How Trumpism, Financial Oligarchy, and Cultural Reaction Are Merging to Redefine American Power
Project 2025, developed by the Heritage Foundation and a coalition of right-wing institutions, has become a roadmap for a radical transformation of American governance. While marketed as a restoration of constitutional values and limited government, the initiative is best understood as an elite-driven effort to reshape the U.S. political economy in favor of deregulation, authoritarian rule, and cultural reaction. Behind its populist facade lies a complex alliance of Sunbelt capitalists, tech oligarchs, global finance elites, and ideologically diverse Zionist factions. These power centers have seized upon the Trump movement—despite its unpredictability—as a tactical vehicle to dismantle the regulatory state, neutralize democratic oversight, and usher in a new era of plutocratic, techno-feudal rule. This paper explores the class forces, ideological conflicts, and geopolitical implications behind Project 2025, situating it within a broader global trend toward post-democratic autocracy.
Project 2025 was put together by the Heritage Foundation, a think tank established in the 70s, along with a broader coalition of right-wing groups. These groups function to represent the right-wing of the US ruling class, primarily Sunbelt capitalist interests (oil, agriculture, armaments, etc), regional and smaller to medium-sized capitalism, the military-industrial complex, and the right-wing of the “deep state” (e.g. the “CIA Right” which has always had its hands deep in “Conservatism Inc” as the palecons call it). I haven’t read the Project 2025 document (it’s over 900 pages), but from what I’ve seen about it, its contents are relatively predictable.
Those sectors of the capitalist class prefer a 19th-century model of capitalism, where bourgeois plutocrats reign supreme over their private empires without being bothered by government regulatory agencies like the EPA, FDA, OSHA, FTC, etc, which is why they are so hostile to what they call the “administrative state.” On the medium to lower levels, they also include “lesser capitalists” (the petite bourgeoisie) who don’t want to pay taxes or bother with regulations, like owners of regional car dealerships. Since the 1970s, this sector of the ruling class and its partners have cultivated the full spectrum of the “cultural right” as ground level constituents (useful idiots), including the religious fundamentalists and traditionalists (low church evangelicals, plus conservative Catholics, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, etc), thinly veiled segregationists, nativists (in the tradition of the 19th century “Know Nothings”), the gun culture, social conservatives, pro-lifers, gay-haters, ultra-Zionist Israel-worshipers, “law and order/tough on crime” types. Increasingly, it looks like they’re reaching further out into the fever swamps towards conspiracy maniacs (what Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in US politics). The capitalist class sectors behind this don’t particularly like Trump, as they think he is a reckless egomaniac. Still, they’ve come to regard his movement as a useful vehicle for advancing their own interests. Therefore, the Reagan-Bush “fusionist” form of conservatism has been replaced by the Trump cult, or what I call “Trump Scientology,” as the Republicans’ dominant ideological superstructure. That’s why a lot of Reaganite types have jumped ship to the Democrats like Bill Kristol, David Frum, Liz Cheney, George Will, de facto John Bolton, etc.
There are some genuine differences within these circles, mainly between the Reaganite capitalist interests and the “populist-nationalists” who prefer something more like Hungary’s Victor Orban, and Europe’s nationalist movements (Le Pen, Farage, AfD, etc), where the interests of capital are partially subordinated to a nationalist-collectivist state. Steve Bannon represents these interests on the US Right. This kind of Bonapartism tends to emerge when there are sharp divisions within the ruling class, as there are now. There are differences in foreign policy as well. The warmed-over Reaganites are still Russia hawks, while the “nationalists” sometimes see Russia as a potential future ally against China, and admire Putin as a great conservative leader.
Old Republicans view the Trumpists as usurpers, interlopers, and pretenders to the throne. However, there are also important differences, particularly in foreign policy. The Reaganites and neocons want a unipolar world order dominated by the USA with Europe, Asia, and various client states as junior partners. Though there are variations, they oppose the rise of BRICS and are generally more hawkish on Ukraine and, to some degree, Taiwan than the Trumpists. The neocon types like Kristol want perpetual war to spread American hegemony. The BlackRock and tech oligarch types are much more accepting of and sometimes even favor multipolarity as they think the USA has become unstable and unreliable. Also, the Gulf States are increasingly oriented toward the BRICS, and Trump is deeply connected to the Gulf, so they are dragging him with them. The Reaganites and neocons are also much bigger on US-led trade cartels like NAFTA as well. The multipolarists are more about spheres of influence.
Another issue is Israel. There seems to be a three-way fight going on between different Zionist factions. The Israeli nationalists like Netanyahu are basically just Jewish Nazis who want a “lebensraum” of their own. For them, Americans are just useful idiots, and they’re happy to work the Russian/Chinese angles when it’s convenient. Then, there are the US-centric neocons like Kristol and their liberal internationalist allies (like Antony Blinken and Samantha Power) who want a US-dominated unipolar world in which the USA and Israel are partners in a co-equal Pax Americana/Pax Judaica. The multipolarists and overt globalists have what I call a “Rothschild model” of Zionism, where Israel is a province within a global financial system. The sectors seem to prefer a Middle East that is increasingly dominated by the BRICS and Gulf Cooperation Council, which means integrating Israel into the Middle East, which in turn means some resolution to the Palestinian situation. I think this is the position of the BlackRock faction (which apparently has some kind of relationship with the older Rothschild/City of London sectors), and I suspect Trump and Witkoff are also representing these sectors.
There is some evidence that there may be plans to create a Potemkin village “Palestinian state” that functions as a protectorate or appendage of the GCC countries, economically dominated by Trump and his associates’ business empire. Within Zionism, there seems to be a dispute between those who want continued American dominance of the Middle East and those who want to shift to BRICS dominance (e.g., Russian-Israelis, Russian-Jewish oligarchs, their associates in the Gulf, etc). Some Zionist factions seem to believe Netanyahu has become a liability and may be seeking to purge him, like when the mafia decides to eliminate an underboss who oversteps his territorial bounds. I mean, Netanyahu has been livestreaming a genocide on social media and has made Israel into the world’s most hated nation.
It appears that Trump’s policies are primarily about buying off or throwing bones to all of these constituencies, e.g. buying off the religious right with pro-life judges, buying off the nativist right with deportations, buying off the cultural conservatives with “anti-woke” policies, buying off the military-industrial complex with a record-high 1 trillion dollar military budget, buying off a range of business interests with deregulation, selective tax cuts, protective tariffs, etc.
It’s merely a question of the overall distribution of power and the place of these groups in the overall class, sociocultural, and politico-economic pyramid. These lower to medium levels can have dubious or pernicious agendas of their own
and still be useful idiots, dupes, and pawns at the same time. For instance, the objectives of the social conservatives are hardly compatible with those of a gay-married transhumanist like Thiel. Musk and his harem of baby mamas have already raised the eyebrows of Christian Right influencers. And the nativists and tech-oligarchs have already had some skirmishes over the immigration issue. Some of the economic nationalist stuff is also going to harm socially conservative sectors of the industrial proletariat and lower levels of the petite bourgeoisie by raising living costs and overheads.
However, there are other interests that I think are currently more influential and powerful than any of the above. Three forces have thrown their weight behind Trump on a tactical basis, and were not part of the Trump movement previously. These are the upper levels of “global finance capital” (like BlackRock), the tech oligarchs (like Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg, although Thiel was always there), and Zionist plutocrats like Bill Ackman who lurched rightward in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 and the subsequent Gaza war/genocide and resulting protests. I think the globalist financial oligarchs see Trumpism as a vehicle for facilitating the transition from US-dominated unipolarity to multipolarity with a much greater role for the BRICS. Trump’s connection to all that is through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and through Russian oligarchs that launder money through European banks that Trump has used to get out of his series of bankruptcies. I suspect there is also a connection to Russia-Jewish oligarchs through Israel and Russian-Israelis. I also suspect the real purpose of Trump’s tariff mania and threats against allies like Europe, Canada, and Mexico, is about weakening the USA economically and isolating the USA geopolitically as part of the transition to multipolarity, even if it’s being sold to his fan base and the “bourgeios nationalist” ruling class sectors described above as a return to 19th century McKinleyite nationalism and protectionism.
The tech oligarchs see Trump as a vehicle for the advancement of their own “neo-reactionary” or “dark enlightenment” movements.
The tech-oligarchs are not American nationalists. Many of them aren’t even Americans at all but South Africans, Germans, etc. They want to be modern-day monarchs or the equivalent of the sheiks in the Gulf States presiding over their own fiefdoms. Meanwhile, the Zionist plutocrats want Trump to weaponize “anti-wokeism,” anti-immigrationism, and “anti-anti-Semitism” as a smokescreen for attacking and suppressing the pro-Palestine movement. Hence, the arrests of Palestinian protestors.
It’s pretty clear based on all the comments Trump has ever made, and the information that came out in all the post-J6 investigations (biased though they were) that Trump thinks he should never lose an election and wants to be a “president for life” like Xi, Putin, or Erdogan. He has also said he doesn’t want Vance as his successor. So, who does he want? Obviously, Don Jr. is his first choice. He wants the US presidency to be a family business/dynasty like the Husseins, Assads, House of Saud, etc. And he obviously has plenty of associates and followers (e.g., the Bannonites) who feel the same way. Hence, the talk of a Trump third term. I don’t know that will happen as there are still plenty of cultural and institutional barriers to it, but I suspect it would likely be the result if Trump and his associates were fully unleashed.
It seems there is a worldwide trend toward what I call a “sixth period of autocracy.” In the past 200 years, there have been about half a dozen eras where there were autocratic pushback against the overall expanding dominance of bourgeois republicanism: the Concert of Europe, post-1848, late 19th century authoritarian nationalism, interwar fascism, the collapse of new countries into autocracies in the post-colonial era, and now the current worldwide trend toward autocracy with figures like Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Duterte (now deposed), Orban, Netanyahu, the recent coup attempt in South Korea, Modi, Bolsonaro, Trump, etc.
Among the global ruling class, it seems the prevailing view is in favor of a world order of geopolitical multipolarity with different major powers having their own spheres of influence, but financial unipolarity under the reign of global finance capital, similar to the 19th century when there were competing colonial empires but under the financial hegemony of the City of London. The tech oligarchs and financial oligarchs have become the equivalent of the bourgeois in the 19th century as an emerging new ruling class that eclipses the older elites on many levels. The tech oligarchs have adopted what I call “neo-reactionary techno-feudal transhumanism” as their ideological superstructure, and the preferred governmental model of the emerging new ruling class is autocratic-oligarchic-plutocracy where tech and financial elites rule over their own “smart city” fiefdoms controlled by AI-surveillance (like the fiefdoms in the Gulf or the 19th century “company towns’).
They’ve also been able to co-opt and weaponize the Trump Scientology cult as a vehicle for achieving these goals. In the process, they’ve cultivated the “base” of “Christian Right-Wing American Patriots”(CRAP) as useful idiots for these objectives, and bought off bourgeois nationalists, Sun Belt capital, and the lower to medium levels of capital with promises of tax cuts, abolishing the regulatory administrative state, protective tariffs, and hemispheric dominance. They’ve also bought off the military-industrial complex with a record-high military budget. And then there is the Zionist component. They’re essentially moving to make Israel-worship into a de facto state religion (like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia or Catholicism in medieval Europe) by fueling “anti-anti-Semitism” hysteria and de facto criminalizing any criticism of Israel, Zionism, Jewish power/influence, etc.
Big finance” increasingly funds AI and automation in defense, healthcare, and finance sectors. Meanwhile, tech moguls are aggressively developing their own closed-source AI models (e.g., OpenAI/Microsoft, xAI, Palantir). If BlackRock or other institutional investors push shareholder resolutions that contradict a tech oligarch’s politics (e.g., DEI, climate policy, unionization), expect vocal resistance or attempts at strategic restructuring to avoid such influence. Tech oligarchs often promote weird, alternative approaches to geopolitics (e.g., space colonization, seasteading, techno-feudal decentralization, or crypto-sovereignty).
But BlackRock and similar firms have deep entanglements with state actors, including central banks and supranational bodies (e.g., IMF, WEF). Tech moguls (especially in crypto or fintech) want to dethrone legacy finance, using blockchain and alternative payment systems. Financial giants want centralized digital currencies (e.g., CBDCs) and tools they can influence via regulation.
BlackRock wants predictable, globalist regulation that protects financialized capitalism (like finance capitalists generally, which is why the Democrats and the “liberal” parties of Europe are aligned with finance capital). Tech oligarchs want loose regulation, often aligning with populist or anti-bureaucratic movements (like the industrial capitalists from the Sunbelt and the petite bourgeoisie).
The divisions within the capitalist classes in the 20th century were between the national plutocratic industrial capitalists and national technocratic managerial capitalists, with the national financial capitalists aligned with the latter. In the 21st century, it’s between the global finance capitalists and the global digital capitalists.
Until the current moment, the major intra-ruling class conflict was between those who preferred a bourgeois-plutocratic 19th-century model of capitalism (“conservatives” or the Sunbelt wing or “national industrial” wing of the capitalist class) and those who preferred a technocratic-managerial 20th-century model of capitalism (“liberals” or the northeastern based “national financial” wing). Now, those are being eclipsed by a third force of global financial and tech oligarchs who emerged from financialization, globalization, and the digital revolution, and who favor what they hope will be a 21st-century autocratic techno-feudal model of capitalism. Project 2025 is a means of co-opting, buying off, and subordinating the range of traditional ruling class, economic, and sociocultural interests necessary to make this happen.
Project 2025 is not merely a partisan policy agenda—it is a blueprint for consolidating a new power structure in the 21st century. By weaving together disparate factions of the capitalist elite—from petroleum barons and religious fundamentalists to AI moguls and global financiers—the architects of Project 2025 aim to replace the technocratic-managerial state with a hybrid regime of authoritarian populism and techno-plutocracy. While appealing to cultural conservatives and “anti-woke” constituencies for mass support, the ultimate beneficiaries are transnational oligarchs seeking to establish a digitally monitored, privately governed future. In this context, Trumpism functions less as a coherent ideology and more as a flexible instrument—capable of appeasing various interest groups while paving the way for a more centralized, surveillance-driven, and hierarchical social order. Whether framed as a rejection of liberal globalism or a restoration of national greatness, Project 2025 signals a deeper shift: the twilight of traditional democracy and the rise of a corporate-authoritarian model that may define the post-liberal era.
