Do not let anyone fool you or tell you anything different: The elites won the 2024 United States presidential election.
For the past two years that this reporter has covered Donald Trump’s now-successful campaign to reconquer power and stay out of prison, there has been one line of dialogue from a decade-and-a-half-old movie that has pounded in my brain, unstoppably, right up until the moment I stood in the center of a West Palm Beach convention center, listening to a decrepit, openly racist game-show host feeling himself on election night.
One look at Trump and his jolly band of propagandists, moneymen, and aspiring ethnic cleansers, it’s difficult not to recall a line from the 2009 film In The Loop, by master satirist and filmmaker Armando Iannucci, formerly of HBO’s Veep. Near the movie’s climax, U.K. spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (who is working frantically to start a new war in the Middle East) says to a senior U.S. government official — a character modeled partly on former Trump adviser John Bolton — “You know, I’ve come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you.”
Standing in the center of Trump’s election night 2024 watch party thrown near the president-elect’s Florida home, it was gratuitously apparent just how much the American elites and our ruling class are disproportionately populated by Trump’s most shockingly boring psychos.
Wealthy donors in immaculate attire and with too much time on their hands were there. Nativists who ran the federal government into the ground, and are on track to run it yet again, were there, too. Hollywood actors like Jon Voight, who just acted in a Francis Ford Coppola movie, and a blue-blazer-donning Kevin Sorbo were enjoying the electoral nightlife.
The elites and the establishment honchos of the wealthiest country the world has ever known aren’t just the ethnic whites who ride and breed horses for fun, and who would rather be tortured to death than be photographed dining at a chain restaurant. They have for decades, if not centuries, been a debauched, easily bored, overeducated, vicious, and lawless constellation of old and new money. This is a matter of historical record.
There is no person alive today, not a single guy, who embodies that culture more than Donald John Trump, a rich kid who inherited a family business empire — just like he inherited recovered economies that were destroyed on Republicans’ (and his) watch — and a bored dilettante who bullshitted and partied his way through life, just as he did during the Covid-19 disaster that flourished during his presidency and ultimately killed more than a million souls in the United States.
When you think of our nation’s elites, it is a mistake to see in your mind’s eye an image of Oprah endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, or even liberal mega-donor George Soros.
An image I’ll forever think of instead is from the makeshift dance floor at the Trump campaign’s 2024 election night bash, when Rolling Stone observed a well-groomed, middle-aged couple, with drinks in hand, rushing to the center of the room, so they could gyrate and cheer to the sounds of the Village People disco-era hit, “Y.M.C.A.,” blasting on the loudspeakers, as the large video screens projecting a montage of Trump awkwardly jiggling to the song at his campaign’s Beer-Hall-wannabe rallies.
It is this reporter’s previously stated position that if we are truly witnessing the gradual death of the great American empire, it should be noted the downfall was largely set to the tune of the “Y.M.C.A.” The man in the MAGA couple on Election Night seemed to agree on how oppressively lame that is, rolling his eyes visibly as his partner dragged him toward the crowd of bodies to dance.
This is what the elites are. As Trump himself has admitted repeatedly in the past, he and his people are “the super-elite,” in part because “we’re richer, we’re better-educated.”
And the true financial and moral constitution of the elites are typified nowadays by the incredibly boring, fantastically wealthy psychos of the Trump orbit — ranging from Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million on a pro-Trump Super PAC even though the president-elect thinks he’s a “boring” weirdo; the bosses of the crypto industry; the billionaires who can’t get enough of Trump; the Mitch McConnells of the universe; the literal Kennedy dynasty’s most visible heir; and the overstimulated media titans who run the global Murdoch empire.
“They’re not just boring, they’re totally joyless. Not one of them radiates happiness with life,” Iannucci messaged Rolling Stone in recent months, as he watched Trump’s abrasively corny, morally vacant campaign and 2024 Republican National Convention unfold from afar. “The more people are alerted to the tense balls of sadness and rage rattling behind their eyes, the better!”
Many millions of voters were alerted, and didn’t care. Or they did care — because they like Trump.
But the political and industry elites of this nation were not — as various interested parties or media personalities would have you believe — punished or snubbed by Trump’s latest election to the White House. The elites have been mightily rewarded for their class solidarity with the Trump family and his Republican Party.
And on Election Day 2024, America’s elites won a commanding victory to take back the country that has always been theirs. The fact that they did it when Trump managed to wrest control of the popular vote from Harris and the Democratic Party does not change the reality of what Trump’s true support actually is, even today.
But one reason that so many citizens, voters, and (of course) well-paid pundits refuse to define Trump or Musk as one with “the elites” is because so many of these people refuse to accept how barbaric and hideously empty-headed the elites of business, policymaking, and stardom have always been. There is a reason the more unhinged and personally destructive Kanye West got, the warmer his embrace by Trump and his media allies became. There is definitely a reason why the world’s richest person has forged an enthusiastic and expensive alliance with Trump, loudly declaring that his happy life would implode if Harris won. And there is surely a reason why — after Trump led a failed coup that left several people dead in early 2021 and horrified even some of his staunchest backers — virtually the entirety of the GOP’s upper crust, including the then-top Republican in the U.S. House, came crawling back to Trump within three tiny weeks of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and have stayed simpering at his side ever since.
It’s because Trump’s fellow elites are just as depraved and craven as he is, and that bond could never truly rupture in the face of pro-Trump political violence, or any other fleeting disagreement between friends.
And for the duration of his two-year campaign to get his old job back, Trump did what any famous elite is accustomed to chronically doing: He constantly obsessed over the dumbest shit imaginable and complained about other famous rich people, further underscoring that — for all its pageantry, ideological literature, and superiority complexes — fascism in all its forms has always been inescapably stupid.
“I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” the former and now future leader of the free world exclaimed on the internet in September, showing where his mind was at in the crucial final weeks of his presumably final presidential campaign. Trump’s obsessions with marginalia and media and pop-cultural pettiness was often met with amusement, or at times disgust, by his Democratic opponent who was once, we suppose, on track to becoming the first female president of the United States.
Throughout her truncated 2024 run, the vice president’s staff would regularly have to brief her on the latest campaign news and developments — and this would at times necessitate staffers scrupulously briefing her on Trump’s latest bizarre outbursts or insult-riddled tangents about Harris. In August, right around the time of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the former president kept remarking on Harris’ Time magazine cover, including while he was on stage at a rally in Pennsylvania. During that rally speech, Trump declared to the world how much hotter he thinks he is than Harris.
“Time magazine doesn’t have a picture of [Harris], they have this unbelievable artist drawing her and I said, ‘Is that [Italian actress] Sophia Loren?’ I couldn’t tell,” Trump told his audience. “But I say that I am much better looking than” the vice president, Trump added. “I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.”
The multi-layered, ridiculous nature of Trump’s sustained remarks was difficult to explain in a professional setting.
In an in-person briefing right around the time Harris accepted the Democratic nomination in Chicago, she was made fully aware of Trump’s fixation on her physical hotness or notness, according to a Harris adviser. But because of the peculiar, stream-of-consciousness word vomit of Trump’s rally monologues, it was surprisingly hard for staff to explain to the vice president exactly what Trump meant, and the different layers of his live analysis of her, the Time magazine illustration, the now 90-year-old Italian actress, and Trump’s own alleged sexiness.
In this utterly surreal moment during the campaign, the Harris adviser says the vice president visibly shuddered, formed a weirded-out expression on her face, and tried in vain to make sense of what Trump was talking about. The adviser did not recall precisely what the vice president said, only that it was akin to “ew” and “what the hell?”
But Trump’s constant, petty obsessions are, whether we like to think of it this way or not, quintessentially emblematic of America’s elites and the powerful few who rule over the rest of us. This is not a deviation. This is who they are.
Trump’s Victory Was a Triumph for America’s ‘Boring Psycho’ Elites
Do not let anyone fool you or tell you anything different: The elites won the 2024 United States presidential election.
For the past two years that this reporter has covered Donald Trump’s now-successful campaign to reconquer power and stay out of prison, there has been one line of dialogue from a decade-and-a-half-old movie that has pounded in my brain, unstoppably, right up until the moment I stood in the center of a West Palm Beach convention center, listening to a decrepit, openly racist game-show host feeling himself on election night.
One look at Trump and his jolly band of propagandists, moneymen, and aspiring ethnic cleansers, it’s difficult not to recall a line from the 2009 film In The Loop, by master satirist and filmmaker Armando Iannucci, formerly of HBO’s Veep. Near the movie’s climax, U.K. spin-doctor Malcolm Tucker (who is working frantically to start a new war in the Middle East) says to a senior U.S. government official — a character modeled partly on former Trump adviser John Bolton — “You know, I’ve come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you.”
Standing in the center of Trump’s election night 2024 watch party thrown near the president-elect’s Florida home, it was gratuitously apparent just how much the American elites and our ruling class are disproportionately populated by Trump’s most shockingly boring psychos.
Wealthy donors in immaculate attire and with too much time on their hands were there. Nativists who ran the federal government into the ground, and are on track to run it yet again, were there, too. Hollywood actors like Jon Voight, who just acted in a Francis Ford Coppola movie, and a blue-blazer-donning Kevin Sorbo were enjoying the electoral nightlife.
The elites and the establishment honchos of the wealthiest country the world has ever known aren’t just the ethnic whites who ride and breed horses for fun, and who would rather be tortured to death than be photographed dining at a chain restaurant. They have for decades, if not centuries, been a debauched, easily bored, overeducated, vicious, and lawless constellation of old and new money. This is a matter of historical record.
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There is no person alive today, not a single guy, who embodies that culture more than Donald John Trump, a rich kid who inherited a family business empire — just like he inherited recovered economies that were destroyed on Republicans’ (and his) watch — and a bored dilettante who bullshitted and partied his way through life, just as he did during the Covid-19 disaster that flourished during his presidency and ultimately killed more than a million souls in the United States.
When you think of our nation’s elites, it is a mistake to see in your mind’s eye an image of Oprah endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, or even liberal mega-donor George Soros.
An image I’ll forever think of instead is from the makeshift dance floor at the Trump campaign’s 2024 election night bash, when Rolling Stone observed a well-groomed, middle-aged couple, with drinks in hand, rushing to the center of the room, so they could gyrate and cheer to the sounds of the Village People disco-era hit, “Y.M.C.A.,” blasting on the loudspeakers, as the large video screens projecting a montage of Trump awkwardly jiggling to the song at his campaign’s Beer-Hall-wannabe rallies.
It is this reporter’s previously stated position that if we are truly witnessing the gradual death of the great American empire, it should be noted the downfall was largely set to the tune of the “Y.M.C.A.” The man in the MAGA couple on Election Night seemed to agree on how oppressively lame that is, rolling his eyes visibly as his partner dragged him toward the crowd of bodies to dance.
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This is what the elites are. As Trump himself has admitted repeatedly in the past, he and his people are “the super-elite,” in part because “we’re richer, we’re better-educated.”
And the true financial and moral constitution of the elites are typified nowadays by the incredibly boring, fantastically wealthy psychos of the Trump orbit — ranging from Elon Musk, who spent at least $119 million on a pro-Trump Super PAC even though the president-elect thinks he’s a “boring” weirdo; the bosses of the crypto industry; the billionaires who can’t get enough of Trump; the Mitch McConnells of the universe; the literal Kennedy dynasty’s most visible heir; and the overstimulated media titans who run the global Murdoch empire.
“They’re not just boring, they’re totally joyless. Not one of them radiates happiness with life,” Iannucci messaged Rolling Stone in recent months, as he watched Trump’s abrasively corny, morally vacant campaign and 2024 Republican National Convention unfold from afar. “The more people are alerted to the tense balls of sadness and rage rattling behind their eyes, the better!”
Many millions of voters were alerted, and didn’t care. Or they did care — because they like Trump.
But the political and industry elites of this nation were not — as various interested parties or media personalities would have you believe — punished or snubbed by Trump’s latest election to the White House. The elites have been mightily rewarded for their class solidarity with the Trump family and his Republican Party.
And on Election Day 2024, America’s elites won a commanding victory to take back the country that has always been theirs. The fact that they did it when Trump managed to wrest control of the popular vote from Harris and the Democratic Party does not change the reality of what Trump’s true support actually is, even today.
But one reason that so many citizens, voters, and (of course) well-paid pundits refuse to define Trump or Musk as one with “the elites” is because so many of these people refuse to accept how barbaric and hideously empty-headed the elites of business, policymaking, and stardom have always been. There is a reason the more unhinged and personally destructive Kanye West got, the warmer his embrace by Trump and his media allies became. There is definitely a reason why the world’s richest person has forged an enthusiastic and expensive alliance with Trump, loudly declaring that his happy life would implode if Harris won. And there is surely a reason why — after Trump led a failed coup that left several people dead in early 2021 and horrified even some of his staunchest backers — virtually the entirety of the GOP’s upper crust, including the then-top Republican in the U.S. House, came crawling back to Trump within three tiny weeks of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, and have stayed simpering at his side ever since.
It’s because Trump’s fellow elites are just as depraved and craven as he is, and that bond could never truly rupture in the face of pro-Trump political violence, or any other fleeting disagreement between friends.
And for the duration of his two-year campaign to get his old job back, Trump did what any famous elite is accustomed to chronically doing: He constantly obsessed over the dumbest shit imaginable and complained about other famous rich people, further underscoring that — for all its pageantry, ideological literature, and superiority complexes — fascism in all its forms has always been inescapably stupid.
“I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” the former and now future leader of the free world exclaimed on the internet in September, showing where his mind was at in the crucial final weeks of his presumably final presidential campaign. Trump’s obsessions with marginalia and media and pop-cultural pettiness was often met with amusement, or at times disgust, by his Democratic opponent who was once, we suppose, on track to becoming the first female president of the United States.
Throughout her truncated 2024 run, the vice president’s staff would regularly have to brief her on the latest campaign news and developments — and this would at times necessitate staffers scrupulously briefing her on Trump’s latest bizarre outbursts or insult-riddled tangents about Harris. In August, right around the time of the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the former president kept remarking on Harris’ Time magazine cover, including while he was on stage at a rally in Pennsylvania. During that rally speech, Trump declared to the world how much hotter he thinks he is than Harris.
“Time magazine doesn’t have a picture of [Harris], they have this unbelievable artist drawing her and I said, ‘Is that [Italian actress] Sophia Loren?’ I couldn’t tell,” Trump told his audience. “But I say that I am much better looking than” the vice president, Trump added. “I’m a better-looking person than Kamala.”
The multi-layered, ridiculous nature of Trump’s sustained remarks was difficult to explain in a professional setting.
In an in-person briefing right around the time Harris accepted the Democratic nomination in Chicago, she was made fully aware of Trump’s fixation on her physical hotness or notness, according to a Harris adviser. But because of the peculiar, stream-of-consciousness word vomit of Trump’s rally monologues, it was surprisingly hard for staff to explain to the vice president exactly what Trump meant, and the different layers of his live analysis of her, the Time magazine illustration, the now 90-year-old Italian actress, and Trump’s own alleged sexiness.
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In this utterly surreal moment during the campaign, the Harris adviser says the vice president visibly shuddered, formed a weirded-out expression on her face, and tried in vain to make sense of what Trump was talking about. The adviser did not recall precisely what the vice president said, only that it was akin to “ew” and “what the hell?”
But Trump’s constant, petty obsessions are, whether we like to think of it this way or not, quintessentially emblematic of America’s elites and the powerful few who rule over the rest of us. This is not a deviation. This is who they are.
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