2016 United States presidential election

The 2016 United States presidential election is portrayed as a political contradiction made flesh: tens of millions of Americans placed Donald Trump, a billionaire plutocrat and leading member of the Ownership Class, in the White House while many of his supporters claimed to be rebelling against the elite. The book treats the election not as an assault on oligarchic power but as its spectacular triumph, achieved through the redirection of popular anger toward cultural and political enemies rather than toward the economic class that already possessed wealth and influence.

Background and Political Contradiction

The election is framed through the division between the 1% and the 99%. The book argues that the rich elite maintain power by persuading ordinary people to act against their own interests, and interprets this submission through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's master–slave dialectic. In that account, the master risks power and even life rather than accept subordination, whereas the slave values survival more than the will to power and therefore accepts domination. The book extends this model to American politics, claiming that many voters desire strong rulers and are willing to be governed by wealthy figures who promise order, superiority, and protection.

This argument is applied most directly to Donald Trump. The book insists that a multibillionaire born into money, privilege, nepotism, and cronyism cannot plausibly be treated as an outsider to the elite. It presents the election as a repudiation of that obvious fact: supporters could denounce political or cultural elites while exempting the obscenely rich elite to which Trump belonged. The resulting contradiction is described as a form of doublethink, in which a candidate is celebrated as an enemy of the elite precisely because his supporters distinguish between the economic elite they admire and the liberal political, media, or cultural elites they resent.

George Carlin's critique supplies the election's central counterpoint. Carlin argued that America was governed by owners who relied on the ignorance and passivity of ordinary voters. The book endorses that analysis and asks how people who profess admiration for Carlin could support Trump, one of the most prominent members of the Ownership Class. The election therefore becomes a test of whether anti-elite language refers to economic power itself or merely to rival elites that a particular constituency dislikes.

Participants, Motives, and Political Frames

The book presents the election as the product of a manufactured conflict between two supposed elites. Donald Trump is described as belonging simultaneously to the overarching economic elite and to the conservative political and media elite, while presenting himself as the enemy of liberal institutions. In this framework, the apparent contest between conservative and liberal elites functions as divide and rule: competing factions stage a public conflict that obscures their shared commitment to predatory capitalism and the preservation of elite power.

The stated appeal of Trump is connected to the abandonment of ordinary people by established economic and political elites. Bernie Sanders is cited as observing that Trump gained support from people who felt forgotten by those elites. The book accepts the sense of abandonment but rejects the conclusion that Trump represented the abandoned. Instead, it argues that the election converted legitimate economic discontent into loyalty to a wealthy ruler whose class position aligned him with the people who had benefited from the existing order.

Resentment is identified as the emotional force behind the vote. The book describes Trump voters as resentful of cultural elites associated with government, universities, and the coasts, but argues that their resentment was directed downward rather than upward. In its account, white conservative voters could tolerate rule by a rich elite so long as that elite promised to preserve their relative superiority over Black and Hispanic Americans. Trump’s rhetoric about restricting immigrants, building a wall, supporting the police, and making America great again is interpreted as a set of dog whistles promising a restoration of racial hierarchy rather than an overthrow of plutocracy.

This interpretation distinguishes the election from a genuine revolt against the masters. The book argues that conservative resentment resembles a slave revolt aimed at other slaves: the objective is not to abolish hierarchy but to secure a higher position within it. Trump’s supporters are therefore portrayed as admiring the elite and longing for its recognition, leadership, and protection. Their language of freedom is treated as incompatible with their choice of a plutocratic billionaire as their leader.

What the Election Represents

The election is presented as the first stage of an experiment by the Old World Order. According to the book, the conventional political class had served as a buffer between the dynastic elite and the public, allowing politicians to absorb blame while the underlying economic order continued. Donald Trump differed from Hillary Clinton in the book's analysis because Trump was treated as an actual member of the Old World Order rather than merely a political figure serving it. His victory therefore removed or weakened the customary buffer and brought the economic elite more openly into the center of political power.

The book connects this development to the decline of confidence in democracy. Barack Obama, identified as the first Black president, was expected to restore political stability and democratic credibility but failed to do so in the author's assessment. Hillary Clinton is characterized as a continuation of Obama rather than a new solution. Trump then became the populist experiment: a high-risk attempt to exploit public anger at a moment when the established democratic framework was losing credibility.

The election is consequently interpreted as a possible transition from implicit plutocracy to explicit plutocracy. America is described as already functioning in practice as a system dominated by wealth, while many Americans are said to distrust government and the State more than the marketplace and capitalist billionaires. On that logic, the electorate could be induced to surrender still greater authority to the Ownership Class, with Trump serving as its visible representative in the White House. The book presents this prospect as the political consequence of allowing economic power to masquerade as popular rebellion.

The election is also described as a victory that unexpectedly opened an opportunity for the radical left, identified in the book with Jacobinism, positive liberty, meritocracy, and social capitalism. Trump’s plutocratic turn could make the underlying class structure more visible and place a more forceful challenge to it on the political agenda. Yet the book leaves the possibility unresolved, asking whether the left possesses the will to power and the intelligence required to transform the crisis into systemic change.

Consequences and Accountability

The book assigns direct responsibility for Trump’s subsequent actions to the voters who elected him. Once a voter has chosen him, the book argues, Trump becomes that voter’s representative and moral responsibility cannot be discarded merely because he fails to fulfill campaign promises. The argument intensifies when Trump orders military action: when he bombs Syria or authorizes the use of the mother of all bombs, the electorate is said to bear responsibility because those acts are carried out in the name of the people who granted him power.

This language turns the election from a procedural act into a moral act of authorship. Voters are described as having created their own political monster, with no right to claim that they were deceived after being warned about Trump’s character and promises. The book calls the voters fully accountable and treats their judgment as the central failure, rather than presenting the consequences as belonging only to the politician.

The early aftermath is marked by disillusionment. The book says that, within the first 100 days, even some of Trump’s far-right supporters had begun turning against him. It presents their disappointment as the predictable result of believing promises that were internally irrational and therefore unlikely to be delivered. Nevertheless, the fact that more than sixty million Americans supported Trump is treated as far more serious than a failed political prediction. The election is not merely a comic error or an episode of gullibility; it is depicted as a mass decision whose consequences extend to war, authoritarian power, and the public reputation of the United States.

Historical and Ideological Significance

The book casts the election as the return of a historical formation rather than an isolated campaign victory. It calls the Trump insurgency The Confederacy: The Sequel, associating it with racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy, and compares it to the realization of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. This analogy is used to describe a politics in which wealth claims sovereignty and the subordinated population is encouraged to defend the hierarchy that constrains it.

The same historical frame links the election to the struggle over slavery and capitalism. The book argues that the American Civil War concerned the limits of acceptable capitalist behavior and that contemporary right-wing politics continues to resist state interference with the power of capital. It therefore treats Trump’s victory as part of a longer conflict over whether wealth may convert other human beings into economic instruments and whether the State may intervene to prevent that conversion.

The book also invokes the film They Live as a political allegory. John Carpenter’s film is described as depicting a hidden elite whose signals create false consciousness, conceal the elite’s true nature, and keep the working class near enslavement. The book emphasizes Carpenter’s stated opposition to interpreting the aliens as Jews or the Illuminati, instead presenting them as yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan and as symbols of unrestrained capitalism. The election is read through the same image: popular perception is shaped so that people fail to recognize the class power standing openly before them.

Ultimately, the election’s decisive significance lies in its exposure of a political system in which anti-elite rhetoric can strengthen the elite itself. Donald Trump did not stand outside the Ownership Class; he made its authority more theatrical, personal, and openly populist. The voters’ resentment did not abolish hierarchy, and their appeal to freedom did not prevent submission to a billionaire ruler. In the book’s final judgment, the election revealed how easily a society can be persuaded to call the elevation of plutocratic power a revolt against plutocracy.