Trump's Non-Reciprocal Transactionalism: Favors Flow Only to Supplicants Who Disclaim Entitlement
America’s plutocrat class talks, in private, about “hedging” and “exit”. But, so far, no people have and not much money has moved. Instead, they seem to have internalized three rules: (a) never lead resistance, (b) avoid notice whenever possible, © flatter and promise when noticed, and (d) never claim reciprocity—approach as supplicants, not partners. Elon Musk’s humiliation clarifies the regime’s logic: hierarchy enforced by arbitrary dominance, not market exchange. What some call “transactional” is deeply asymmetric—favors only for those who deny they expect them. As norms erode, formal fixes are implausible; culture can’t be restored by statute. The quiet strategy of invisibility and ritual flattery isn’t neutral—each accommodation helps entrench a patronage-autocracy where proximity to the sovereign outranks institutions…
For nine years now—ever since Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone first got in bed with Donald Trumo—I have been using a more-or-less standard line: that American plutocrats regard kleptocrats like Donald Trump as their friends, while kleptocrats ultimately regard plutocrats as their prey. It sometimes gets a laugh. It sometimes does not.
Mike Brock details how this is going:
Mike Brock: Elon Musk Discovers What Hierarchy Actually Means <https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/elon-musk-discovers-what-hierarchy>: ‘The neo-reactionary dream meets the law of the strong….. Trump just stripped SpaceX of a government contract and handed it to Jeff Bezos. Musk’s response? Rage-tweeting at Trump officials, including the immortal question “why are you gay”—the rhetorical sophistication we’ve come to expect…. The oligarchs… misunderstood…. They thought they were buying hierarchy with themselves at the top…. [But] authoritarian hierarchy… requires constant demonstration of dominance through arbitrary humiliation…. There are no stable positions. No guaranteed seats at the table. No amount of money that exempts you from being the example. Musk thought he’d bought partnership. He bought the privilege of being degraded publicly. This is what Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and the entire Silicon Valley neo-reactionary apparatus never quite explained to their fellow travelers…. Power in authoritarian systems isn’t demonstrated through competent governance or policy achievement. It’s demonstrated through the arbitrary exercise of dominance over those who thought themselves powerful….
[Musk] is learning what Roy Cohn learned: You’re useful until you’re not. And when you’re not, the humiliation is public, arbitrary, and designed to demonstrate to everyone else what happens when you forget your place.The contract going to Bezos isn’t about SpaceX’s technical capabilities or cost-effectiveness or any rational criterion. That’s the point. It’s about Trump demonstrating he can take from Musk and give to his rival for no reason except to show he can…. Welcome to the world you built, Elon. How’s it feel?…
Step back:
In the circles in which I move, I have noted some talk from America’s lower-upper class about guarding their safety by getting foreign passports or moving abroad, and from the truly wealthy about moving their money out of the United States. You hear nervous speculation about capital flight, about diversification strategies, about the need to hedge against American political instability. Yet when you look at actual money flows or on pressure on the exchange rate, the picture tells a different story: very little is actually happening. Perhaps the decline in the dollar is a sign. Perhaps. But I do have a strong hunch right now that there is a gap between rhetoric and action.
Perhaps this reveals something important about how power is actually working here and now in Trump’s Second-Term America.