Donald Trump's election as U.S. president

Donald Trump's election as U.S. president is portrayed as a political rupture whose apparent anti-elite promise concealed the elevation of a billionaire plutocrat. In the book's argument, the election turns a claim of popular rebellion into a test of collective responsibility: by giving Donald Trump power, more than sixty million Americans made his subsequent actions their own and could not disown the consequences.

Causes and Political Framing

The election is framed against the conflict between the 1 percent and the 99 percent. The book identifies Donald Trump as a leading member of the Ownership Class, a man who estimated his fortune at more than ten billion dollars, refused to disclose his tax affairs to the people over whom he would preside, and possessed a vast property portfolio. His victory therefore appears, in this interpretation, not as a blow against the elite but as the elite's successful return to the White House through popular identification with one of its richest representatives.

This contradiction is sharpened by the book's treatment of inheritance and class formation. It argues that a 100 percent inheritance tax would have prevented the reproduction of a rich dynastic elite, and cites the claim that Trump inherited around $300 million from his father. It also notes the account that he began with $40 million in 1974, when he became president of his father's real-estate company. These details undercut the image of a self-made insurgent and recast the election as the political triumph of inherited wealth presented as populist authenticity.

The campaign's larger ideological setting is described through an aggressive historical analogy: the Trump insurgency is called “The Confederacy: The Sequel,” a return to far-right conservative rule based on racism, white supremacy, and ultra-plutocracy. The comparison links the election to the book's broader account of capitalism, class power, and the American Civil War, though it functions primarily as the author's polemical framework rather than as a demonstrated historical equivalence.

The Election as an Ownership-Class Victory

The book argues that supporters who claimed to oppose the Washington, D.C. and Wall Street elites nevertheless chose a figure deeply embedded in the same social order. Rather than selecting an ordinary person with comparable income and background, they placed one of the 1 percent in the White House and treated that act as revolutionary. The resulting paradox is central to the event's meaning: voters imagined themselves resisting elite power while, in the author's view, advancing the agenda of the Ownership Class.

That argument is connected to a longer history of class collaboration. The book describes the original form of predatory capitalism as a system in which workers broadly opposed the Ownership Class, then argues that the creation of a middle class supplied the elite with managers, agents, gatekeepers, and enforcers drawn from below. In this account, support for the Republican Party becomes evidence of class betrayal rather than an expression of working-class independence. Trump's election is consequently interpreted as the culmination of a political structure in which subordinate groups defend the interests of the people above them.

The book also relocates the meaning of the “globalist agenda.” Against the idea that globalization represents a left-wing conspiracy against American freedom, it defines the agenda as the worldwide extension of right-wing, predatory free-market capitalism, allowing banks and corporations to govern without direct election or accountability. Donald Trump's election matters within this frame because it places a wealthy representative of that order at the center of national political authority while preserving the language of rebellion.

Promises, Expectation, and Disillusionment

The election created an expectation that Donald Trump would deliver his campaign promises, but the book treats those promises as so extreme that their fulfillment was never plausible without a wider collapse of political judgment. The voters' belief in the promises is presented as a second error layered upon the first: they not only elected Trump, but trusted assurances the text regards as inherently impossible.

After the first 100 days of Trump's presidency, the book says that even some of his far-right supporters had begun to turn against him. This reversal exposes the gap between electoral fantasy and governmental consequence. Yet the author's mockery of the disappointed supporters does not release them from responsibility. Their disillusionment is treated as proof of failed judgment, not as grounds for moral or political absolution.

Accountability and Consequences

The election is defined most forcefully as an act of authorization. Once voters chose Donald Trump, the book argues, they could not turn their backs on him by claiming that he had failed to meet their hopes. He was “YOUR GUY,” and every act performed under his authority became an act carried out in the voters' name. The text therefore converts electoral support into continuing moral liability: when Trump bombs Syria, the voters are said to have done so because they gave him the power to act.

This logic extends beyond criticism of a single policy. The book declares that voters are 100 percent accountable for Trump and his actions, describing him as their creation, their guy, and their monster, and comparing them to Dr. Frankenstein. The election thus changes the status of supporters from spectators to implicated agents. They cannot wash their hands of decisions made after election day because the officeholder's authority originated in their ballot.

The consequences are described in deliberately stark terms, including responsibility for the “mother of all bombs” and for American military action. The event's moral structure is therefore retrospective as well as prospective: the ballot is treated as the moment at which responsibility was accepted, while later violence supplies the proof of what that responsibility entails.

Historical and Cultural Significance

The election is also interpreted through the book's account of the Confederacy, slavery, and unrestrained capitalism. It presents contemporary right-wing politics as a mental continuation of the Confederacy and calls for a new Abraham Lincoln to end that ideology rather than merely its former physical state. In this framework, the election is a renewal of a social order in which capital determines freedom and workers are reduced to dependent labor.

A parallel cultural interpretation appears through John Carpenter's They Live. The film's hidden signal, false consciousness, and elite domination are used to illuminate the election as a moment when propaganda and political identity obscured the social position of the candidate. Carpenter's stated interpretation of the aliens as yuppie followers of Ronald Reagan, rather than the targets proposed by right-wing conspiracy theorists, supports the book's claim that the election should be read as a victory for wealthy conservative capitalism rather than a revolt against it.

The event therefore carries two opposed meanings. For its supporters, it was imagined as a populist overthrow of the elite; in the book's interpretation, it was the mechanism by which elite power secured popular consent. Its final significance lies in the collapse of the distinction between choosing a ruler and accepting the ruler's acts: the election made Donald Trump the voters' representative, and made his presidency their political and moral responsibility.