they don’t comply, seize their servers, allow UK and EU companies to take over their operations. An EU Twitter, a UK Facebook. I can’t see it happening, particularly in the UK. The EU and UK are neoliberal, and their are too many here and on the continent who are in thrall to American companies, our own PM included. But in an ideal world, this is what I would like to see happen.
That’s radical, but may well be what trade war requires.
What they have done to us is radical. A radical solution may be what is required in return. If Facebook is so useful, which it is at a local level, helping connect and organise communities, then why can’t the government be a provider or stakeholder of that service? If the government uses Twitter to communicate, why not have its own Twitter? Could it be incorporated into the BBC? And why leave our agricultural industry to the mercy of a company like John Deere, which has made it illegal for farmers to repair their tractors? They must wait for an authorised technician to come and fix their machinery, using only John Deere parts. If you try installing third-party parts, the entire machine stops working as the parts can’t “talk” to each other. There’s a city in Poland where their trains keep shutting down as they haven’t been sent to the manufacturer for repairs, instead having been maintained in-house. They do not control the trains they have paid for. It’s not just American companies that do this sort of thing, but it’s a business model that originated in their sociopathic, ultra-competitive, growth-at-all-cost model of business. Not being able to use third-party ink in Hewlett-Packard printers is why their ink is more expensive per gram than gold, and how they cheat you into replacing cartridges before they are empty. Tech companies and their predatory extraction business model prop up the US economy. Attacking this would cripple them, and allow us to bring vast sums of money back into our country. £800 billion a year is taken out of the UK economy by American businesses. Do it all within our own borders.
You are fighting back against the rentier. I like that.
In response to TomB’s second post: bit surprising, given the strength of the ag’ lobby in the EU, that the EU has not done something. In principle one could reverse engineer the operating software of a given tractor (the Software copyright directive explicitly allows that). Once done, diff operating system for the tractor (hey I know open systems operating system!) and then a stinky finger to John Dire. Dooable. be fun. Upset people.
In the US farmers and independent repairers are now doing reverse engineering on John Deer machinery software. A Right to Repair bill was vetoed unfortunately when John Deere loosened their contracts a bit.
https://farmoffice.osu.edu/blog/thu-01122023-921pm/john-deere-and-farm-bureau-address-right-repair
The EU Right to Repair legislation tackles this a bit, but it has not really been tested :
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IPR20590/right-to-repair-making-repair-easier-and-more-appealing-to-consumers
FYI
A review of War for Eternity by Benjamin R. Teiltelbaum
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/05/war-for-eternity-benjamin-r-teitelbaum-starstruck-steve-bannon-dugin-putin-trump
I came across this from an #mmt er on twitter.
The ‘old’ money determined regain it’s control over democracy.
https://twitter.com/malcolm_reavell/status/1806965353592807445
He is right
Thank you for a disturbing, persuasive article.
A relevant book is “The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power” by Max Chafkin.
Thanks
Richard,
You present a plausible observation. But I find it a bit restrictive. As indicated by others, there is much more at play here.
Why don’t we try to find out what we can do about it. First, find the cause.
Let’s take a moment and reflect on the real cause of the problem. Sadly, it is and will always be us, the people.
We can blame the rich and wealthy all we want, but who is really responsible for their wealth? WE ARE. They are just exploiting human weaknesses, mainly Fear and Greed. And it works. The USA elected a felon. How did this happen?
We all know that not all humans are created equal, nor have the same opportunities in life. We would be tempted to think that an higher level of intellect would provide a bit of protection… NOPE. Fear and Greed do not discriminate.
We can start with a few simple things. Limit our consumption of Social Medias, Spend more time with people face to face, use COMMON SENSE!! ( I know it is very hard to do these days). If you are not happy with the Government, get more involved. There are many more things we can do…While we still can.
Wishful thinking, I know. Most people are addicted to the technology. Weaning ourselves off is not that easy. But I believe it is a first step in the right direction.
I felt from the get go that DOGE wasn’t just about dismantling federal government, but mainly cover for Elon doing a Data Heist.
Thanks for fleshing out the rest of the picture.
The Tech Oligarchs have already petitioned Trump to use tariffs to attempt to strong arm the Australian government into dropping regulations against them, and Pharma trying the same to undermine our Pharmaceutical Benefits scheme. Presume they are trying that on everywhere.
This is what I particularly resent about the US Administration and Corporate/Tech Bro America, the blatant attempts to interfere with other countries. I agree wholeheartedly with Tom B…..the rest of the world needs to push back against this. While the US is busy dismantling and deregulating, our governments need to ramp the regs up against the US.
Richard, I watched your video and thanks for saying it out loud. This insight “licensing our data back to us” is the game of Musk et al. It is far in advance of our craven politicians. I wonder if Wes Streeting has already been seduced by big data’s overlords?