The Old Game With New Players
Or: Why the spectacle is louder but the corruption isn't new
“America First” was always “Business First.” What’s new isn’t the alignment with wealth. It’s that nobody’s pretending anymore.
Past leaders protected capital quietly, through institutions and back channels. Trump does it as performance art. He doesn’t really govern; he plays a president on TV, prioritizing the appearance of dominance over anything resembling actual policy.
The New Incentive Structure
That shifts how everyone else operates. Without legal or institutional guardrails, he hands out rewards for loyalty and punishes anyone who crosses him, personally. For the Cooks and Bezoses and Zuckerbergs of the world, kissing the ring is cheap insurance. A donation here, a photo-op there, and you’re covered. Resistance, on the other hand, gets expensive fast.
2025 changed something, though. Watching people go after Musk directly, and actually hurt him, broke decades of American deference to billionaires. Turns out economic power has weak points if you know where to press.
When Power Actually Responds
Trump folds when actual power gets threatened: stock markets tanking, election losses, workers shutting things down. That’s why the Minneapolis strike mattered. It wasn’t symbolic protest theater. It was a shot across the bow. He responds to cost, not principle
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None of this is new corruption. It’s old corruption without the discretion. Trump didn’t invent pay-to-play politics; Halliburton was already doing this in Iraq while Cheney cashed checks. Gas, oil, steel: same playbook, different decade.
Calling Trump “the most corrupt president” actually undersells the problem. He’s an aberrant outlier. The corruption is more significant, especially in what he’s taking, and he does it openly while escalating the scale. He’s not just further along the same spectrum—he’s operating in a different category entirely
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The Information Problem (And Its Limits)
Tech companies controlling information flow is different, sure. But Americans believe what they can see with their own eyes more than what anyone tells them. Fox News just flipped their story on the Minneapolis murders because the administration’s lies stopped working. Their own viewers were getting pissed off and confused when reality didn’t match the narrative.
That’s the thing about spectacle politics. When you make everything visible, you can’t hide when the performance falls apart.
What do you think? Are we seeing genuinely new corruption, or just the old kind without its PR department? Reply in the comments.