This column deals with political opposition, resistance, and the future of the nation. It dissects the Trump-Musk financial bromance and the role of VP Vance. Bear with me to its end, then please comment pro, con, or in between.
Shadow action
Donald Trump won the 2024 election by a narrow margin, with only 63.7% of eligible voters voting.[1] We are now experiencing a post-election coup – with Musk’s minions storming federal buildings in an echo of the January 6 insurrection – and more vicious and unconstitutional abuses reported daily.
These are not normal times.
This Facebook exchange between a TANDO Institute colleague and myself spurred the present essay.
Fred: You and I are the resistance. But where/who is the USA’s shadow government, the government-in-exile? Who is drafting “Project 2029”? Joe Biden did Trump-proof certain regulations and persons. But seriously, that’s hardly enough. The organization we need is either competently invisible, or not yet existent.[2]
Colleague: Money talks in politics. Many city and state leaders have always recruited foreign investors, companies and governments to invite capital, companies and talent. They also raid each other, like Texas does recruiting California companies. Trump is just accelerating state and city internationalization to tap offshore capital markets. All finance is global so states and cities will be recruiting more international financiers. Cities generate 80% of global GDP and have probably 80% of the financiers, talent and global connections so they just need to organize them via the International Chambers of Commerce, sister cities and regions, global banks, VCs, PEs, and other international financial players.
My colleague is implying a decentralized resistance government located in multiple cities. I see the strengths of that; such a structure would be nearly impossible to destroy. However, the U.S. since WWII has been a largely effective (if often tragically flawed) democratic leader and guarantor of security. A devolution into city-states would mean the demise of the U.S. as a nation and the cessation of its postwar moral and military role. In other words, it would play right into the hands of Trump’s owners. Not to mention Putin and Xi.
I asked someone who would know
I reached out to another colleague whose grandfather was the President of the World War II government-in-exile of a large mid-European country. He replied with useful insights, though I don’t agree with all of them.
Tossing my own words back at me, he cited an argument of Hal Linstone’s and mine[3] to the effect that large organizations inevitably experience cycles of centralization/decentralization. Too big to administer effectively? Give more decision authority to the individual business units. Units spinning too far out of control? By that time IT capabilities are more advanced, so it’s practical to re-integrate them and re-centralize decisions. (This 2nd phase is what Musk has in mind, as he tries to replace government personnel with AIs.)
The problem with applying this principle to today’s situation is that our decentralized status (three branches of government, states’ rights, etc.) has lasted 200 years, and in fact is set “in stone” in our Constitution.
Might the U.S. need more centralization, as my European colleague urges us to consider? Maybe so, maybe not, but either way it mustn’t be accomplished by would-be dictators, lawlessly and unconstitutionally. And Trump’s tactics of dividing Americans against each other hardly serves “integration.”
My correspondent goes on to say,
"Even if the majority of people are uneducated and do not understand the fine points of politics, as a society they make ultimately right decisions, like bees or termites with very simple brains, but as a hive creating very complex systems (like the sophisticated ventilation in the termites’ nest) and as a herd exhibit complex behavior."
Terminology
Yet this decision (DJT’s election) was made by a slim majority of a disappointingly small fraction of eligible voters. The termite comparison, though in a way pro-democracy, doesn’t cut the mustard. Next, though, my friend makes powerful points:
"I believe that the use of the word “resistance” is simply wrong and confusing. 'Resistance' is a powerfully negative word which should be used carefully. For me, this word is associated with freedom fighters (terrorists) focused on the physical elimination (murder) of the occupying foreign force. For example, when _____ was partitioned and part of the country was under Russian occupation, my grandfather was one of the leaders of an underground resistance movement and their mission was the elimination (murder) of the particularly bloody members of the Russian administration. Also, during the 2nd World War German occupation of ______, the Government in Exile organized in the country an underground resistance movement (Domestic Army) to continue the resistance to the German invasion and occupation.
"I hope that you are not resistance, i.e. not planning, or conducting, acts of terror against members of the Trump administration or against its supporters.
"I hope you are a member of a political opposition, i.e. you are focused only on the political or academic activities against MAGA, not on using violence. There is a fundamental difference between 'political opposition' and 'resistance' and we must be careful not to confuse these two terms."
These are not normal times, and this is not politics as usual. The MAGAs are perpetrating a coup. The term political opposition is too bland under the circumstances. I don’t want violence or approve of violence, yet I can’t eliminate it from all plausible future scenarios. As Robert Heinlein wrote, ultimately it was violence that “settled Hitler’s hash pretty good.”
Yet the fact that Trump won the election means
"if somebody within federal administration purposefully tries to block [legal] actions of a legally elected president, it is simply illegal. Also, if a network of government officers (deep state) emerges who are trying to block, or change, the actions of a legally elected president, it is simply an act of conspiracy and possibly treason."
As is, of course, the Musk-rats’ storming of the USAID and Treasury buildings.
Otherwise, Trump is irrelevant
I spend much time posting meme-worthy (I hope) items aimed at reinforcing for my readers that Donald Trump is, on his very best days, the most miserable possible excuse for a human being. Yet in the bigger picture, he is irrelevant.
Why irrelevant? First, because his mental and physical ailments likely will not let him complete his current term. Second, because everyone realizes it’s useless to negotiate with him. Just as in his construction projects, he will ‘negotiate’ for the price and the deliverables, and on completion of the job he will refuse to pay. (This is why government employees should not take his offer of a delayed buyout payment if they retire now: That payment will never come.)
Third, because Trump’s not making any decisions anyway: Staff copy/paste his executive orders from the pages of Project 2025 while Trump watches TV, checking his ratings and deciding who will be next on his shît list.
Trump’s handlers don’t care about the latter, but go along with it, because they see canceling a disloyal Republican, or one more annoying liberal, is a no-cost, no-loss exercise.
Vance is the keystone
Nor are the handlers concerned with Trump’s health. It wasn’t for nothing that they made Joe Biden’s advanced age a campaign point. It’s as true for Trump as it was for Biden, and they know it. The sooner Trump expires, the sooner JD Vance can take office as President – before 2028, the right-wing tech bros hope, as then an incumbent Vance will be strongly placed for re-election.
Like the tech bros, Vance was once a Silicon Valley VC, so he’s familiar to them. He’s the guy Musk urged on Trump as VP material. He’s proven himself malleable. He’s neither terribly bright nor the total dumbass that Trump is. In sum, he’s the ideal vehicle for carrying the right-wing coup forward, at least through the next election cycles.
Pundits predict a falling-out between Trump and Musk. For reasons just explained, that will make no difference to Musk.
It’s striking that Trump’s handlers let him express his fear of assassination. (“Iran will be obliterated,” he says, in the event of his murder.) There are those (not me!) who will take Trump’s mere mention of fear of assassination as an invitation to try it. The handlers know this.
In any case, Trump’s unabashed adoration of Arnold Palmer’s genitals is an obstacle to the techies’ “masculine politics,” which of course means hetero. Left and far right are agreeing that Trump has to go.
Are right-wing tech bros such a mystery?
James Bond villains tried for world domination, but the analog technology of their times limited their prospects. Thirty years ago Jeff Bezos realized that digital commerce could enable world domination far more easily. The Silicon Valley ethos of “grow or die, dominate markets” inevitably slid into “dominate the governments that control markets.” Elon Musk took note.[4]
Some tech entrepreneurs and investors’ sense of ethics tempered their views on this. We’ll see that they might be key to moderating the views of their peers.
The definition of a socialist, goes the joke, is a libertarian tech bro who had money in Silicon Valley Bank. (SVB crashed in 2023). This is another key, or call it a tipping point, when a personal crisis powerfully shows a tech bro that his libertarianism limits his success – that his life depends on collective society.
More about dividing people
“The concept of the society division was originally proposed by Marx,” wrote our European friend, “and perfected by Stalin. It was a precondition for a successful communist revolution.” As it has been for an American right-wing coup.
It’s only fair to admit the dividing of America was exacerbated by perverted forms of DEI, a principle originally intended to unite all of us. The far left’s abuse of DEI invited the far right to incite grievances among the electorate. The far right installed its own counter-version. Substitute MAGA for ‘communist’ in our European friend’s next paragraph:
"The communists [perverted] DEI to divide and control the society along social lines and even introduced 'nomenklatura,' i.e. a list of positions which were reserved only to the members of the communist party."
At the top of the 2025 nomenklatura are white men who profess Christianity. No need to waste space in this column on whether their actions reflect Jesus’ teachings, because you already know the answer to that.
Who’s gonna do what, and I mean you and I
My mentor, U.S. National Medal of Technology winner George Kozmetsky, was the son of Russians who had fled the Bolsheviks. He told me he had always expected a revolution in the U.S., given the growing wealth imbalance that echoed that of old Russia. His sentiment highlighted the fact that our current difficulty is not about left and right so much as it is about unchecked kleptocracy versus equal opportunity.
Thus the ineffectiveness of recent Democrat-Republican interactions in Congress.
There’s progress. A Democrat representative from Oregon just quit the DOGE committee, basically giving up the battle while using wishy-washy words like “disturbing” to describe Musk’s actions. But Rep. Jamie Raskin has begun to take the needed harder line. Among other statements, he’s urged civil servants to resist illegal firings (Trump just tried illegally to fire the head of the federal election commission, and she told him publicly to take a hike), and to use “personal resources,” i.e., not government phones or email, when blowing whistles on unconstitutional initiatives in their agencies. Thus launches the shadow government!
Back to our European informant:
"I think we have at the same time both integration and division trends, but one is always dominant and therefore it is not only making decisive impact, but it is much more visible than the other."
MAGAs are binary thinkers: 0 or 1, male or female, nothing in between. Deeper thinkers can understand the quote just above. We can use the boths and the in-betweens as leverage in recovering our democracy. We can recruit those Silicon Valley techies who have retained their sense of morals, as leverage for nudging their MAGA peers.
Will there be civil war? An uncomfortable question that must be faced. No one would have a thing to gain from a left-right civil war. No one has ever started a “centrist” civil war. The French and the Russian revolutions did pit the rich against the hopeless and disenfranchised poor. Such a thing might happen here. There are now daily demonstrations outside U.S. state houses. Participants are not yet carrying pitchforks.
Here is something that seems more likely than open civil war: Trump’s daily insults against places he sees as “shîthole countries” will invite terror attacks on U.S. soil. The whole stupid Iraq mess, i.e., a foreign war, could recur. It would distract U.S. citizens from the domestic kleptocracy.
I’m fairly certain the U.S. military will uphold the Constitution, despite a MAGA SecDef. The courts? Maybe.
The challenge for all of us is to find a non-violent path toward restoring constitutional democracy and preserving the U.S. as a nation. Achieving it will require creative thinking, recruiting of influencers, deft legal cleverness, the courage to speak up, no matter what, and a strength of mind that will not let the bastards grind you down. Understanding the material above – if you agree with it – can form a basis for your personal strategy.
[1] Ballotpedia.
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/democrat-leadership-vacuum/681540/
[3] H. Linstone and F. Phillips, “The Simultaneous Localization-Globalization Impact of Information/Communication Technology.” Technological Forecasting&Social Change, 80 (2013), 1438-1443.
[4] Carole Cadwalladr, Don’t rejoice yet, Elon Musk and his tech bros-in-arms are winning the global battle for the truth. The Guardian, 31 August 2024. https://apple.news/AxTqU_jATTheMgPDEsj2MYw
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