Pinned to the King
The nation’s richest men aligning with Donald Trump is a sign of vulnerability rather than unprecedented strength.
Does the name Daniel K. Ludwig ring a bell? Probably not, unless you are an expert in the history of the shipping industry or you frequented elite philanthropic circles in the 1980s. Daniel K. Ludwig is all but forgotten today but no one would have called him a household celebrity even in 1981, when he was the richest man in America. And while Ludwig was a conservative Republican, he certainly wasn’t standing center stage on the Capitol steps when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th President of the United States on January 20, 1981.
The dawn of the Reagan 80s seems like a simpler time compared to the vulgar excuse for an inauguration we witnessed last week when a who’s who of mega billionaires stood front and center in the Capitol Rotunda demonstrating their alignment with the agenda of Donald J. Trump. But we cannot understand how we got to 2025 without a closer look at 1981. Reagan entered the White House with a Mandate for Leadership, specifically the one written for him by the Heritage Foundation. Reagan tore up the New Deal Social Contract through aggressive deregulation and radical tax cuts, lowering the top marginal rate from 70% to 33%. Unlike the New Deal Social Contract that promised national wealth through the regulatory state working in coordination with Big Business and Big Labor, the Reaganomic Social Contract promised unprecedented wealth for all by pushing both the regulatory state and Big Labor out of the way of Big Business, giving the titans of industry free rein over the economic future of America.
To see how 1981 laid the foundation for 2025 we only need to compare Daniel K. Ludwig to the richest man in America today, Elon Musk. When Daniel K. Ludwig was the richest man in America he had a net worth of roughly $2 billion, a little more than $7.5 billion in today’s dollars. At the time of Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk’s net worth was estimated at $426 billion. Even when we adjust for inflation, America’s richest man in 2025 is 55 TIMES RICHER than America’s richest man in 1981. Meanwhile, since 1981, median household income in the United States has stagnated: the median household income of $21,000 in 1980 is worth $80,433 in today’s dollars while the Federal Reserve’s most recent data for the current median household income comes in at $80,610. There was a marginal gain in the economic prospects of the average American family from 1981 to 2025, but improvements in our quality of life under the Reaganomic Social Contract have been minimal compared to the era of the New Deal Social Contract when Americans went from using outhouses to reaching outer space.
As nearly a half-century has passed, it is becoming harder to deny that the Reagan Revolution was nothing more than a Collusionist coup, a fraudulent Social Contract that could not have ended in anything other than oligarchy. The rise of the celebrity CEO was preordained by the Collusionist dogma that the profit-seeking private businessman will always make better economic decisions than the democratically elected statesman. Adding fuel to this fire was the rise of stock market prices all but preprogrammed by tax cuts that kept dollars out of the state coffers and in the hands of the wealthy desperate for a return on the extra capital now at their disposal. Before long America would have a parade of celebrity CEOs from GE’s tough-as-nails deal maker Jack Welch to whiz kid Bill Gates to a New York City real estate mogul whose shoddy business dealings would be papered over by clever personal branding and the mythologizing sensationalism of a reality TV show called The Apprentice. The parade of celebrity CEOs would continue with the rise of Silicon Valley, giving us names like Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and just about everyone else on the guest list of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, men possessing the kind of wealth Daniel K. Ludwig could barely fathom.
The spectacle of these CEO demigods lined up with CEO turned Commander-in-Chief Donald Trump gives the appearance of unprecedented power, the ultimate fusion of corporate and political interest that is the very dark heart of Collusionism. But seeing the CEOs align with Trump made me think of a different image altogether, a chessboard. Now I am no chess master. I rarely play unless I am confined with little us to do, like taxiing in a plane on a runaway or (more recently) lying in bed half-catatonic during a 36-hour fast before a colonoscopy. But I’ve played enough chess to know that lining up your strongest pieces in front of the King is not a sign of strength but a position of great vulnerability. For instance, if your Queen is aligned with the King and attacked by an opponent piece, your Queen cannot escape without placing your King in check, resulting in your most powerful piece being taken, with your King likely to fall in a few more moves. Similarly, with so many powerful CEOs publicly aligned with President Trump, the Collusionist elites are now more vulnerable than ever. Our celebrity CEOs are now pinned to the mad king Donald Trump, responsible for the suffering Trump is recklessly inflicting on the American people.
Monday’s bloodbath of Nasdaq tech stocks shows just how vulnerable America has become from this Collusionist alignment of our corporate and political leaders. The richest men in America bowed before the king’s throne on Inauguration Day because they needed the support of the Trump Administration to pull off what may become the greatest Collusionist boondoggle of all time, the state-sponsored drive to beat China in the race for the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence. The conventional Silicon Valley wisdom was that unprecedented spending on cutting-edge GPU chips and unrestrained energy consumption for AI training was needed to ensure American companies like Nvidia, Meta, and OpenAI came out on top. This “America First” narrative for AI development fits seamlessly into Donald Trump’s protectionist economic thinking, aggressive tariffs, and export controls preventing cutting-edge chips from reaching China. Like most Collusonist endeavors, the quest to give American companies a leg up in the AI race is a bipartisan affair. The AI Race narrative helped the Biden Administration sell the American public on plowing $52 billion in subsidies to support onshore semiconductor manufacturing, all while members of Congress like Nancy Pelosi were adding millions to their personal wealth by trading on companies like Nvidia poised to benefit from the government’s largesse. Sure the political and corporate elites were growing in wealth exponentially faster than the average American, but this was a minor concern compared to ensuring the good guys won the “Chip War.” As long as we poured more and more money and electricity into the hands of the world’s most valuable companies America would finish first in the race to Artificial General Intelligence and all would be right with the world.
Then DeepSeek happened. Last week, a small Chinese company named DeepSeek released an AI app named R-1, an AI assistant that quickly rose to the number one spot in Apple’s App Store. It was bad enough that DeepSeek R-1’s performance rivaled Open AI’s most advanced Chat GPT models. But full-blown panic set in once Silicon Valley realized that DeepSeek developed and trained R-1 for just $5.5 million, a minuscule fraction spent by American companies like OpenAI whose cost of training Chat GPT 5 will likely be in the billions. While Sam Altman was touting a $500 billion new data center for OpenAI in Texas and Microsoft was planning to reopen Three Mile Island to generate enough electricity to train its AI models, the Chinese were cobbling together an almost equally effective AI model with a few million dollars and Nvidia chips old enough to make it through America’s aggressive semiconductor export controls. The unraveling of the tech titan’s AI narrative would send stocks plummeting on Monday, erasing over $1 trillion in market cap from the Nasdaq Composite (don’t worry about the Pelosis - they once again timed the market perfectly by selling their Nvidia stock before it dropped 17%). If there was a Sputnik Moment in the growing AI Cold War between China and the USA, DeepSeek was it.
Whether DeepSeek is a genuine threat to America’s AI dominance or a PSYOP by the Chinese government to inflict damage to our economic confidence remains to be seen. What we do know is that the Collusionist narrative of AI maximalism that brought America’s tech titans to Trump’s inauguration looks more vulnerable than ever. If the AI bubble bursts (after CEOs and Congress have already cashed out handsomely) and inflicts economic pain on average Americans, a focused political attack must be launched against the Billionaire Class who sold us on a self-aggrandizing narrative and sold their souls to Trump in the process.
Previous Collusionist CEOs were more cautious and clever chess masters of political influence, maneuvering behind closed doors through elaborate gambits involving family foundations, nonprofit think tanks, PACs, and charitable trusts. The overconfidence that led America’s tech overlords to align publicly with Trump at his inauguration will be their undoing, as they are now pinned to his brutal agenda. The Billionaire Class must be tarred with the guilt of all the sins committed by the President they supported on Inauguration Day, whether it’s sending ICE in to raid schools and churches, freezing Medicaid funds for those desperately in need of medical care, or attempting to halt all federal loans and grants. The Billionaire Class must pay for the chaos and suffering inflicted by Trump because he is one of their own and they have shown themselves to be willing collaborators in his agenda. They have grown obscenely rich and dangerously powerful under Reagan’s fraudulent Social Contract, while the material existence of the average American has stagnated. It is only right that the American people collect damages for the billionaire elite’s failure to deliver on their end of a Social Contract. Now that the billionaires are pinned to a cruel and corrupt President like Donald Trump, we must use a Wealth Tax as the power move to knock them off the chessboard of American politics and once again restore to the people the wealth and the power we have lost.