The ‘three-sickbag spectacle’ of tech bros at the court of Trump 2.0

There’s a passage in Notebook 3 that seems particularly relevant now. It’s about what Gramsci called an “interregnum” – a period of crisis “which consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Eight months into Trump 2.0, it’s pretty clear that we in the west are deep into an interregnum of our own, and morbid symptoms are everywhere on view. Here are a few, in no particular order, for your leisurely contemplation.

Exhibit A is the dinner Donald Trump hosted at the White House for the tech titans of Silicon Valley. The assembled masters of the universe (Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Bill Gates, Greg Brockman, Sergey Brin, Safra Catz, Tim Cook and sundry others) were there for obvious purposes: to pay homage to the supreme leader, to laud his wisdom and to boast about how much money they were preparing to invest to Make (His) America Great Again. The deeper message was that the most powerful corporations in the world are signed up to Trump 2.0. It made for a three-sickbag spectacle of which the only redeeming defect was that Elon Musk was nowhere to be seen.

This was perhaps timely because exhibit B is the announcement by the board of Tesla of an incentive package for Musk that offered him a trillion dollars if he met some ambitious goals for company stock.

This led the political theorist Francis Fukuyama to point out that if Musk wins this payout, “he could single-handedly close a significant part of the national deficit, and personally fund all the Medicare, early childhood education, foreign aid, and other programmes being cut as part of the [Republican] big beautiful bill’s effort to minimise the deficit. Given that US GDP last year was about $28tn, the payout implies that one man contributed more than 3.5% of the nation’s total output, while the other 340 million of us produced the remaining 96.5%.”

Exhibit C of our interregnum is a juxtaposed pair of photographs in Noema magazine. One shows a dejected array of European leaders in the Oval Office sitting facing Trump, who appears to be rapping his knuckles on the Resolute desk. They are trying to persuade him not to abandon Ukraine. The other shows Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping gleefully hand in hand at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Tianjin, China. “If the G-7 is the ‘steering committee’ of the west,” writes Noema’s editor-in-chief, Nathan Gardels, “this new triumvirate is the nascent steering committee of the non-west.”

“Eighty years ago,” said Xi at the conference, “the international community learned profound lessons from the scourge of two world wars and founded the United Nations, thus writing a new page in global governance. Eighty years later, while the historical trends of peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit remain unchanged, the cold war mentality, hegemonism and protectionism continue to haunt the world. New threats and challenges have been only increasing. The world has found itself in a new period of turbulence and transformation. Global governance has come to a new crossroads.”

It’s now the rest vs the west.

Which brings us neatly to exhibit D, the tsunami of online viciousness that has followed the shooting of the conservative “influencer” Charlie Kirk on 10 September. In no time at all, the killing was being portrayed as having been organised by “the left” which, tweeted Musk, “is the party of murder”. The rightwing activist (and Trump whisperer) Laura Loomer sent a post to her 1.8 million X followers calling for the administration to “shut down, defund, & prosecute every single leftist organisation”, adding: “The left is a national security threat.”

Sean Davis, the co-founder of conservative online magazine the Federalist, tweeted his “hope that Trump also orders the extermination of the entire anarcho-terrorist network that has been terrorising Christians in this nation unabated for more than a decade”.

These exhibits may look like random aberrations but, really, they’re what Gramsci thought of as “morbid symptoms” of something seismic. When established orders collapse and replacements haven’t emerged, societies produce these kinds of monstrosities: tech billionaires genuflecting to authoritarians; trillion-dollar individual payouts while democracies fracture; great powers realigning along civilisational lines; and political movements calling for the “extermination” of their opponents.

The old liberal democratic order is clearly dying. What we don’t know is what will be born from the chaos.

Fiction from friction

The Crash of 2026 is a grimly entertaining fictional scenario by the economist John Quiggin.

One step at a time

Why Process Knowledge is Crucial to Economic Development is Henry Farrell’s insightful review of Dan Wang’s amazing new book about China and the west.

AI maintenance

Tony Curzon-Price explains an inventive solution to an inevitable decline in quality in How Does Enshittification Come to LLMs and How to Stop It?

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty Images