The Luigi Mangione Democrats

The Bad Trump Ending, part 1

This article is part of an ongoing series of articles examining the Second Trump Administration and its long-term consequences, for both America and the world.

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The Democratic base did not have particularly warm feelings towards Biden, but in the years to come will probably find themselves reposting the Eisenhowerian warning in his presidential farewell address: that the dependence of the Republican Party on ‘Big Tech’ threatened to turn American democracy into an ‘oligarchy.’ During his presidency and re-election campaign, Biden’s warnings of the danger posed to American democracy by the MAGA Republicans simply fell flat. Ordinary voters were more worried about inflation, crime, and healthcare, among other bread-and-butter issues. Though he didn’t have the answers voters demanded in 2024, future historians may claim that he was simply four years too early.

Trump’s winning message has always been simple: the protection and restoration of the living standards of the ‘core’ American nation, ultimately rebalancing the international system against the transnational elites and foreign countries milking the American cash cow. Despite the best efforts of ‘Populist, Inc.’, the anti-elitist messaging of the Trump campaign never took any serious anti-corporate turn; instead, suggestions of the ‘corrupt’ or ‘rigged’ nature of the American political and economic system were usually directed against the entrenched elites of the ‘Deep State’, who were throttling America’s natural dynamism and working to stop Trump, just so they could protect themselves.

Immigration reform, protectionism, low taxes, and deregulation at home are all very popular, and led to moderate improvements in living standards in Trump’s first term. The combination of this policy platform with middle-class demagoguery rewarded him with a strong mandate in both 2016 and 2024. Unlike most other attempts to revise the international system, Trump’s promise was not predicated upon any kind of temporary sacrifice or disruption; rather, America, now liberated from the stupidity of the elites and cut loose from foreign and domestic deadweight, would more-or-less immediately ‘start winning again, start winning like never before’, thanks to the technocratic excellence of the administration.

The first part of this series does not attempt to explore the numerous possible outcomes of the Second Trump Administration’s efforts to reset trade and foreign policy. Instead, we will begin by speculating on the electoral and cultural politics downstream of MAGA’s shifting coalition and slowing momentum. While electorates tend to extend a period of grace, failing to deliver on Trump’s clear mandate — whether via a recession or a prolonged period of economic turbulence downstream of his flagship economic policies — threatens the long-term prospects for the reconstituted right-wing coalition in America, and possibly abroad also if the nascent cultural thaw of the ‘Vibe Shift’ is discredited before it can be fully felt.

The Second Trump Administration began its term poised for a coup d’état aimed at resetting the executive branch’s relationship with the federal bureaucracy via DOGE, and to transform immigration policy with a publicised live deportation count (which would presumably tick up to the promised numbers). It has since become bogged down with cheap ‘foreign policy wins’ that impress slop accounts on X alone. Of course, it is almost certainly true that the electorate does not care about alienating America’s European partners. However, ‘owning the europoors’ does not in itself accomplish anything for those critical people who stand at the margins of Trump’s new right-wing coalition of voters. On the legislative front, the administration only has about two years to pass a comprehensive immigration bill. This, however, does not appear to be coming any time soon. Despite a few well-publicised raids on some of the least sympathetic illegal immigrants in the country, the deportation ticker has now been taken down. Make of that what you will.

The prominence of Elon Musk has certainly provoked a wide spectrum of opposition. After the abolition of USAID (a genuine triumph, albeit one with real foreign policy implications that have not yet been adequately explored) and a few surgical, high-precision cuts to the funding of hostile actors in the first few weeks (also very important), the DOGE coup seems to have stalled completely. It seems likely that most of the more useful activities of DOGE can be attributed to Stephen Miller and his wife, who have been sent on permanent babysitting duty for Musk (which poses the question of whether Miller will have time to do the requisite work on immigration reform). Unfortunately, most of DOGE’s more recent activities seem to be focused on Musk’s notion — almost certainly incorrect — that the Federal Government is paying out to tens of billions to the dead, children, or people who simply do not exist (that many of the employees in question do exist, but their age is wrongly reported, does not seem to have occurred to him), and the cancellation of thousands of supposedly ‘unused’ software licenses (some of which, at least if Reddit is to be believed, certainly were in use).

Needless to say, even if this does achieve something, these cuts are only at the margins of federal expenditure: you don’t run budget deficits worse than anything proposed by Liz Truss for nearly one decade running because of government ‘waste’. (The obvious point that these deficits are largely funded by the dollar’s reserve status, and the extent to which this is understood by the administration as a whole, as opposed to certain individuals within it, will be a topic of discussion in a future article.) Meanwhile, the administration has gotten bogged down in the courts, which are hearing cases from those unceremoniously fired in defiance of certain legal protections they were widely thought to enjoy. Musk has now been partially restrained by Trump himself after a showdown with other members of Trump’s cabinet who complained of the chaos that Musk is causing in their own departments, as well as of the public relations idiocy of (reportedly) attempting to cut funding to air traffic control days after a major air disaster. Whether federal agencies will actually end up under the real control of the executive thus remains an open question.

The American Left have so far struggled to form a cohesive narrative in response to the 2024 Election: for many reasons, the sweeping away and delegitimisation of an old form of politics was more complete in 2024 than that which accompanied genuine landslides in the past. Very few people have bothered to turn up to the protests that have been organised, showing the sheer extent of the demoralisation compared to 2016. The Democrats have been exceptionally low-profile (if not downright invisible) in the media despite the chaos the administration has already caused both at home and abroad, not seeming to know the right angle of attack. Internally, it seems to be business as usual for the Democratic National Convention, with the terminally unlikeable David Hogg being elected as vice chair.

However, if DOGE merely cuts some billions from the budget, dragging on for years rather than accomplishing its real goal, and promptly dissolving itself thereafter, it will prove to have been an altogether damaging experiment for MAGA and its successors, wounding but failing to kill the beast. As the Second Trump Administration gradually reveals its weaknesses, both political and otherwise, it seems likely that the Left’s reaction will be to settle on the need for a more radical agenda than that of Biden or Harris.

This is because when the Democrats eventually get their act together, every interest on the Left will be directed towards attacking the attempted Musk takeover of the government. Reversing the damage the Second Trump Administration has inflicted on the bureaucracy will be the first goal of any future Democratic administration. Most likely, they will get the public on side in this seemingly unpopular goal by mobilising popular antagonism towards Musk himself. While a pro-free speech X, the general cultural turn of Silicon Valley towards the Right (or at least not-the-Left), and Musk’s money greatly assisted Trump’s victory in 2024, both directly and due to their indirect effect on the national and international ‘Vibe Shift’, the man himself gives Trump’s opponents a great deal of ammunition by merely existing, and produces yet more on a daily basis.

Musk and Trump’s personal and political entanglement is creating a real focal point of opposition to the administration that did not need to exist. With the decisive personal mandate of the last election and being ineligible to serve again, Trump himself is nigh-on unassailable. Instead, the excesses of DOGE will be used to vindicate many Americans’ opposition to MAGA. If Miller is taking the reins at DOGE, it is not clear how useful Musk is as an individual to the work undertaken, other than to perhaps play the role of a caricature of an ‘evil advisor’, cut loose after the dirty work is complete while leaving the rest of the cabinet unscathed. Given what appears to be Trump’s genuine personal friendship with Musk, doubling down on the sunk costs of continuing his personal association — going so far as the White House Tesla South Lawn display — this seems incredibly unlikely. Whatever credit Musk once had with any organic constituency has been burned rapidly, and his fate is now inextricably tied to the success or failure of the MAGA project.

Donald Trump seems to have a rather tenuous grasp on the distinction between public and private — something that, while somewhat endearing (due to the very old-fashioned, personalistic, patronage-centred politics it creates), is just asking for trouble. Trump, of course, even before we consider his wider, pre-political business career, has made an enormous amount of money since entering politics from Truth Social, as well as from borderline scams like the Trump Digital Trading Card NFTs and the $Trump shitcoin. Musk, meanwhile, has been virtually been adopted into Trump’s own family: he is constantly hanging around Mar-a-Lago, is pictured with his children in the Oval Office (and was the only non-Trump to appear in that famous victory photograph), and does not have a ‘real’ role in the administration despite his free-roving, wide-ranging powers (somewhat akin to Kushner in the First Trump Administration).

Now that he is part of the family, Musk’s habit of broadcasting his ‘Inevitable West’-informed takes publicly, directly contradicting decades-long American policy on a whim, the widespread speculation of a drug problem, and his being generally unstable and/or embarrassing might become the least of the Second Trump Administration’s concerns. DOGE has already seemingly targeted government agencies investigating Musk’s own businesses. These vary from supposedly anti-union practices, to regulations on SpaceX, to the subsidies given to Tesla, to the investigation of ‘X Money’ by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to animal rights abuses at Neuralink.

Bizarrely, these blatant conflicts of interest have been reported factually without being in any real way seized upon by congressional Democrats. Not only devoid of any genuine inspiration, the dejection from November’s defeat apparently still hangs so heavy over the Democrats that even a performative ‘we told you so’ is proving too much for them — at least for now. It is telling that one of the strongest displays of grassroots opposition has instead been in the spontaneous acts of vandalism and arson against Tesla facilities and vehicles across the country. In response, Trump has vowed that the attacks on Tesla vehicles would be regarded as an act of ‘domestic terrorism’ against a ‘great American company.’ The declaration that Tesla is in some abstract, symbolic sense only a semi-private entity, with their vehicles now within the royal family’s estate and (apparently) given special protections, is a sign of things to come.

While Musk is the most visible problem, he is not the only one. There are, of course, Trump’s strange choices of appointees, many of whom have a long career of grifting behind — and potentially also ahead of — them. Meanwhile, prominent business leaders, many of whom were loudly anti-Trump in the past, have been falling over themselves to win the great man’s favour. The decision to create a bitcoin strategic reserve raised eyebrows, not just because of its absurdity (given the volatility of cryptocurrency), but also because of potential conflicts of interest involved. The names of many others who will be accused of one form of corruption or another are probably still unknown except to the most well-connected few.

Another obvious angle of attack will be the business activities of Donald Trump Jr. Trump Jr, the most politically-involved of Trump’s children (he reportedly advocated for JD Vance’s selection as Vice President), is currently the sole trustee of the Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (TMTG). Since November, Trump Jr — who, despite his proximity to Trump, is currently a private citizen, freeing him from the usual requirements imposed on those holding public office — has been appointed to the board of three publicly-traded companies, all of which saw their share price skyrocket upon the announcement. He has also become a partner at 1789 Capital, an anti-ESG venture capital fund. The Financial Times reports that a ‘family associate’ said that, even though there was ‘…never a quid pro quo… everyone wants to work with [Trump’s children], offering a flood of potential deals in the hope of currying favour with the president down the line’.

In all of this there is a corruption scandal of some kind or another waiting to happen. While the narrative of ‘Hunter Biden’ and the ‘Deep State’ may suffice to forestall any broader consensus that the Republicans are ‘corrupt’ for now, this will not last forever, not least because Biden and his family are no longer directly involved in politics. Musk’s desperate attempts to claim that the real corruption is to be found in a federal judge married to a management consultant living in a $2.4 million house in Washington DC are unconvincing to say the least.

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In response, consider an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (now of presidential candidacy age) campaign running on the following. ‘The American Government has been taken over by big business and Silicon Valley oligarchs who are using the state to advance their commercial interests at the expense of ordinary Americans.’ ‘Billionaires like Elon Musk are stopping you from having universal free healthcare.’ In doing so, the Democrats could pitch a natural retreat to their core values — in this case, corporate greed and corruption, coupled with a supposed ‘threat to democracy’. No issue is as core to, and has as much mass appeal as, the fraught minefield of healthcare, often sidelined by besuited types but beloved of the grassroots with a fervour bordering on the messianic. Much as Trump’s first victory served to make the Republican Party realign with their base, Trump’s second victory could achieve the same for the Democrats. It is important to note that this realignment, even if it looks somewhat different, could also be (mostly) achieved under a nominally ‘centrist’ candidate, especially if they tack to arguments that sound more ‘pro-market’ despite their strong anti-corporate emphasis. A ‘radical’ like Ocasio-Cortez is not strictly necessary, though it might help (especially if it is thought to be expedient to talk about being ‘pro-worker’).

The narrative of the oligarchic corruption of the Republic will be combined with the sexual and personal corruption of the highest elites. This will not be difficult, given Musk’s predilection for impregnating e-girls and semi-abandoning his children (and that’s before considering the allegations against Trump himself, which have faded in prominence but have not been forgotten). These people, we will be told, are ‘weird’. Not only do they not represent the personal interests of ordinary, decent Americans: they are fundamentally, sociologically distinct from them in important ways. Naturally, this will be combined in some way with the constant, ‘Insane Clown Party’ (to quote Scott Greer) drama, which will almost inevitably involve a fair few sex scandals, possibly involving senior apparatchiks, given the behaviour that is known to be common on the conservative circuit in the United States.

Luigi Mangione has become the darling of an entirely predictable kind of younger leftist, and copies of the Anarchist Cookbook — something that can get you sent to jail in Britain — are now on prominent display in bookshops. Ocasio-Cortez has already discussed the killing of Brian Thompson as a symptom of building anger over healthcare and systemic inequality (never mind that the motive seems to have been anger at a botched operation, not a lack of healthcare per se (let alone ‘inequality’), given the wealth of Mangione’s family). It does not feel impossible that the Democratic candidate in 2028 flirts, in Trumpian fashion, with a pardon or sentence commutation for Mangione and other martyrs of the ‘anti-oligarchy’ cause. This dynamic may become a signifier of partisanship, as Trump continues to double down on the need to protect the royal estate, his Tesla swans, from attack. Obviously, while isolated attacks like those on Thompson may become marginally more common (though from near-zero levels) in the next few years, in practice nothing much is likely to happen as a consequence, except in the reinforcement of each side’s narrative. I would have preferred to never hear the man’s name again but the ‘Luigi Mangione Democrats’ seems an appropriate moniker.

Of course, Bernie Sanders’ attacks against ‘big business’ and ‘oligarchs’ didn’t translate into any real electoral success in 2016 or 2020. However, since then, household-name, super-rich individuals in the public eye have not had such a marked impact on American political life since the Gilded Age of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan. Though this narrative will naturally be at its strongest from the left of the party, the Democratic centre also has good reason to consolidate with an AOC-type candidate given the ‘damage to our democracy’, and as funding cuts hit the sinecures of a not-insignificant proportion of the population. Ocasio-Cortez and ‘the squad’ also have a far better relationship with the Democratic Party than Sanders, an independent, ever did.

The Mangione Democrats will also be far more able to tap into the elusive online ‘youth culture’ than whatever they were trying with the desperately astroturfed ‘Kamala is Brat’, ‘Tim Walz is the cool high school coach you never had’ garbage they had in 2024. It is already perceptible that a large proportion of Zoomer leftists have, with some exceptions, began to implicitly adopt (or co-opt) a new version of ‘anti-Woke’ — one that understands ‘Woke’ to mean ‘political correctness gone mad’ whether from the Right or Left, and an opposition to so-called ‘puritanism’, which is seen as equally applicable to the removal of Enola Gay photographs from the Department of Defense website for being ‘DEI content’ by mentioning the word ‘gay’. This stands against the Right’s understanding of ‘Woke’ as a shorthand for ‘anti-white’, ‘anti-male’, ‘anti-heterosexual’, et cetera, and is waiting to be fully utilised in national political discourse.

Disagreeing with left-wing social policy will be declared ‘cringe’ and ‘puritanical’ and — for those who are feeling especially daring — ‘Woke’. Caring about (say) transgenderism, rather than being ‘literally murder’, will instead be declared ‘weird’, ‘not normal’, in an attempt to recapture an early-noughties libertarian streak from the army of HR ladies and the mentally ill who had taken over leftism from around the mid-’10s. The salience of class concerns will be boosted, in the spirit of the ‘anti-oligarchy’ times and as a sop to postliberal analyses of Trump, but race, gender, and sexual identity will still remain fundamental to the American Left. DEI will be revived, but under a new name and in a somewhat modified form. No attempt to restrict mass migration, whether legal or illegal, will be made, despite much ado about ‘American workers’. The need for insurgent energy will be satisfied by the present hagiography of Mangione and future mugshots of imitators. A competent online messaging strategy, with Ocasio-Cortez streaming Valorant and replicating Trump’s success on the podcast circuit, will probably cut through with a certain kind of under-35 voter.

Most in our sphere may scoff at the idea that this could culturally catch on. It is probably true that the Left will continue to find it difficult to convince people that they do not inherently dislike heterosexual masculinity, or even sexuality full stop (see the self-conscious decision of many Democrats to defend Harry Sisson in his recent scandal, something that would not have happened two years ago), no matter how many times they wheel out Hasan Piker. Nonetheless, it is still highly compelling for many of those on the Left who are desperate to revive some sense of rebelliousness in their movement. Certain bad actors on the Right will also help contribute to this framing with ludicrous platitudes like ‘Woke Right’.

The convergence of the Mangione Left and the DNC establishment will provide the Democratic Party the populist energy necessary to use the power of the state to crush Musk personally, and Big Tech’s influence generally, via antitrust and lawfare, coupled with legal ‘disinformation’ standards and an attempted shutdown of a free internet, as seen in Europe (especially in Germany), but now with the jurisdiction to enforce it. The serious revival of antitrust in particular, an old and deep-rooted American political tradition, has been a long time coming. Even Trump, through his appointment of known trust-buster Gail Slater as head of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, has given a nod to the mood of the times. For years, many Republicans (including JD Vance himself) have flirted with antitrust on the basis of ‘Big Tech’ censoring conservatives, something that in hindsight may have been a major error. Among Democrats, Matt Stoller and Tim Wu stand out, with the former in particular having advocated for the good part of a decade that the Democrats should use antitrust to inject populist rebellion — as well as to help play into generic ‘Blue Labour’-type cultural themes — into an increasingly staid sociocultural movement.

Whether this left-wing project succeeds will depend on if Trump can hold together his coalition by delivering on his basic promises, as outlined above. The fact is that the capture of the administrative state, while very important, was not the moving issue for the median voter in his camp, and can be used against him in a way that immigration never could, no matter how many sob stories are publicised by the left-wing press (as on this matter at least, hearts have hardened). If the Second Trump Administration plunges America into a permanent, rather than a temporary, state of chaos, the Republican coalition may find itself in jeopardy. The margins of Trump’s coalition should probably be seen as even more fickle than the margins of an ordinary political coalition, especially with regards to the surprisingly high number of ethnic minority male voters Trump won in 2024.

A pivot of the Democrats against ‘oligarchy’ will naturally push America towards redistribution, antitrust, and economic populism in the long run. Even in the event of a Vance victory in 2028, economic redistribution and the social and cultural politics of ‘Mangionism’ will better represent the new ‘base’, as Boomers begin to die off. The pattern of American politics could, at least for a time, consolidate into an alliance of business interests — completed by the jettisoning of aspects of Trump’s anti-immigration (e.g., on H1B) and protectionist politics — against a coalition of public sector ‘elites’ and those attracted to economic populism in its broadest sense.

As things stand, rather than the vaguely ‘postliberal’ JD Vance — who may even, in the right circumstances, actually lean somewhat into ‘anti-oligarchy’ himself — the most natural avatar of the former, the pro-business alliance, is Vivek Ramaswamy. Sadly, this will decisively complete the process, began in the interwar period and progressing more and more rapidly in the face of radical mass migration, of the total decoupling of the United States from the Old World. ‘Europe has fallen’ slop will feed into a vision of American nationalism, substantially shared by both Left and Right, which sees Europe as a wholly foreign civilisation. We will consider the consequences, good and bad, of this decoupling of Europe from America — which, as all readers are of course aware, is currently occurring for far more immediate and direct reasons — further in our next article.

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This article was written by Nigel Forrester, our editor-in-chief, and Francis Gaultier, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

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