Our bespoke piñata of the day is the Susie Wiles piece in Vanity Fair (they must be excited to move on from Olivia …) We’re seeing the standard incantations of “fake news” from none other than Wiles herself. Trump’s cabinet secretaries have all lined up to post tweets repeating the claim, intoning the Trump-Wiles catechism as though they’d just emerged from a fast-forward struggle session with a pack of feral MAGA toughs. I’ve started making my way through the morselly excerpts, as perhaps you have or are too. What struck me here was perhaps not even so much the quotes as the venue.
Few American publications are more at the heart of the cosmopolitan world of America than Vanity Fair. That is not liberal. Small-c cosmopolitan is different but overlapping. But it is perhaps even more than “liberal” what MAGA is talking about when it denounces the “coastal elite.” Certainly they’re talking more about that than, like, People for the American Way or Americans for Democratic Action or Heather Cox Richardson. Susie Wiles is no fool. And while she may — as in a very low de minimis chance — have gotten a touch injudicious in a few quotes she certainly knew with perfect clarity what Vanity Fair is.
Today, I want to share some additional thoughts with you on this ranging topic of tech lords and predators, the conquistadors and pirates in our midst. It’s a point that is perhaps the most visible part of the current moment, but because of that, paradoxically, hardest to see clearly. It’s been more than a century since the men at the highest pinnacles of the American economy so visibly and directly intervened in the country’s politics. An element of that is the highly personalist nature of the big tech monopolies. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t just a CEO or plurality owner. He is Facebook. He’s the founder, the driving mind since the beginning. I believe that voting rights are structured in such a way at Meta that in terms of control as opposed to equity stakes he is in total control. Meta cannot be taken away from him. Whether or not voting rights are precisely the same, a similar story prevails at Amazon, Google, certainly X and all of Musk’s companies. We haven’t seen anything like that since the Gilded Age and the Robber Barons, when big names like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan and Rockefeller similarly owned, drove and personified the great corporate behemoths and monopolies of the day.
For many decades, certainly since the Second World War, even the more politically- and ideologically-minded corporations kept their political spending and their exertions in the background. Perhaps they gave most of their money to Republicans but they’d give to Democrats too just to keep them mostly on side.
What we began to see in the late Biden administration and then to an almost mind-boggling degree through 2025 is not just the big tech titans cozying up to Trump and doing so visibly, but making themselves what we might call main characters in the American Political Cinematic Universe. There’s really nothing like it in our history. I know many friends who are into MMA and the UFC. My sons are into it. Not my thing. But great if it’s yours. But if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you take ringside seats at a UFC match with Trump friend and UFC CEO Dana White, you’re sending a very clear and specific message and you’re sending it far outside the channels where most traditional political messaging takes place. Even more if you put White on your board. And the same applies to going on Joe Rogan’s show and talking about a rights movement for “high testosterone males.” Yes, Zuckerberg got into MMA before the so-called “vibe shift.” But not in this politics-inflected way. We’ve seen countless examples of this in so many different contexts, starting with that unforgettable inauguration image where the seats of greatest distinction were reserved for the centi-billionaire tech titans. Government of, by and for them.
I’m not usually one for rubber-necking a celebrity death or commenting on it here. I feel I need to say something about Rob Reiner. It’s hard for me to think about someone in public life whose contributions were so weighted in the direction of humor and joy and whose final fate was so much one of horror and heartbreak. When I put together the pieces of that collision last night I couldn’t quite process it.
TPM has spent the past two months documenting the front lines of mass deportation in New York City. In courthouses, in churches, outside community gatherings and through an extensive digital network, we started to get a feel for and gain access to what we’re calling the “Undocumented Underground“: a volunteer army helping immigrants to stay in the country, even in the face of the Trump administration’s onslaught and some of its uniquely New York features, such as violent arrests in the halls of immigration court.
We published our first two installments in the series last week. The third — on legal clinics for immigrants facing deportation — is up this morning. Lou, a self-described “ex-finance guy” who is now “deeply involved” with one of these organizations says he started volunteering because of the hardships faced by migrants he’s met.
“They literally have nothing,” Lou tells reporter Hunter Walker. “All they have is their character and their story.”
Read Hunter’s latest here, and keep an eye out for several more installments this week.
I got a fascinating array of responses to my Tuesday post about the 21st century nabobs, striding over politics and society with their unheard of wealth and indifference to the rules we once imagined bound us. One of the big questions was, What happened to the original nabobs? Were they brought to heel? And several of you asked, Okay, so what are we going to do about this? I wanted to discuss these and other topics.
A lot has been flying around today in some of the key mass deportation/rule of law cases, but I want to tee up for you another major clash that is brewing:
