Steve Bannon is out and Elon Musk is in. A man who once had an office and a whiteboard in the White House now has a podcast. It’s not nothing, but it’s not an extra-governmental agency that has access to the backend systems that make America run and hum. Banon was once the darling of right-wing media and the world’s preeminent Trump whisperer. Now he’s “Sloppy Steve,” Musk is sitting next to Trump during interviews, and Bannon says he’s ready for war.
And while Bannon whines, Musk is opening the door to the Big Tech takeover of the United States.
The Department of Government Efficiency appears to have access to private taxpayer data. Tom Krause, a Musk ally, will be taking over as the Fiscal Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department. He’ll keep his job as the CEO of a software company while he does it. DOGE has gutted teams that were investing in Musk’s various companies. Musk himself has complained about government overspending while his companies receive billions of dollars in contracts.
It’s safe to say that a tech bro laughing it up next to Trump and looting America for all its worth is not the populist future Bannon imagined when he hooked his wagon to Trump’s star in 2016.
We’ve known for a while that Bannon and Musk aren’t friends. But the issue got more attention this week after the 71-year-old political operative gave an interview in UnHerd where he made it clear just how much he hates the world’s richest man. “Musk is a parasitic illegal immigrant. He wants to impose his freak experiments and play-act as God without any respect for the country’s history, values, or traditions,” Bannon said.
Bannon has no one to blame but himself. During Trump’s initial run for high office, he set himself up in the media as the éminence grise, the dark power behind the throne. The narrative went that he utilized Big Tech’s platforms to harness populist forces brewing just under the surface of the American electorate.
One popular story is that Bannon recognized the political power of tech-addicted young men early on. Bannon’s version of the story is that he figured this out while running a World of Warcraft gold farm. “You can activate that army,” he said of the gamers. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then you get turned onto politics and Trump.”
And Bannon activated that army. Now he’s lost control of it. It’s moved past him. Another thing those angry young men loved was Elon Musk. The people who control the platforms filled with people Bannon helped activate—the Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world—were paying attention. And they have direct control over the incentive structures of those platforms, something Bannon does not have and will never have.
Bannon versus Musk represents a supposed broader rift in the Trump movement. It’s heated enough that JD Vance commented on it in a post on X. “I think this civil war is overstated (though yes there are some real divergences between the populists and the techies),” the Vice President said.
Avowed racist scumbag influencer Nick Fuentes has had wavering loyalty to Trump over the past year. The preeminence of Musk and his cronies isn’t helping. “The same conspiracy theorists warning about transhumanism, big tech, mRNA vaccines, and surveillance for the past decade are now cheerleading the Palantir occupied government led by Elon Musk,” Fuentes said in a post on X. “Liberals were right about populism.”
But these are just posts. Vance and Fuentes and Bannon are all influencers. That’s how politics works now. Bannon saw Trump as a vehicle for his populist ideas. But those ideas never mattered to Trump, not really. The only thing that matters to Trump is Trump. Trump is the political movement. It lives and dies with him.
Trumpism is a cult. There is nothing the President himself could do that would turn his supporters away from him. A recent Pew poll revealed that most people in the country don’t support giving the executive branch more power.
But self-identified conservatives and Republicans say something else. “Republicans who say they ‘strongly’ identify with the GOP are particularly likely to say the nation’s problems could be more effectively addressed by giving Trump more power: 78% say this,” Pew said.
Trumpism is something new, a movement of the present moment we don’t have adequate language to describe. I’ve long thought Trump was an out-and-out fascist. He checks the boxes. But he’s not a Nazi or a Stalinist or a Mussolini-type, he’s something else. We’re in something new now. It’s a strange convergence of historical trends, technology, and dying boomer personalities. It’s what Garbage Day writer Ryan Broderick has called “The Age of Influentialism.”
“Like all influencers, he’s now landed on a much more direct relationship with his followers,” Broderick wrote. “He signs an executive order and even if it’s blocked by courts — and many of them are, thankfully — he can still claim it as a win. And the other members of Trump’s regime are operating the same way. If Trump is MrBeast, he’s turning our government into Lunchly. A source inside the Republican party, in a recent Semafor piece, described the current Defense Department as, ‘30 blogging, podcasting, isolationist ideologues.’ As we speak, the Trump administration is trying to negotiate the release of Andrew and Tristan Tate. It’s influencers all the way down.”
As above, so below. Musk and Bannon are influencers with an audience of one: Donald Trump. Musk is embracing politics with all the ignorance and fervor of a 2008 college Freshman who just learned about the Federal Reserve and won’t shut the fuck up about Ron Paul. Bannon is an old ideologue who sees the grand sweep of populist energy moving through Trump.
Trump sees himself as a King. After he helped destroy congestion pricing in NYC he crowed about it in a post on Truth Social: “LONG LIVE THE KING!.”
In case there was any confusion about the message, Taylor Budowich—White House Deputy Chief of Staff and Cabinet Secretary—followed this up with an AI-generated image of Trump in a crown. The official X account for the White House followed suit.
— Taylor Budowich (@Taylor47) February 19, 2025
Bannon and Musk are both dancing at the court of the mad king. They helped birth this thing, but they aren’t in control of it. We all get to watch while it happens. Some of us will become influencers ourselves. Most of us will just be influenced.
