To my knowledge, I’m the only person writing about Trump as an agent of the Machine. Most analysts are stuck in industrial-era frameworks. That’s why they feel confused. I just heard a clip of Tim Dillon saying, “I’m confused. And if you’re not confused, you’re an operative.“

I see Trump as a machine actor in a decaying system that can’t enforce coherence any other way. That’s why it looks like fascism, but functions more like outsourced computation. He’s the front-end meltdown while the back-end runs.

Let’s start with his key alliances. Trump’s friends are the Machine’s friends. It’s a mistake to think he’s doing this alone. He’s not a mastermind. The guy’s not even particularly strategic. But that’s what makes him perfect for automated systems. He doesn’t have to plan anything. He just aligns with money and systems already in motion. Think of him as an attractor node, chaotic on the surface, but low-key syncing with infrastructural flows beneath.

Palantir is the cold, administrative machine. It’s become the de facto operating system for the American security state. ICE uses it to track and deport. Police departments use it to forecast crime. It was there before Trump, but under his administration, it was deployed more aggressively and with less oversight.

Peter Thiel represents the legal-tech complex. He hates democracy. I won’t go into his “Antichrist” stuff here, but he believes in monopolies and the slow bleed of political legitimacy into infrastructural dominance. He’s backing Trump because Trump creates cover for machine integration. As courts hollow out and institutions become shells, Trump clears the field for Thiel’s post-political machine order.

Then there’s Jared Kushner and his predictive urbanism. Kushner’s real estate empire runs on data layers. He’s basically a genius of demographic targeting and redevelopment forecasting. He helped roll out the Abraham Accords as a kind of platform diplomacy, basically infrastructure deals and digital corridor alignments between Israel, the Gulf States, and U.S. tech firms. The whole goddamn world knows these aren’t treaties. They’re APIs.

The Gulf Tech Bloc (UAE, Israel, Saudi Arabia) are autocratic laboratories. With Trump, their cooperation escalated through chip deals, biometric data sharing, predictive border security, and joint ventures in AI-assisted governance. The Golden Dome is another example of cybernetic sovereignty. Trump positioned the U.S. as a willing partner in what amounts to a post-state, pre-AI algorithmic international. I call it the Feedback International. It’s all about infrastructure.

As for Elon Musk, let’s assume he’s no longer on Team Trump. This might work even better for automated control, because now someone can play the role of apolitical techno-freedom fighter or whatever, even though Elon has the same agenda. He wants to dissolve the state and elevate the platform. His companies help normalize the replacement of public systems with private loops. That’s what it’s all about.

The thing to understand about these tech billionaires is that their power comes from digital algorithmic infrastructural architecture. They got rich by building systems that replace the old ones. Their power dismantles governance. We end up with a version of capitalism that increasingly runs without politics. And that’s what they want, but completely. Their design philosophy is optimization over deliberation. They hate democracy. Democracy is slow and human. It’s procedural. There’s debate. But it’s supposed to be that way. It has drag on purpose. Tech sees that drag as a design flaw. They think democracy is an old buggy system getting in the way of the Upgrade, so they want to obsolete it.

When you live in that world long enough, people stop looking like citizens. You start to see people as bugs or noise in the data. You develop a worldview that’s deeply anti-human, even if you don’t mean to. Just listen to how they talk. Humans are “edge cases.” Society is a “coordination problem” to be solved by code. They’re obsessed with statistical inference. They want decision trees to override deliberation. They want input/output to bypass debate. When they look at politics, they don’t see collective struggle like the rest of us. They see lag and systemic latency. They’ve convinced themselves that sovereignty is something to be engineered.

If Trump’s alliances aren’t enough, look at the policies. They’re pure code. He’s turning governance into system updates right in front of your face. Trump 2.0 is a format switch that strips the civil service of autonomy and replaces regulatory bodies with loyal billionaires. But more importantly, it automates discretion. Trump is rewiring the entire administrative state into a command-and-control interface. If you’re a techie, think of it as a UI overhaul.

Trump’s AI regulatory freeze was a patch to prevent future patches. There was a clause in the big beautiful bill that would’ve blocked state level regulation on AI for a decade. It was so outrageous it got removed from the bill. But it’s the fact that Trump tried for an infrastructural override. It would’ve completely neutered state-level democracy while creating a national regulatory vacuum, except it’s not really a vacuum because it’s already filled with private platforms and unelected contractors. By banning state intervention, the clause would’ve handed jurisdiction over to whoever already owns the pipeline. And we all know who that is. Amazon, Palantir, Meta, and BlackRock. And the time span, ten years, is just brutal. Ten years is an eternity in system-years. That’s ten years of undisturbed integration with firewalls over the states to keep the people from touching the code. Ten years means they probably anticipate resistance to AI ramp-up and wanted to make sure humans don’t get in the way.

Remember the wall? Trump never built it. His border vision turned out to be about filters. The borders are now biometric checkpoints using predictive profiling and machine vision to sort the good guys from the bad guys. And no one has to decide who gets deported because guess what? It’s automated. The software makes the call. Even worse, Trump handed ICE to Palantir to remove oversight altogether. So the governance has been outsourced, the accountability is gone, and the systems used for AI border control are now replicating into identity verification systems inside the country.

More, Trump’s deregulation is about removing drag. Conservatives and libertarians think EPA rollbacks and infrastructure selloffs are about “letting business thrive,” but really, they’re about stripping the old system of inertia. Drag is the enemy of cybernetic optimization. Outside of Trump’s ego and personal revenge games, he cares about two things, boosting velocity and reducing drag. These are world class cybernetic imperatives. Trump’s version of governance is nonhuman. Get out of the way. Let the Machine run. 

Leftists think he’s a fascist. The flags, the military parades, the threats, the constant invocation of enemies, the promise of national rebirth and all that. But that’s just his style. It looks like fascism because that’s his front-end. That’s the GUI. But behind it, on the back-end, his program is raw acceleration. Fascism was a centralized project of myth and command. Trumpism is a distributed performance of destabilization. Pure velocity. He doesn’t do ideology.

What Trump actually does is scramble power. And in the scramble, machine-systems take over. If you’re a legit U.S. citizen, you’re not getting ruled by the state anymore. You’re getting processed by algorithms, price signals, biometric filters, and feedback loops. ICE is a menace, no doubt. You don’t want to be illegal under Trump. But in terms of the greater population, the real control is cleaner and colder than most people would like to admit. Notice how there are people who vehemently oppose Trump but keep trying to debunk the fascism claim. They know something’s off but they’re not sure what. At the same time, leftists are calling it fascism because they see the GUI. Both sides are right and wrong. What we’re actually looking at is front-end nationalism with sovereignty undergoing a backend transformation. He’s rerouting legitimacy from the state into a privatized layer of machine intelligence, burning through what’s left of institutional authority to make room for governance by system, not by state. Trump is about one thing: acceleration. Nothing else, except his money, obviously.

Imagine three more years of this. By then, the tech billionaires and infrastructural elites will have drained what’s left of the human layer. Agencies will simply be bypassed. Their functions rerouted to private systems and automated decision tools. The courts will become slower, the code will get faster, people will feel more dehumanized, and the real politics will happen at the level of APIs and smart contracts.

None of this requires Trump to know what he’s doing. He just needs the right friends and to create the social and institutional overload required for the system to reformat itself. If Trump has any real ideology, it’s perpetual interface crisis, managed through cybernetic infrastructure. And if he ever had a real slogan, truer than MAGA, it’d be Collapse the Human, Delegate to Machine.