Dynasty Or Oligarchy? The Super-Ugly Future of Trumpism

The GOP After Trump— No Exit

I'll opt for AOC

If mass prayers work, Trump will be dead soon, maybe before the cock crows on Monday. It’s obvious that neither Congress nor the Supreme Court have the will to do anything to stop in. God? The military might have if the choreography around the Qatar “attack” had gone awry, but, thankfully, it didn’t. The oligarchs’ candidate to run the White House, is ready to step in. JD Vance— a political creation of creepy South African billionaire Peter Thiel— is the most beholden potential president to the oligarchs since Warren Harding and William McKinley. Wired writer Jake Lahut described the formerTrump critic as Señor TACO’s “right-hand man… with full MAGA backing [… and] the highest point of contact in the administration for the Silicon Valley billionaires who helped propel Trump to a second term. The vice president has a much closer relationship with these new players in the GOP than the president does... the most reliable link between the tech industry and the White House, something of a newly constructed bridge between the tech right and the populist MAGA loyalists who stood by Trump through the Capitol riot on January 6. Up-and-comers in the Republican Party have consolidated power thanks to both factions, but with Musk gone for now, Vance is the load-bearing link between the two. To use a venture capital metaphor, though, Vance has only just progressed from his pre-seed to seed funding.”

For the 40-year-old Vance, his time working in venture capital and his Trump-era transformation have led him to become, as one Trumpworld source put it, the poster boy for the so-called loyal converts who may not have been on the Trump train in 2016 but have put enough money and social capital into supporting him that there’s no turning back.

…Vance’s role as the ambassador for the libertarian tech right and its eccentric financiers was largely the result of a cash crunch facing the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2024 general election.

… With the money train behind him, at least for the time being, Vance has the keys to the kingdom waiting for him.

“Right now, I think his standing is still strong among the base. We have seen, historically, very icy relationships between presidents and vice presidents,” the former Trump official says. “We have not yet seen that with Trump and Vance. But people are looking for it—they’re looking under the hood.”

But for all Trump’s love of a convert, what if he wants a dynasty instead of a technocracy to follow him? This morning, Alex Rogers reported that the dynasty thing might be real: “Eric Trump has said that ‘the political path’ for a family dynasty ‘would be an easy one,’ opening the door for another Trump to seek office after his father leaves the White House. His comments came in a wide-ranging Financial Times interview, in which the co-executive vice-president of the Trump Organization discussed his international real estate dealings, hit back at criticism that the family is seeking to profit from the presidency and echoed his father’s claims about political persecution… ‘I think I could do it,’ he added. ‘And by the way, I think other members of our family could do it too.’… His older brother Donald Jr is a frequent fundraiser and MAGA podcaster, and his sister Ivanka took a role in the first Trump White House, while his wife Lara was co-chair of the Republican National Committee last year. But Eric Trump described himself as ‘wholly unimpressed by half the politicians I see . . . I could do it very effectively.’”

JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio are seen as favourites for the 2028 Republican nomination, but, as to whether a family member would run then or in subsequent elections, Eric Trump said: “Who knows?”

…“If there’s one family that hasn’t profited off politics, it’s the Trump family,” Eric Trump said.

“In fact, I would sit there and say that we [would have] had many more zeros behind our name had my father not run in the first place. The opportunity cost, the legal cost, the toll it’s taken on our family has been astronomical.”

He said that the Trump family had spent close to $500 million “just defending ourselves from Russia shams, fake hoaxes, dirty dossiers about the unthinkable.”

In 2024, a New York judge ordered Donald Trump and the Trump Organization to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties after censuring them for “blatantly false financial data.”

Donald Jr and Eric Trump were ordered to pay more than $4 million each and individually barred from doing business in New York state for two years.

… The president has also sought to tap into enthusiasm for crypto by issuing his $TRUMP memecoins, days before his return to office in January, and rewarded top holders of the token with a dinner at his golf course in Virginia last month.

Eric Trump has himself launched a crypto mining company called American Bitcoin. He called bitcoin the “gold asset in the modern era”, saying the cryptocurrency is “better than gold”— “tradeable 24/7,” “transportable,” “digital,” “immediate” and in limited supply.

By contrast, he told a crypto conference in Las Vegas last month that he “would love to see some of the big banks go extinct.”

His father, who dismissed crypto in 2019 as “highly volatile,” “based on thin air” and a facilitator of illegal activity, is now leading a charge in Washington to boost the industry. 

At the same time, Eric Trump, who says the Trump Organization is worth between $8 billion and $12 billion, is striking real estate deals across the world, despite a pledge the group made ahead of his father’s first term to avoid new foreign ventures.

“We got absolutely no credit for doing it, and we’ve done everything right,” he added, referring to the pledge.

“I’m really busy and my father’s trying to stop World War Three,” he said. “My father has nothing to do with companies; he’s not running any of our entities. I run great hotels around the world. It’s what I’ve done my entire life; I started on our construction jobs when I was 11 years old. It’s all I’ve ever known.”

Eric Trump said that he was working on “several” hotels in India. A group connected to Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, recently paid a $10 million “development fee” to the Trump Organization. “Pick the five biggest cities [in India], and we’re going to be there,” he said.

But, noting the role of geopolitics in potential deals, he said if there were “true political stability” he would enter the Israeli market and has had “a hundred” opportunities to enter China.

“Our brand is hugely popular in China,” he said. “In the middle of tariffs and trade wars, it’s just not the right time, right?”

If you’re a regular DWT reader you know how we feel— that the American people should recoil at both of these grotesque prospects, whether a Silicon Valley oligarchy in the body of Vance or a Trump family dynasty cobbled together from entitlement, corruption and crypto-hype. What they have in common is a contempt for democracy and a hunger for power disguised as populism. Vance cloaks himself in “working-class” garb while serving the interests of billionaire libertarians who dream of privatizing everything from education to Medicare. Eric Trump, meanwhile, is trying to whitewash years of self-dealing by painting his family as martyrs of public service. Neither vision offers the country anything but more grift, more repression and ultimate collapse.

How clear is it that this is what happens when a movement built on resentment and lies gains control of a major party— there’s no bench, only a throne to be inherited or bought. Whether the GOP nominates a crypto-minted failson like Eric Trump or a Thiel-backed puppet like JD Vance, the rot at the core remains the same. Needless to say, these aren’t deviations from Trumpism; they’re its logical conclusion. The merging of tech billionaires’ utopian delusions with authoritarian nostalgia is a nightmare dressed up as the future. Vance’s pseudo-intellectual nationalism and Eric’s gold-plated populism are just different dialects of the same con.

The challenge for America is to prevent Trumpism from outliving Señor Trumpanzyy. The next would-be strongman or dynastic heir may speak in a softer tone, quote scripture more convincingly, or throw Bitcoin into the mix, but the agenda is the same: concentrate power, erase dissent, loot the public for private gain. If there’s any hope of defeating it, it’s got to  come from the people— organizing, voting, striking and fighting like democracy actually matters. Zohran Mamdani did it in NYC this week. Can Travis Terrell do it in Iowa, Randy Bryce and Emily Berge in Wisconsin, Donavan McKinney in Detroit, Saikat Chakrabarti in San Francisco, Lukas Ventouras on Long Island, Randy Villegas in the Central Valley, Eric Descheenie in Arizona, Mike Sacks in the Hudson Valley, Chris Bennett in Sacramento County, Tanya Lloyd in Texas…? Or will the blue end of the oligarchy put an end to that?