Moscow is invoked not as a fully depicted city but as the destination in a deliberately humiliating image aimed at Donald Trump’s supporters. Its significance lies in the way the book uses the name to dramatize what it presents as their submission to a billionaire elite while they imagine themselves to be resisting one.

The Moscow Image

Moscow appears in a coarse taunt directed at people who, in the book’s view, have worshiped Donald Trump and allowed him to exploit them. The image places Trump’s supporters in Moscow with him, urinating on the same bed previously slept in by Barack Obama. The point is not geographical description. Moscow is used as a charged political symbol: a place associated, within the passage, with Trump’s alleged alignment with Russia and with the degradation of supporters who defend him despite his elite status.

The image’s force comes from its mixture of political accusation and bodily disgust. The bed, urine, and excrement surrounding the passage turn an argument about allegiance into a scene of contamination. Moscow therefore serves as an imagined endpoint of political devotion: the supporters are portrayed as willing to follow Trump into humiliation, even while claiming that he represents their interests.

Moscow and the Ownership Class

The book’s larger argument is that the world is ruled by the 1 percent, described as the Ownership Class, and that elite power is maintained by confusing the 99 percent and preventing them from uniting. In this framework, Donald Trump is not an outsider confronting the elite. He is described as a senior member of the economic elite and a billionaire plutocrat whose anti-elite posture disguises his membership in the class he supposedly opposes.

Moscow belongs to this argument because the insult collapses the distinction between Trump’s rhetoric and the material position the book assigns him. His supporters are said to imagine that he fights the political elite while accepting the rule of an obscenely rich economic elite. The city becomes part of a larger exposure of that contradiction: the followers believe they are rebelling, but the book presents their loyalty as service to the Ownership Class.

Rival Elites and Manufactured Conflict

The book repeatedly argues that there is only one fundamental elite, even though political life presents a liberal elite and a conservative elite as opposing camps. Donald Trump is described as belonging both to the overarching 1 percent and to the conservative political and media elite. His conflict with liberal political and media institutions is consequently treated as a manufactured or pseudo-conflict rather than a revolt against elite power itself.

Within that structure, Moscow intensifies the charge of deception. The image of Trump’s followers accompanying him there and defiling the bed associated with Barack Obama turns partisan hostility into evidence of political manipulation. The passage suggests that supporters have been trained to confuse opposition between factions with opposition to the ruling class. Moscow is thus a compact symbol of the book’s claim that divided loyalties and rival elite identities conceal a shared class interest.

Relation to the Book’s Historical and Political Allegories

Moscow is one element in a text that explains contemporary politics through aggressive historical and ideological comparisons. The Trump insurgency is presented as a return of far-right conservative rule, compared to a sequel to the Confederacy and linked to racism, white supremacy, and plutocracy. Elsewhere, the book argues that conservatives do not oppose the elite but instead resent equality with people placed below them in racial and social hierarchies.

The city does not receive the sustained historical treatment given to the Confederacy or to Abraham Lincoln’s struggle over slavery. Its role is narrower and more rhetorical. By placing Moscow inside the same humiliating image as Trump, Obama, and his supporters, the book turns a location into a shorthand for the alleged moral and political degradation of right-wing populism. The result is less a claim about Moscow itself than an emblem of the book’s larger accusation: a movement that speaks in the language of rebellion may still defend plutocratic power.

Narrative and Thematic Function

Moscow’s appearance is brief, but its recurrence in the book’s political vocabulary is supported by the passage’s wider concern with propaganda, false consciousness, and the manipulation of ordinary people by elites. The book describes Trump supporters as people who have been persuaded that a member of the 1 percent stands outside the elite. The Moscow image gives that abstract argument a memorable, obscene form.

The location therefore functions as a rhetorical stage rather than an inhabited setting. It concentrates themes of submission, betrayal, partisan illusion, and elite domination into a single imagined scene. The book’s later expectation that placing a senior member of the 1 percent in the White House will expose the consequences of right-wing rule gives the image an additional political logic: once the supposed rebel is revealed as an elite actor, the followers’ loyalty can no longer be represented as resistance to elite power.