Donald Trump is as close to a one-man show as Washington has seen since Barack Obama’s second term in office. What that means for America’s future — and the rest of the planet — depends on whether Trump can carry through on his promises of a new American Revolution or whether the forces he has unleashed will instead replace the top-down bureaucracies he and his supporters despise with something more brazenly oppressive: Oligarchy.

The radicalism of Trump’s second term in office has been evident since Day One, which began with a salvo of executive orders abolishing the old regime of DEI and gender-neutral bathrooms in government facilities and public schools. Subsequent weeks saw the evisceration of USAID by Elon Musk’s DOGE; the seizure of Treasury Department payments systems by Musk’s young lieutenants, including a 19-year-old programmer who went by the online sobriquet “Big Balls”; an attempt to buy Greenland; and the firing of thousands of probationary employees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, the Pentagon, and other ostensibly untouchable Federal agencies.

Democratic attempts to disrupt Trump’s “takeover” of the Federal Government by imploring Federal judges to block his maneuvers, holding protests at affected agencies, and writing concerned op-eds have done little to slow him down. In contrast to both 2016 and 2020, it is now Trump’s team, not his opponents’, that controls social media, thanks to Elon Musk’s ownership of X — providing Trump with newfound control of political optics. With the algorithm at their backs, nearly all of Trump’s controversial Cabinet picks — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel — have sailed through their confirmation hearings.

MAGA believers expecting Trump to follow through on his meat-and-potatoes promises of trade war with China and mass deportations of illegal migrants may find themselves as lonely as today’s progressive Democrats, though. While Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Homan talks tough on illegal immigration and law-breaking, there have not yet been mass round-ups of migrants. Instead, Homan seems to be following a sotto voce policy of deporting only “criminal illegals” — meaning the few thousand or so migrants who have actually committed serious crimes — rather than the millions of illegals who are apparently being allowed to remain quietly in the shadows, for now.

Trump seems to have little appetite for a trade war or any other kind of confrontation with China, either. In part, that’s because key administration positions are being filled by members of the libertarian policy network funded by the Koch brothers, the longtime Republican donors and liberal bogeymen who starred in journalist Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money, written in the long-ago days when the Democrats had captured Wall Street and Silicon Valley for their own donor base. As ideological purists, whose libertarianism also happens to coincide quite well with the family’s long history of partnering with the world’s most abusive dictators, the Koch brothers constitute one of the last remaining ideologically grounded sites of resistance to Trump within the Republican Party. Last year, the Koch brothers gave tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s rivals in a last-ditch “anyone-but-Trump” campaign.

As a Silicon Valley millionaire and onetime protégé of Peter Thiel, Vice President J.D. Vance is a useful bridge between the libertarians of the Koch network and his former colleagues in tech. What is unclear, however, is whether Vance has all that much influence within the Trump White House, especially after Trump himself made a point to answer the question of whether he saw Vance as his anointed successor with a succinct “No.” Tucker Carlson, who has become the lead mouthpiece for the Koch alignment on foreign policy, has made himself toxic to many conservatives by embracing a decidedly downmarket tabloid-like mix of conspiratorial antisemitism, WWII revisionism, and commercials for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad. Questioning the morality of the Allied war effort against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, a frequent hobbyhorse of Carlson’s, does not seem to accord with the views of most Americans of either party, who understand World War II as a just cause, and admire the men who fought it as “the Greatest Generation.”

Which brings us to Elon Musk. Of all the consequences of Trump surviving an assassin’s bullet — and pumping his fist in the air, yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!” — perhaps the most significant is that it allowed Musk to take his side, openly fracturing the tech oligarchy which until that moment was still uneasily united behind the Democrats. What happened after that can best be described as a cascade of potentialities that had been hovering in the ether, quickly coalescing into the science-fiction-like alt-future that America now inhabits.

No longer a retrograde loner staggering under the weight of multiple legal cases, Trump was now suddenly, plausibly, the incarnation of old-school Hollywood manliness, and at the same time the favored candidate of the country’s most successful and future-oriented technologist. Along with his plans to build cities on Mars, Musk also brought with him the social-media platform X, which in previous elections had been a key component of the Democrats’ permission-structure machine.

Barack Obama, who functioned as the ultimate decider and strategist at the top of this integrated political-messaging and social-pressure machine, was quick to realize that the combination of the newly heroic Donald Trump and Elon Musk meant that it was now anyone’s election. Within a week after the shooting, Obama emerged from his state of occlusion — facilitated by the same media that covered up Biden’s dementia — to force Biden from the ticket and replace him with Kamala Harris. In reporting on these events, the legacy media was forced to admit that it had been lying about Biden’s condition, thereby validating Musk’s insistence that his free wheeling social-media platform was in fact more reliable than the mainstream press. The fact that Obama’s permission-structure machine was both manufacturing “public opinion” on hot-button issues while spreading significant falsehoods that impacted the basic functioning of American democracy had now been laid bare. Yet Obama’s bet, which seemed plausible in the moment, became increasingly unlikely throughout the fall, as Harris failed to display any underlying substance or grit.

In retrospect, the day Trump survived, July 13, 2024, now marks the dividing point between two radically different sets of expectations about the American future: one that is now rapidly receding in the rear-view mirror, and another which is still being born. The attempted assassination of Donald Trump was the day that Obama’s permission-structure machine came apart in full public view, to be replaced by a new and very different construction. Where Obama’s personal authority as de facto leader of the Democratic Party was at least partially diffused throughout the multiple networks — NGOs, bureaucracies, corporate interests, messaging verticals, security agencies, and the mainstream press — that used the Democratic Party as the main switchboard for their claims on power, the new American system would incarnate itself very differently, in the public personas of two very famous and powerful men: Trump, representing the power of the state, as well as his own heroic defiance of death; and Musk, representing both the magic of technology and the incredible wealth of the Silicon Valley tech elite.

Musk brought with him his own entrepreneurial flair and wealth, as well as powerful AI-driven data tools that helped to even the playing field in key states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. A techno-optimist might therefore understand Trump’s win as the defeat of Obama’s top-down command-and-control structure, which sought to use new technologies to limit and control public opinion. Once Musk used his billions to deliver X from the control of the Obamoids, the story goes, Trump’s band of online citizen-patriots stepped in to do their work and America’s one party techno-dictatorship disintegrated into dust — as evidenced by the near-total disappearance of Barack Obama and his aides from public life.

However, if one looks at the first month of the Trump presidency through the lens of what is essentially a power-sharing arrangement between the two most powerful men in America, it becomes difficult to see the new intraparty politics that will shape the country as any more inherently democratic than the once-nascent one-party state they have replaced. On any given day, Trump’s “revolution” can easily look a lot more like a top-down cascade of the type that brought us bad progressive ideas like DEI, open borders, and transgender surgeries for kids. Only, this time, the lunacy is coming from the Right.

There is a simple explanation for this strange uniformity of off-kilter thoughts and deeds across a seemingly unbridgeable political divide. One is the way that “public opinion” is manufactured on social media platforms. The second is that the United States is — and has been for some time — not the two-party system that is still the focus of college classes in American government, but an inherently undemocratic oligarchy, run by a relative handful of incredibly wealthy technologists and bankers in league with the national security complex that rewards its wealthy partners with huge government contracts.

Oligarchy is not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the alternatives. Under the leadership of Trump and Musk, it is perhaps distantly possible to imagine the United States taking the kinds of radical actions that have been unthinkable for at least the past half century, such as: replacing the Federal income tax with a consumption tax; or undoing the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of boosting China, to the advantage of a small class of American capitalists and to the detriment of American workers. America could choose to spend trillions of dollars on terraforming Mars. It might also build the next-generation of nuclear reactors to supply safe and plentiful energy at close to zero cost to the entire planet. It might restore dignity to the middle class by supporting small business owners and domestic production. It might better educate our children. It might build a giant AI Eye in the desert. Anything is possible.

That said, Elon Musk is also free to join forces with the Koch brothers and Tucker Carlson and his foreign bot armies to build a new permission-structure machine that divides the American population against itself while getting ever richer off unequal trade with the dictatorship in Beijing. And if he does that, Donald Trump may wind up being his captive.

Is that what Musk wants? Who knows. Certainly, his businesses remain dependent on good relations with Beijing, while he exercises more direct and daily control over American public opinion than any man in history. Through the instrument of DOGE, he has also succeeded in turning the vast information and payments systems at the core of the American state into something like a proprietary database. Stalin’s control of the Communist Party after Lenin’s death was founded on less.

It remains to be seen whether Musk and Trump, having each been recently targeted by the establishment, will continue to work together — and, if they do so, towards what ends. The alternative is that one of them teams up with the Koch networks and Tucker Carlson in the hopes of banishing the other. Yes, there is indeed a new American Revolution in Washington, and like most revolutions it is likely to be bloody.