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Trump, a grasp of spectacle, put the billionaires there for a purpose. His message: “I’ve introduced them to heel and harnessed them to the American challenge.” He is aware of most of his voters will approve. Maga is constructed extra on the cult of the entrepreneur than on the cult of the strongman, although they overlap. Many businesspeople regard nice entrepreneurs as the winners of life’s recreation.
Trump constructed his repute enjoying an incredible entrepreneur on TV. He then went into politics promoting the notion that authorities was a “malfunctioning company referred to as the USA”, to cite Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is nice” speech from the 1987 film Wall Road. Trump promised to run authorities like a enterprise. The Donald Trump vs Kamala Harris election was, amongst numerous contrasts, entrepreneur in opposition to authorities official.
Trumpism could characterize the peak of the political cult of entrepreneurs. I can’t suppose of one other entrepreneur turning into head of authorities in a serious economic system, besides Silvio Berlusconi. Previous US political cults have been hooked up to troopers (Washington, Eisenhower) or to company bosses, resembling Mitt Romney. George W Bush, who had a Harvard MBA, was hailed as a “CEO president”. However the company CEO is a rule-bound determine in a swimsuit with levels. The entrepreneur is a wilder beast, autonomous, rule-breaking, typically a university dropout. He’s his personal man. (This can be a male cult — recall Zuckerberg’s latest reward of “masculine vitality”.)
The largest entrepreneurial fortunes in historical past have been coined in Silicon Valley between about 1998 and 2008. As we speak, the beneficiaries are center aged. Their 80-hour workweeks are principally over, leaving them with sufficient vitality to pour into politics. They’re recognized to abnormal Individuals by their first names or nicknames, in Musk’s case by his tweets, and by their anti-corporate costume. The billionaires relentlessly self-brand as iconoclasts, which may go fallacious, as maybe with Musk’s obvious Nazi salute.
Underpinning the cult is the perception that what’s good for entrepreneurs is nice for America. Enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen advised podcaster Joe Rogan that Trump’s message, “America has to win”, meant that US corporations “ought to win international markets . . . How can anyone be in opposition to that?” In any case, Andreessen argued, solely financial progress might pay for “welfare programmes and meals help programmes, all these items”.
The argument is doubtful. First, Europeans retire earlier and stay longer than Individuals, regardless of decrease financial progress and principally decrease governmental debt-to-GDP ratios. Second, progress doesn’t essentially increase public spending on condition that Large Tech has perfected tax avoidance. Nor do these corporations create many roles. Meta has 72,000 principally high-skilled workers, together with immigrants on H1-B visas.
Final, how do the moguls — who spent a long time ignoring Washington — learn that {photograph}? In Andreessen’s telling, Joe Biden compelled them into Trump’s arms. Whereas most abnormal Individuals appear to have skilled Bidenism as a time of inflation and drift, the moguls noticed one thing extra sinister: a business-hating administration stamping out their freedoms. Andreessen accuses the Biden-era Securities and Change Fee of “attempting to kill the crypto trade”.
Crypto and AI are the entrepreneurs’ new battlefields. One distinction between Trump I and Trump II is that the value of bitcoin was $900 in 2016 and is greater than $100,000 right this moment, whereas we noticed on Monday that shifts in AI can now flip international inventory markets.
On crypto and AI, as on all the pieces else, America is split. Democrats are cautious of crypto as a money-laundering alternative. Trumpists see it as a libertarian enterprise that subverts authorities (albeit that crypto entrepreneurs need financial institution accounts and Trump’s assist). Biden tried to regulate AI; Trump gained’t. Tech moguls hope he’ll assist them win what Peter Thiel calls the “international warfare” to overcome enemy territories resembling the EU, the UK and Brazil.
Billionaires care about insurance policies, however they need love too. A number of, like Andreessen, used to lean liberal. But when liberals reject you, you’ll select the man who loves you (for now) and reveals it along with his seating plan.
Electronic mail Simon at simon.kuper@ft.com
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