In many ways, none of this is new. Extremes of wealth and poverty are hardly novel in the history of the United States. But Cooper points to an important difference: If, in much of the 20th century, these economic divisions were produced by major industrial corporations, collectively controlled by a community of shareholders and stock owners that included pension funds, banks, and wealthy individuals, then in today’s economy they are produced by private equity funds, financial firms, family trusts, and tech firms owned by a handful of wealthy founders.
Many commentators have been struck by the crude ideological agenda of Project 2025 (especially in regard to gender), the ferocity of Trump’s nationalism, the relentlessness of his self-promotion, and the strange combination of wheeling and dealing and brute force that Trump seems to believe qualifies as governance. But Cooper’s book clarifies that along with these cultural and stylistic qualities, there is another aspect of Trump and Trumpism that often gets overlooked: What is most distinctive about both is that they reflect the unique characteristics of a political culture and economy shaped by the private wealth and patriarchal whims of a group of entrepreneurs who have been able to wrest free of any of the structural limits that once guided economic life. The financiers, tech bros, and megalomaniacal entrepreneurs of today’s Republican Party are no longer accountable to the bureaucratic corps of middle managers that populated the mid-20th-century corporations or to large numbers of external shareholders. The authority of the private executive over the firm that he owns is echoed in Trump’s habit of governing by executive order, his penchant for making “deals,” and his ability to win the allegiance of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who also believe in the need to free corporate founders from the hassle of answering to regulators or shareholders. It may even account for Trump’s support from the small-business owners and middle-class voters who decided that they identified more with this style of leadership than with the professional expertise represented by Kamala Harris.