The Evil Stalking America Is More Than Just Trump— Though It Props Him Up

Musk, Vance, Bannon & A Billionaire Class Bernie's Been Warning Us About

Does that sound like the fascist mastermind half of America is so worried about? Maybe more like unlikely frontman for the fascist conspiracy poised to implement Project 2025. In any case, I’m with Charlie— we’re running out of ways to explain how bad what Trump has done to America is. “The truth is,” he wrote, “it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were ‘weather weapons’ unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and ‘truth seeker’ accounts on Twitter that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was ‘spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton’ in order to ensure maximum rainfall, ‘just like they did over Asheville!’” Although the MAGA morons don’t know it, Asheville is a heavily Democratic city. The city’s 3 members of the state House are all Democrats, as is Asheville’s state Senator. The mayor and whole city council are Democrats. Buncombe County gave Trump just 38.6% of its vote in 2020.

As Milton made landfall, causing a series of tornados, a verified account on Twitter reposted a TikTok video of a massive funnel cloud with the caption “WHAT IS HAPPENING TO FLORIDA?!” The clip, which was eventually removed but had been viewed 662,000 times as of yesterday evening, turned out to be from a video of a CGI tornado that was originally published months ago. Scrolling through these platforms, watching them fill with false information, harebrained theories, and doctored images— all while panicked residents boarded up their houses, struggled to evacuate, and prayed that their worldly possessions wouldn’t be obliterated overnight— offered a portrait of American discourse almost too bleak to reckon with head-on.

Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts.

But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

And no one’s worse than Elon Musk, the world’s richest man working to elect a transactional clown who will help turn him from a billionaire to a trillionaire. Musk’s support of a candidate alone should be enough of a signal to look for an alternative. And in this case Musk has spent more than $100 million— maybe five times more— to elect Trump and other MAGAts. A quartet of top NY Times reporters delved into Musk’s “unparalleled” support for Trump yesterday. He pushing Trump relentlessly on Twitter and uses it “to spread conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and to insult its candidate... Above all, he is personally steering the actions of a super PAC that he has funded with tens of millions of dollars to turn out the vote for Trump, not just in Pennsylvania but across the country. He has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself, in part to see how his money is being used. Taken together, a clear picture has emerged of Musk’s battle plan as he directs his efforts to elect Trump with the same frenetic energy and exacting demands that he has honed at his companies SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter.”

Musk, who is erratic and seems to seek out controversy is famously mentally ill and has publicly admitted to having Asperber’s syndrome.Between the impulsive tweets, abrupt policy shifts at his companies and high-profile disputes with public figures we have all watched a developing pattern of mental instability. His actions in the political and economic spheres, amplified by his vast wealth and ability to directly reach hundreds of millions of people, raise legitimate and urgent concerns about how much unchecked power he should have. I’ve always thought that his bizarre behavior is caused by the intense pressures of running hid business empire and the constant international public scrutiny he faces. 

When we look at his role in the election, we can’t help but see an unsettling parallel with historical examples in Russia, Italy and Hungary— all of which combined great wealth and media access to steer the countries in an authoritarian direction. In each case, the wealthiest individuals or oligarchic circles have used their financial power not just to influence elections, but to skew entire political systems toward their interests. Wealth, when concentrated in the hands of a few, creates a dangerous imbalance where the richest individuals think they are entitled to act as kingmakers, dictating policies, shaping public opinion and silencing opposition through sheer financial might.

The Trump-Musk Access of Evil represents the confluence of raw wealth, media control and political influence on a scale rarely seen before. Musk’s intervention in U.S. politics could mark the reemergence of a dangerous era where billionaires, unaccountable to the public, wield outsized influence over democracy itself.

“These days, in private conversations, wrote Theodore Scheifer, Maggie Haberman, Ryan Mac and Jonathan Swan, “Musk is obsessive, almost manic, about the stakes of the election and the need for Trump to win… One person who spoke recently to Musk recalled him saying, without any hint of irony, ‘I love Trump.’ [He once called Trump a “stone-cold loser” and supported DeSantis’ primary against him.] Musk’s frenzied engagement reflects his view of this moment in American history. On Twitter, he has warned in dire terms about the effects of progressive policies and censorship. He has claimed, without basis, that Democrats are trying to fill the country with undocumented immigrants who would reward them with permanent power, warning that the 2024 race could be the last free election in America. It may be impossible to capture the financial value of all the support Musk is providing to Trump. This is in part because of his role on Twitter, where he amplifies so much of the former president’s message. Trump has privately used grand— and unverified— terms to describe what Musk is donating to the super PAC, telling one associate recently that the figure is $500 million.”

At one dinner earlier this year with a group of Trump-friendly billionaires including Nelson Peltz and John Paulson, Musk voiced an earnest, if naïve, belief in the way that politics should work. He dismissed the power of television advertising and spoke sweepingly of an organic movement to elect Trump, with supporters persuading others to join the cause. Two voters by two voters— that was how Trump would win, he said.

In April, Musk arranged for a dinner to be held at the Los Angeles home of the venture capitalist David Sacks. There, Musk and a phalanx of some of the world’s wealthiest people— including Rupert Murdoch, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the onetime Trump supporter Peter Thiel— said that 10 by 10 voters was how Trump would win. Musk told about a dozen dinner companions that supporting Trump would be politically safe if they did it in large numbers— and so it was important for the businesspeople to organize their peers.

Trump has made clear that he appreciates the help, promising to appoint Musk to oversee a government-efficiency team if he is re-elected. At a rally in Reading, Pa., on Wednesday night, Trump appeared preoccupied with Musk, telling stories about his talks with Musk in three unrelated tangents and celebrating the “dark MAGA” hat that some attendees said they had bought because Musk wore it in Butler.

… At the core of Musk’s project is America PAC, an organization that the Trump campaign is relying on for significant help in knocking on doors in battleground states and encouraging 800,000 to one million voters to cast ballots for the former president.

The group has spent about $80 million to help Trump according to federal records, primarily on its canvassing program. Musk’s advisers have told donors that the group has about 2,500 organizers in the field, and the group has effectively acquired the Wisconsin assets of another group, Turning Points USA, taking on about 200 new canvassers in the state. Some canvassers, during training, have been shown Musk’s social media posts about the group, as a way to encourage them.

…One post with that claim this month has garnered nearly 34 million views, according to Twitter’s own metrics, underscoring the scale of attention that Musk, owner of the platform’s most followed account, can command.

“Unless Trump wins and we get rid of the mountain of smothering regulations (that have nothing to do with safety!), humanity will never reach Mars,” Musk wrote this month in a post that has gained nearly 18 million views. “This is existential.”

Online, Musk has painted a dark picture of what would happen if Trump lost, a circumstance that could hurt Musk personally. In an interview with the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, he acknowledged “trashing Kamala nonstop” and being all in for Trump.

If Trump loses, he joked, “how long do you think my prison sentence is going to be?”

How about a one-way trip to Mars instead? Let him run that place. And he should take Steve Bannon on that life’s adventure as well. Is he still in prison? And doesn’t he have a much bigger trial coming up soon? James Pogue’s essay on him Steve Bannon Has Called His “Army” To Do Battle— No Matter Who Wins In November. Maybe Mars is too close… What about Uranus?

Rogue wrote that “The best outsider’s portrait of Bannon is a book by the ethnographer Benjamin Teitelbaum, called War for Eternity: Inside Bannon’s Far-Right Circle of Global Power Brokers. Teitelbaum spent years interviewing Bannon and his like-minded allies and associates, from the late Brazilian “far- right guru Olavo de Carvalho, as the New York Times described him, to Aleksandr Dugin, the philosopher who was, in the years before Russia launched its shadow takeover of Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine, one of Russia’s most prominent public intellectuals, in posh hotel rooms and under-the-radar gatherings. He got unparalleled access to Bannon, and he was able to do so in part because he came to him not as a political reporter but as a scholar interested in an obscure school of thought known as Traditionalism. Capital-T Traditionalism is a mystical philosophy developed by a Frenchman named René Guénon, who converted to Islam and died in Cairo in 1951. His syncretic view held that modern ideologies like liberalism and communism had perverted the natural, sacred, timeless true order of human life. Many inheritors adapted and expanded Guénon’s philosophy, most notably the Italian Julius Evola, for whom the natural order of things meant men ruled over women, and whites and Aryans were above Black, Jewish, and Arab people. Evola used his theories to elaborate a meta-narrative of why nations and empires rise and fall— a small addition to a library of esoteric historiography that now makes for popular fodder in conservative circles. ‘Traditionalists aspire to be everything modernity is not,’ Teitelbaum wrote. ‘To commune with what they believe are timeless, transcendent truths and lifestyles rather than to pursue ‘progress.’”

[Bannon] saw the “aristocrats” around him as a deadened people, hopelessly disconnected from the blood and sweat and deep sense of shared, spiritual purpose that had made America into a great nation. When he arrived at Goldman Sachs to work in mergers and acquisitions, he discovered he was the only member of his cohort of hires who’d come from a blue-collar background or had served in the military. “The aristos don’t fight!” he told Teitelbaum. “They strictly don’t.”

Bannon developed relationships with Traditionalist-minded critics of the global system all over the world, from former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Some of them, like the openly Traditionalist philosopher Dugin, have been deeply antagonistic to America. Bannon and Dugin are hardly allies, even if Dugin welcomes the idea that a nationalist America might rise up alongside the “Solar” Russia he dreams of, borrowing an idea from Evola. But they share an intuitive sense of “the tradition,” as Bannon said when the two met in 2018. More importantly, Bannon and populists throughout the West came to welcome the vision, now Russia’s guiding policy, of a multipolar world order that will rise in place of the American-led order, which Bannon had come to believe was ravaging Americans.

“America isn’t an idea,” he told Dugin. “It is a country, it is a people, with roots, spirit, destiny,” he said. “And what you’re talking about, the liberalism and the globalism…real American people are the victims of that. We’re talking about the backbone of American society, the people who give the country its spirit— they’re not modernists. They’re not the ones blowing trillions of dollars trying to impose democracy on places that don’t want it. They’re not the ones trying to create a world without borders. They’re getting screwed in all this by an elite that doesn’t care about them and that isn’t them.”

In August 2019, Bannon released an interview with Farage in which he spoke to a mystery that hangs over much of the upheaval in the world order today— why it’s the right and not the traditional critics on the left who suddenly present the biggest threat to the global world order. “The reason is the immigration—they’re not prepared to take it on,” he said about left populist figures like Bernie Sanders and then UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. “We’re prepared to take it on. It’s a global revolt. It’s a zeitgeist.” To Bannon, and for pretty much everyone involved in his diffuse movement, resisting the empire is bound up in a project of preserving the spiritual character of a nation. And there was another thing he later talked to me about at great length that the left shies away from— in part because, in his view, it would mean throwing into question all hopes and dreams of building a stronger social safety net or slowing climate change.

This was the global dollar system. Worldwide use of the dollar to settle international transactions and of American bonds as a trusted means for the world’s central banks to store their currency reserves allows the American government to spend far beyond its revenues, secure in the knowledge that financial markets will act as a credit card with an almost infinite limit. This has allowed America to spend $31 trillion more than it has taken in since the end of the Cold War, because America’s military dominance and stable government serve as guarantees. This system, Bannon warned in a series of pamphlets titled “The End of the Dollar Empire” (electronically published in collaboration with his show’s main sponsor, the precious-metals broker Birch Gold), was falling apart—“not quickly, but inevitably.” If the world actually does abandon the dollar, America’s days as the world’s great military power will come to an abrupt end.

…After I’d checked in, I got a text asking if I’d like to visit the small Alexandria house that JD Vance calls home when he’s in Washington. When I got there he was drinking whiskey with a small circle of friends and aides as he relaxed on the couch in sweats and socks with yellow ducks on them. The meeting was off the record, but I am a journalist (one who has written about Vance) and so I could not help but whisper a prayer that Trump would happen to call and I’d be there to witness Vance being asked to join the ticket— a moment that, win or lose, would mark one of the most significant choices of a running mate in American history. “From a systemic perspective there are really only two things in politics that really mean something,” Jeremy Carl, who served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, told me later. “Elon [Musk] buying Twitter,” he said, meaning that the right now had an unfiltered channel, “and for someone to emerge who could make the MAGA into something bigger than the man Trump himself.” This is what a potential Vance pick would really represent.

Long ago, Vance told me that the first political book he ever read was The Death of the West, by Pat Buchanan, and that the book still shapes his thinking. I bought and read it after he told me this, and I was surprised to find that it presaged almost perfectly the populist upswelling at the time Vance had just entered the primary for his Ohio US Senate seat. It raised alarms about declining Western birth rates and globalization and argued that immigration was sapping America’s character and social cohesion. Western elites, Buchanan wrote in the introduction, “do not seem to care if the end of the West comes by depopulation, by a surrender of nationhood, or by drowning in waves of Third World immigration.”

Buchanan was dismissed as a “paleocon” when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996. But when Bannon took over as Trump’s campaign chief in 2016, he made Trump’s closing argument a very Buchananite message. The campaign’s final TV ad, released three days before the election, was laughed off by many observers as a bizarre two minutes. “The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election,” Trump said. The ad introduced an idea that’s now almost a cliché on the online right, which has shaped the worldview of younger conservatives like Vance: “You aren’t a citizen of a nation,” the line goes. “You’re an imperial subject.”

…I was pretty sure that Vance would be Trump’s pick. My confidence had nothing to do with anything I’d learned from Vance himself—it came from years of increasing familiarity with the worldview of people like Bannon and of the young, weight-lifting-obsessed men who make up the infantry of the America-first movement. Trump may well have liked the idea of choosing a middle-of-the-road pro-internationalist Republican. But, as Bannon had once told me, Trump is “a fucking moderate” compared to the people who have made him into a symbol of systemic reckoning, and I had trouble imagining that they’d stand for someone like North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, who by all appearances would be confused by the idea that the extent of America’s financial and military power is sapping the vitality of the nation.

I spoke to Bannon during the intra-Republican battle over who would succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House. Bannon argued that this, too, was a fight about the dollar system and the world order. “The whole civil war on Capitol Hill right now?” he said then. “That’s a real fight about money and power, about whether you can keep laying debt on the American people.”

I had never really thought of someone like Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, who comes off mostly as a MAGA culture warrior, as an anti-imperialist renegade. But to Bannon it was all linked. Even populist Democrats are “neoliberal neocons,” a phrase he loves to use to dismiss any politician who doesn’t show an interest in unknitting order. “To be serious you’ve got to be anti-imperial,” Bannon said dismissively of Chris Murphy, the senator from Connecticut I was then writing about, who actually shares many Traditionalist-sounding critiques of how our connected world has left a void of meaning in people’s lives. Bannon said, “He’s out there supporting a $100 billion supplemental for Israel and Ukraine that we absolutely can’t afford. Empire is the core mode of power. Unless you’re prepared to take on Wall Street and the banks,” which for Bannon would mean confronting the very basics of the financial system, “you’re never going to actually do anything. It’s all talk.”

“But people are waking up,” he’d told me. “Once you talk about how the system is financed, they are fucking furious. A working-class audience can understand something’s not right with the system, but they can’t put their finger on it.” Bannon, who calls his audience the “army of the awakened,” has made it his mission to spell it all out. “Populism is system versus anti-system, that’s the whole story. Republicans in all these super-red MAGA districts who don’t get it are gonna get attacked,” he said. “There’s going to be a revolution in this country, one way or another.”