Another week and where to begin? It’s easy not to know where to start when everything around you is on fire and there’s no source of water nearby. To date, Trump’s lies and disinformation have served him well, but we are now approaching the point where the chickens come home to roost, and Americans will begin to feel the impact of tariffs on their daily life.
The difficulty right now is that, aside from the Trump political chaos, the world is still spinning, and geopolitical adjustments continue to exacerbate the problem, as the US faces a world learning to live without US leadership. Global trade is transforming, and the global economy is seeking stability that the US appears either unable or unwilling to provide.
I spend a lot of time listening to what business leaders, technology advocates, and investors are discussing, and there is little doubt that the welfare of the American people plays no part in their thinking as they draw up their plans for the future. I’ve spoken many times about the chasm that now exists, that is the wealth gap, and these industry leaders are all in on Trump’s vision of social Darwinism. He’s created a permissive environment that dispenses with any notion of social responsibility, leaving them free to satisfy their insatiable greed for wealth and power.
Trump’s shameless creation of a pay-for-play administration allows them to act with total impunity in the knowledge that if they break the law, they can make a phone call and a crypto deposit to Trump, and any problems will disappear. Never have the wealthy and big business had such a favourable environment in which to operate. Money will buy you all the deregulation, planning rights and government assistance you need to deliver ever-increasing returns on investment. What’s not to like if you’re in the top 1%?
Let me spell it out even before we begin on this new Trumpian road trip to riches beyond the wildest dreams of the already rich.
US Total wealth is estimated at $164 trillion
The top 1% (3.3 million people) own $50 trillion
The next 9% (30 million people) own $60 trillion
The next 40% (133 million people) own $50 trillion
The bottom 50% (175 million people) own just $4 trillion
Back in the 1980s, adjusted for inflation, America’s total wealth was around $30 trillion; in 45 years, the nation’s wealth grew by $134 trillion. Here’s the kicker: back then, the bottom 50% owned just $2 trillion of that wealth, and today they own just $4 trillion. One can’t help thinking there’s a structural problem. Either that, or we’ve all become victims of repeated muggings by the rich.
One important thing we saw last week is why the judicial branch, a coequal branch of government, poses such a significant threat to Trump’s plans. While he would have you believe that the courts are merely an irritation to him, the truth is that he’s losing 96% of cases that block his daily proclamations. Now you might think, ‘so what’s the problem? If the courts are ruling against his lunacy, why do we need to worry?’ This is all about what you consider a win. Trump and, in particular, Russell Vought know that they don’t have to win battles in court. Indeed, they don’t expect to win in many cases. The objective is simply to disrupt and break the system. Vought knows that the courts have to play catch-up, so the aim is to outrun the courts, blowing up the bridges behind them as they go.
They wanted, from the outset, to pour sand into the engine of the government because they knew it would take months, if not years, to unravel the damage they could inflict. Trump spent the last four years inventing words like lawfare and screaming about the weaponisation of the judicial system, only to weaponise it himself to deliver retribution to his enemies while rendering the rule of law impotent when challenging him. It is a breathtaking abuse of power that sees him protected from accountability by the very Supreme Court he’s now happy to throw under the bus in his quest for absolute power.
Last week, we saw exactly why he wants to castrate the courts when the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled that a significant number of his tariffs were unlawful. To be precise, the court ruled Trump’s tariffs “exceed any authority granted” to the President by the emergency powers law. If we examine the case purely on its face value, the trade position remains the same as it was during Trump’s first term and for years prior. Indeed, the very calculus the administration used to calculate the ‘so-called deficits’ was just fabrication. There was no emergency except for the one he had invented.
Unfortunately, facts seem to play no part in Trump’s game of cat and mouse with the rule of law. Needless to say, the administration appealed the ruling and was granted a stay by the Federal Appeals Court while the arguments play out in court. The reason this case is critical is that it challenges the central premise of his ability to define an emergency as he sees fit. That’s not how it is described in the act. In addition, without tariffs, his entire economic agenda is dead in the water. Which would mean his Big Beautiful Bill would be dead too. With this in mind, there is no doubt that Trump will have a backup plan to retain the tariffs, so please don’t get too excited that the courts will stop him.
Trump’s whole strategy here has been two-fold. Use legislation to pass a massive reconciliation bill to gut the social welfare safety net, and extend the failed, unfunded tax cuts of his first term. This legislation is central to protecting his tax cuts moving forward. The second part of the strategy involves using executive orders to circumvent the legislative process and dismantle the government, while undermining confidence in the courts. He did the latter in the full knowledge that by the time the courts caught up with his actions, it would be too late to fix the damage caused.
To recap, we have an administration that has signalled to the rich that all they need to do is factor in a crypto bribe to the President for any crimes they plan to commit. Factor in a crypto bribe to the President for any deregulation they wish to see enacted, all while receiving massive tax breaks and access to corporate welfare on demand. We have a cabinet and senior officials who, I suspect, are all using the Signal App across government to deliberately avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act, which dictates that all records created or received by the President and his staff in connection with official duties, including those of the Vice President, are considered Presidential records and must be archived. This includes materials intended to advise or assist the President in carrying out their duties. If forced to leave office, they plan to leave no evidence of their illegal acts behind, making it difficult to prosecute them once out of office.
Please make no mistake: this is a right-wing crusade meticulously planned over decades, and Russell Vought and his co-conspirators are the custodians of the strategic plans as outlined in Project 2025. Vought loads the gun, and Trump is the useful idiot who is pulling the trigger in this made-for-TV march towards theocratic autocracy.
It seems incredible to think that all this chaos and malign intent is designed to keep us all busy while the real evil shit is going on way out of sight. In my earlier post, I introduced the likes of Curtis Yarvin, Michael Anton, and Peter Thiel. These are the commanders in the field who linked up with Elon Musk. If Democrats want to destroy the Death Star, they had better get up to speed on the real threat to them, which is being excluded from the electoral process for the foreseeable future.
There’s a very clever dance going on here where the tech bros are saying, 'Really, we're just harmless disenfranchised Democrats.’ claiming, 'We tried it your way, and wokeness nearly killed us,' which is, of course, nonsense. Terrified at what damage Trump as president can do to their business, they have all bent the knee. Corporate leaders will always dance to the tune of the piper in government. If the Trump government fell tomorrow and Democrats were back in power, they'd be the first to claim they never believed in Trump's radical vision. Their sole allegiance is to profit, and it's simply a matter of how they work with those in power to achieve it.
The danger at this moment, however, is that hard-right ideologues have begun to control the direction of travel based on what they believe to be a mission-critical goal for the US to dominate the only game in town, the AI space, and Trump is the perfect vehicle to help them achieve that in record time. They know that under Trump's transactional presidency, they will be allowed to run amok, destroying everything in their path to attain their objectives. All they will need to do is keep topping up Trump's bank account, and he'll clear their path of any obstacles. I'll discuss their underestimation of China in my next post.
I'll explain it as gently as I can. Their new world order does not need a traditional workforce. This is now being discussed quietly by those involved at a high level in this new revolution. I have personally worked closely with AI and have been constantly monitoring its pace of development. Believe me when I say it is developing at a terrifying pace, certainly at a pace that the average person on the street can barely begin to comprehend. If you have ten minutes and haven't yet seen this clip from CNN's Anderson Cooper, featuring an interview with Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, I recommend you take a look.
In my opinion, even Dario is painting an optimistic picture here. I'd like you to join me in taking a step back and examining this through a corporate and political lens. Let's begin with the corporate lens. Technology companies do not see it as their job to be concerned about the social impact of their ambitions, though I would argue this is short-sighted. It's their job to generate profit, and they are, as I write this, salivating at the prospect of the potential gold rush ahead.
The bigger concern for politicians is who will be the first casualties as AI is more widely adopted by businesses whose largest overhead is people. It seems clear to me that the primary casualties will be the middle class. White collar jobs will be decimated, of that there is no question. I personally believe the change will be so dramatic, that within a decade we may even witness the disappearance of the middle class. This is not an impending threat, it has already begun and jobs are being lost to AI as I write this. We’ll take a deeper dive into the vulnerable sectors later in the week, but you can safely assume it will have a widespread impact. When the dust settles, there will just be the owning class and the rest. As I said in my previous post, they will see a rebirth in the form of the tech plantation owners of the 21st Century.
Trump is on the leading edge of a shadow political revolution taking place well out of sight of you and me. It is this quiet revolution that could render politics as we know it irrelevant, and the man leading this quiet revolution is Peter Thiel. If you're looking for a Bond villain in this democracy holocaust, he's your guy, and the wheels are already in motion. Thiel co-founded Palantir in 2003. In 2004, he hired Alex Karp as CEO and the face of Palantir moving forward. The company's objective was to develop data analytics solutions. The stated objective was to "reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties.". The company struggled to attract funding at the outset, and its first real investor, apart from the $30 million Thiel invested himself, was the CIA. I don’t intend to deliver you a history of the company, you can find that on their altruistic dripping website where their apparent societal aims would make Mother Teresa blush.
Palantir is not new to holding government contracts, which it does with intelligence agencies around the world. These include contracts with the US government for defence and intelligence analytics. Their last contract was inked just weeks ago with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon for $795 million. It should be noted that Palantir is the gold standard when it comes to data-driven threat analysis and a number of military intelligence tasks. To be clear, I am certainly not doubting their credentials in this field, which is the whole reason for my fears. The threat to democracy comes from the adaptation of these military threat analysis tools to target law-abiding citizens in the development of a national database.
Data mining is more than capable of being the beating heart of autocratic rule, and I can tell you without fear of contradiction that Trump and those driving down this road to absolute power are aligned with his throw away statement:
As reported by the New York Times on May 30th by Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik (I have gifted a link to this article here so the paywall is removed)
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Palantir has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, aside from $795 million awarded to them recently which has not yet been spent.
The Times goes on to report:
‘Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.’
The key thing to understand here is the power of data overlays and their ability to profile their target, in this case, you. Palantir analytics are the gold standard for intelligence gathering and analytics. My question, which should be on the lips of every Democratic and Republican member of Congress, is: What are the objectives? Because you are unlikely to find them on the record, given the extensive use of Signal within key stakeholder departments.
As I have already spoken of, Republicans were using EagleAI to target voters to be removed from electoral rolls, but this is little league compared to Palantir; Don’t be surprised if they join up the dots to bring big data together to choose their voters in the election space. I appreciate that this may sound like the stuff of a science fiction movie, but rest assured, something is going on here to create a master dataset that can be used to profile and track Americans. Your phone is the central anchor point which also doubles as a tracker, your social media feeds are often linked to a phone or email address, and AI is in a position to analyse your posts and assess your political leanings and identify personal vulnerabilities, and that’s before we discuss your internet searches among other things. Add credit ratings and credit card spending patterns, and you become a political as well as a commercial commodity. We already live in a surveillance state, Palantir just takes it to the next level and then some.
Be in absolutely no doubt, the threat from this administration is very real. Once they have a central database, everything from menstrual cycle tracking to medical records, political donations, to rally attendances and meetings is on the table. The type of analysis that could be done on a national citizens database is beyond most people’s comprehension. For example, like when you visit an item on Amazon and that item starts appearing in accompanying Ads for other non Amazon searches, this is to try and get you to maybe take another look at what you were considering purchasing. Imagine if instead of you being reminded of a product it was showing you political Ads based on what you posted on social media because the AI had concluded you were a swing voter and it knew what your hot button topics were? This is VERY REAL and technically possible right now. with the right data overlay. Of course, you would be told to stop being silly if you raised concerns, but given Trump and his strategists are driving around Congressional oversight and ignoring judges, how confident do you feel about calling me a liar?
This week we are going to dig deeper and examine the impact of AI not only in the political space, but also in wider society and how it might impact wider society. The economic and social threats it presents and also how the US stacks up against China.
I just wanted to add a footnote to this post to say please don’t view this post in isolation, it’s part of a series of posts to help people understand the political threat, but also the wider societal impact.
It’s about awareness and while I think there’s no escaping the fear element, there is a bigger picture that I hope will unfold as the week progresses.
Martin
The amount of data they have on every single American is a gut punch to the soul. My guess is it’s already been shared with the Th*el’s and their data-based company(s). My guess is they are already mining the data for social media posts, income, donations, family relations, taxes and political affiliation’s (just the tip of the iceberg). My guess is the data is already being weaponized against their ideological opponents. My guess is the data has already been sold and transferred into the hands of our adversaries.
This is, of course, a guess based on my own research. My guess is this post will also count against my “rating”, sometime in the near future.