Two brothers are playing chess. One examines the Queen. Others are thoughtful but don’t see the saving movement. My father goes in and offers. “That’s not right,” complained the first brother. Someone agrees to put down his Lord.
What my father had done wasn’t just giving an unfair advantage—he had ruined the game. If they continued to play and the player with the checked Queen ended up winning, he would not claim victory.
Winning is all that seems to matter to Trump—winning big and claiming to have won even when it’s fake or untrue. He pointed out that the US won the war that was launched illegally against Iran. He said the US is winning in tax revenue and $18 trillion in investment. He has earned credit for “historic” low crime rates, border control, and stopping illegal drug trafficking. This is all a false victory.
The claim of victory over Iran is a misunderstanding of the truth. Claims about tax and economic investment are smoke and mirrors. The claim of low crime rates cannot be attributed to his processes alone, and immigration and drug trafficking control is a huge victory.
Trump is not an anomaly. Perhaps, he is the strongest representative of the oligarchic ruling class and its culture, whose only measure of success is winning all the time. Winning no matter what the cost, because winning gives legitimacy.
“The people inside the system, who build as they do, the self-created and self-defined class, the new type of top management, often talk about the world not as it is but as they want the people there to believe,” wrote Joan Didion in her first book Insider Baseball for The New York Review of Books in 1988.
By “common people,” Didion meant the average American. Political discourse is designed to be heard, not to reveal the truth. Its purpose is to manage and convince them that the “process” is working. The only difference between Trump and other American politicians is that he has changed the tune, but not the genre.
Didion talked about how the elites don’t care about the reality of the citizens they rule. Instead, they are preoccupied with “process”—polling data, strategic planning, visualization, and “narrative.” They treat governance as a private game whose rules only they understand.
He describes this ruling class as an elite group made up of politicians, campaign strategists, corporate sponsors, and high-profile journalists. They argue with each other on television, but they eat at the same restaurants, attend the same weddings, and share exactly the same class interests.
Didion notes that this elite class prefers a low voter turnout because a non-participating society is easier to manage. By reducing politics to a highly scripted, theatrical activity, they alienate the common people, reducing citizens to mere “servants” who have no real say in the course of the state.
Donald Trump makes a cameo on Insider Baseball. He was mentioned as a person who is part of the process—one of the TV broadcasters who bring it closer to the people. That’s why Trump is so focused on polling data, stock market numbers, and fighting the media. You are an introvert; that is the world he has lived in all his life, and the only style of politician we have ever known.
However, something happened that allowed him—someone whose job in the process was just to be a TV actor—to take on the role of a professional politician. The top offices in the White House, especially the presidency, have traditionally been reserved for those who were part of America’s “political generations,” as Stephen Hess calls them.
What had happened was, in fact, a dual but interrelated phenomenon. On the other hand, the “process” was frowned upon even by those who were conducting it. Didion pointed out, in the later essays collected in her book Political Fictions, that the process was increasingly aimed at the “wealthy, the educated, the diverse, the suburban, the ’empowered’, and the moderates.”
He quotes the Washington Post as saying that in the 2000 election, “apathy is the main reason why an estimated 100 million Americans did not vote on Tuesday.” Indifference, he explains, is how the Post—which is part of the process—refers to those who were alienated from it.
Since 2000, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, “the process” has been revealed as an empty shell, increasingly, even by those within it who do not believe. When Barack Obama was elected on a promise to strengthen the financial class and make them pay, the opposite happened. He bailed them out.
The “system”—that is, the state—was taken over by the financial and corporate class. The second thing that happened is that after 2009, 9 out of 10 dollars invested in Silicon Valley came from central bank money through Quantitative Easing (QE). That is the basis on which Yanis Varoufakis wrote his book Technofeudalism.
Central banks have given this money to commercial banks at almost zero interest. The financial system has not been able to make enough money from conventional loans to channel money into high-risk, high-reward investments in Silicon Valley. In fact, 90% of the tech startups tested and the cash flow that kept them going were indirect lines of credit going back to Quantitative Easing.
In the 20 years that passed from 1988, when Didion’s story was first published, until 2008, when the financial crisis hit, expropriations and state-owned companies reached their peak. From 2008 to 2026, the financial oligarchy, through government-sponsored QE, made one of the largest transfers of wealth ever seen from the public to the oligarchy.
This created Silicon Valley as a new field of speculation and created a new technological elite. As the wealth of these elites increased and their technology became more sophisticated-and as they were able to show that it could be used to maintain the oligarchic status-they began to apply themselves to politics, bringing their own agenda. This is the song Trump plays.
Donald Trump and JD Vance are a good example of this. Trump is a member of the “process” elite but not of the great political families. He is there because he represents the interest of the financial class. Vance is a product of Silicon Valley, a protégé of Peter Thiel; he is there to act for them. Because the “process” was mandated and because the new officials did not believe in it, they needed someone to break it. That’s Trump.
So what is left to lend legitimacy to oligarchic rule? Victory. Because that is the shared trend of the financial and technical sectors. Victory no matter what. But there is no honor in winning if you cheat
