The New Cro-Magnon Era, What American Oligarchs Have Lost, and Trump's Views on Opera

We’re only three weeks into the Ugly American era and it’s already unbearable. I am not talking about the crashing of falling political masonry (see below), but the whole smelly rodeo of performative masculinity.

I am so over not just the loudmouth tweets, lame braggadocio, and hurled-down edicts from Trump and Elon Musk (no, I don’t think productivity requires sleeping in the office alongside the strewn underpants of over-caffeinated 20-year-old engineers), but even the quotes surfacing from a quarter as reliably dull as the Office of Management and Budget. Its newly confirmed director Russell Vought, a dour, dome-headed Heritage Foundation plant who was a key author of Project 25, once told a think tank gathering, “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work…We want to put them in trauma.” Bring it, Rambo.

Unfortunately, he is. Within hours of being confirmed, Vought has been firing off directives that will slow the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which he called a “woke & weaponized agency”) to a standstill. And he’s dragging religious fervor into it to boot, telling MAGA megaphone Tucker Carlson, “We're here because God has given us a particular purpose for a particular time.”

The prevailing uncouth, club-wielding style is now infecting the other side. The country’s most irritating political nepo baby Jack Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s studiedly scruffy 32-year-old son (briefly useful for slagging off his uncle RFK Jr.) , no doubt thought he was striking a blow for the resistance when he tweeted, “Thank you Elon!! For letting China eat out your a-- while you p--s on the constitution. Spread for me.” Really, Jack, that’s what you’ve got? The grandson of a president famed for his wit and elegance, revered for his clarion call “ask what you can do for your country”? Maybe someone in his family answered this question for him, because he deleted his social media accounts over the weekend.

Jack Schlossberg

The new loutishness is excitedly written up by culture critics as the booming manosphere. But the sorry truth is that every woman knows there is nothing new about this knuckle-trailing Cro-Magnon club. Sometimes they wear Brioni suits and sometimes they wear baseball caps, but they have always been running the show.

Proud Boy

The tune-out strategy isn’t working, people. The warp speed of Trump’s demolition gang exceeds every political prediction of what would happen next. None expected that Musk would out-crazy Trump and POTUS would turn into the ultimate Proud Boy who stands back and stands by.

Credit: Reuters

The imperial emperor of chaos has acquired a demon enabler. Or is it the other way round? The demon has met his indulgent daddy. In his interview with Fox’s Bret Baier over the weekend, Trump reinforced his admiration and trust of Elon, who, despite his multiple conflicts of interest, he rendered as "not gaining anything" in his new role. "I wonder how [Musk] can devote the time to it," Mr. Trump marveled. "He's so into it." That’s the problem. Detail has always bored Trump. Musk, by figuring out how to penetrate the federal payment systems, swiftly found the pressure point in the massive ossified bureaucracy. Without Musk, Trump would lack the expertise or the attention span to oversee the intimate dismantling of the federal government.

And yet there could be fissures down the line, amplified by the inevitable resentment Trump will start to feel for Musk stealing the limelight. Their goals may be temporarily in sync but their worldviews could not be more different. Trump retains nostalgic 20th-century visions of what a great president looks like. His proudest photo op was at Buckingham Palace with the Queen. He says he wants to be remembered as a “peacemaker.” He dreams of winning the Nobel Prize. He looks in the mirror and sees his face carved into Mount Rushmore. Musk would happily blow up Mount Rushmore. He probably thinks Nobel laureates are a bunch of “pedos.” His mindset and aspirations are far from America’s historic past or Trump’s delusional future. Instead, he’s building a new world order to rule over from his base camp on Mars.

Billionaire Blunder

As the signage of a mighty foreign aid agency was stripped from its DC headquarters like a closing Broadway musical, a kind of numbness descended. “What leverage do we have?” Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, practically howled on Capitol Hill last Friday. “They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency; it's their government.” If Trump's dominance has cast a paralyzing spell on Democrats, no one seems more recumbent than the titans of American business.

In the naïve days of the early 2000s, NYT columnist Tom Friedman preached that you could not have a thriving free market economy without civil liberties, but China’s rise proved that is not true. Trump’s venal velocity has achieved a paradox with the moneyed elites. He has both liberated them and shut them down. As one European money manager marveled to me, “By prostrating himself to Trump, Jeff Bezos no longer has fuck-everyone money.” The demigods of Silicon Valley and Wall Street have suddenly been exposed as small and needy, tethered to Trump by their fear of regulation, tax audits, anti-trust suits, merger denials, and social media spankings from the White House. How fitting that one of Pam Bondi’s first acts as Attorney General was to kill off Task Force KleptoCapture, set up in 2022 to seize the megayachts and ill-gotten gains of Russian oligarchs.

Trump is following the Putin playbook for harnessing America’s wealthiest men by extorting obeisance and rewarding them with privileges. According to exiled Russian author and Substack Putinologist Mikhail Zygar, there is in Russia growing fascination with and reverence for Musk, whom Putin has called “a man who cannot be stopped.”

“A businessman wielding state-level power without holding any official position perfectly reflects the aspirations of Russian big business in the 1990s, when problems were solved through threats, bullying, and brute force. No one back then could have imagined that something similar would unfold in the West,” Zygar writes. He likens Meta chairman Mark Zuckerberg to “a classic Russian bureaucrat, ready to be loyal to anyone in power.” The difference is that Russia, hollowed out in the Yeltsin era, had no institutions left that could protect democracy, whereas we do, at least until round two when Trump intimidates or fires every defiant federal judge.

The late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky

Zygar points to the lesson of Russia’s once all-powerful media owner Boris Berezovsky, who could be seen in the photo behind Putin when he was elected president. Within three months of throwing his weight around, Berezovsky was stripped of his fortune and fled to London where, thirteen years later, after ignominiously losing a $3 billion lawsuit against Putin ally Roman Abramovich, he hanged himself in a bathroom. Once he, too, was a man who could not be stopped.

America’s oligarchs can expect their billions to accrete under Trump, but history suggests their peace of mind will not.

Stage Fright

One place you think might be safe from Trump’s revenge tour is the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But no, Trump has just installed himself as chairman of the board and his ally Richard Grenell as interim executive director. On Monday, the entire board was scrubbed from its website. Trump, who settles every score in good time, has waited for this payback moment since 2017, when Kennedy Center honorees Norman Lear and Lionel Richie said they’d skip the ceremony if Trump attended. Instead, Trump bowed out, adding this public slight to his list of grievances against so-called cultural elites. (Already on that list: Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones, Celine Dion, and every other musician who asked Trump to pull the plug on their music at his campaign events.)

Since Trump observes no limits on his influence, we can expect a new season of interesting programming for his “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” with perhaps Mel Gibson and Kid Rock as 2025 Kennedy Center honorees. One thing is certain, there will be no reprise of Wagner’s Ring cycle. The first time I met Trump, at a 1987 dinner hosted by Ann Getty, he complained to me about Ivana dragging him to the opening of the Metropolitan Opera the night before. “Ring cycle. Plácido Domingo. Five hours. Dinner started at 12. Beat that. I said to Ivana, ‘What, are you crazy?’ Never again.”

Trump also famously hates overlong movies, a feeling I share, which is why I will probably never see The Brutalist. In 2016, the Sunday Times reporter who interviewed Trump on his Boeing 727 recounted how Trump watched Jean-Claude Van Damme’s 92-minute film Bloodsport but had his then 13-year-old son Eric fast-forward through all the boring bits, like exposition and dialogue, until he was left with a relentless 45-minute supercut of “broken bones and knuckle sandwiches.”

Trump’s theatrical tastes are less well known, but perhaps he will think it's time the Miss America pageant finally came to the Kennedy Center. Or how about his old favorite extravaganza, Miss Universe—only with a new rule: Miss USA always wins.