Why is America "Trumpomuskovia"?

A New Name for a New Regime

Trumpomuskovia is a word I introduced in an essay about some historical moments that might help us to understand the coming reality. Some of you asked why. Here are five reasons.

1. Novelty. We need a new name for the coming regime because we need to recognize the novelty of the situation -- legally, structurally, and morally.

A new constitutional regime is emerging, in which the Supreme Court has tried to place a single individual above the law, and in so doing has purported to void a section of the Constitution (the Insurrection Clause, section three of the Fourteenth Amendment).

We are already in a power structure in which money has displaced citizenry. We now have people in power who no longer pretend to care about votes and elections. The sitting president tried to overthrow the previous presidential election. His co-ruler, Elon Musk, spent more on the last campaign than all of the small donors put together. He and other oligarchs chose the vice-president.

Not just Trump but Musk believe they can simply threaten Americans with persecution and violence. Both use language that is redolent of fascism to define Americans as enemies deserving of punishment.

2. Personalism. Part of the novelty is the prominence of the two personalities. This is why the regime should bear the personal names "Musk" and "Trump."

Never before have people been bombarded with as much propaganda about two potential rulers as in the case of Musk and Trump. Both men are influencers with social media platforms. They both seem to believe that it is their personality that entitles them to rule. Trump, after all, tried to keep power even after losing an election in 2020. His team was preparing to contest the results in 2024. Given these habits and this attitude, he cannot regard himself as representing anything other than himself.

And Musk, of course, was not elected at all. He spent an invisibly tiny fraction of his huge wealth on bribes for Trump voters, demoralization ads for Harris voters, and other support. He can't feel that he owes voters anything, since he came to power without anyone voting for him. And, given that the amount of money he spent was meaningless to him personally, he can hardly respect Trump voters for having been swayed by it.

Uzbekistan is named after a Mongol raider. Mozambique is named after a wealthy trader. Russia is named after medieval slavers who captured and sold the common people. We should consider a name for an American regime that recognizes the centrality of exploitation. And thus Trumpomuskovia.

3. Russia Why the "Muskovia" part of "Trumpomuskovia"? It is Musk's name, of course. But it is also a name for Russia, and this is an association we need. The Ukrainians call Russia "Moscovia," which corresponds to the name one will find, for example, on the most famous seventeenth-century map of the region. The historical name in English was "Muscovy."

"Muskovia" in "Trumpomuskovia" recalls a few essential connections to the current Putin regime. The first is that Musk himself is a Putinist. He communicates regularly with Putin. For two years he has repeated Russian propaganda about the war in Ukraine. (The same is true of his fellow South African oligarch, David Sachs, who has been named to a position of responsibility in Trumpomuskovia. Sachs is a relentlessly humorless Putinist known for his social media transcriptions of Russian war propaganda. His Putinism is so literal that he managed to get himself booed at the Republican National Convention.)

And, of course, Trump's public record thus far has been one of submission to Putin. He has trained his followers to speak of a "Russia hoax," and will try to appoint Kash Patel as head of the FBI precisely to punish everyone who notes that Putin has supported Trump and his presidential campaigns. But Trump's efforts suppress only confirm the basic truth: Putin strongly preferred Trump over Clinton, Biden, and Harris, and acted to bring his preference to life. The Russian internet videos supporting Trump and the dozens of bomb threats on election day were just the brazen and most recent examples of a continuing campaign.

4. Oligarchy. The stronger connection to Russia, though, is a resemblance to the 1990s, which also suggests the name Trumpomuskovia.

Russia's recent history of oligarchy and dictatorship offers some suggestions as to how Trumpomuskovia might evolve. Like Trump today, Boris Yeltsin after the Russian elections of 1996 was an aging president who owed both his election and his stature to the oligarchs around him. (We have the word "oligarchy" from the ancient Greeks, for whom it meant "rule by the few"; its present meaning, "rule by the wealthy few" we owe to Russia in the 1990s.) Yeltsin's term was a contest for power among oligarchs, who saw themselves as the true and correct holders of power. As Yeltsin become ever more incapable of holding the responsibilities of power, the oligarchs undertook what they called "Operation Successor," a search for a replacement for Yeltsin who would seem plausible to Russians but who would do their bidding. Their choice, Vladimir Putin, did not pan out as they expected; he used the power of the state to dominate them and to become the chief plutocrat.

In the current U.S. setting, our regime-proximate oligarchs have chosen J.D. Vance as the successor. To be sure, we can't know exactly what will happen next, since these oligarchical clusters depend upon impulsive and willful personalities. Perhaps Trump will look ever more like Yeltsin and his allies of today will be nudging him aside tomorrow. Perhaps Vance will play the role that Putin was supposed to play, and serve the oligarchical masters. Or perhaps Vance will behave more like Putin, inheriting Trump's mantle and then using state power to change the regime. Or perhaps Trump will see the structure of the situation, and try himself to overturn his own debts to Musk and rule without the oligarchs whispering in his ears al day long. And of course we cannot forget Putin himself, who has a strange hold over Trump, and whom Trump seems to want to rescue from his various follies. In oligarchy, all that is certain is the uncertainty. I considered these variants and others in other posts.

5. Instability. The word "Trumpomuskovia," with its length and awkward accents (like "Czechoslovakia") is meant to suggest the inherent weakness of the new regime. New things are unstable. Personal politics are unstable. The Russia of the 1990s was unstable. Oligarchies in general are unstable.

Dictatorships are unstable — as Syria has just reminded us. Trump will likely try to save Putin, just as Putin once tried to save Assad. But, in the end, all of that will fail.

In the short run, can Trump and Musk stick together? In some sense, it would seem that they have to, since Trump needs Musk's money and Musk needs Trump's hand signing away power to him.

How can they separate, and the Trumpomuskovite regime break?

There are at least three scenarios. The first is that the oligarchs and the current president and the designated successor fight amongst themselves until some new structure emerges. The second is that Musk and the other oligarchs succeed in weakening the federal government to such an extent that there is no longer anything for Trump to dominate.

The third is that the Trumpomuskovian designated deputies of destruction -- people like Hesgeth, Gabbard, and Patel -- are actually nominated, confirmed by the Senate, take office in the highest positions of national defense, intelligence, and policing; and then do what they are supposed to do. If we actually do see an America of intelligence collapse (Gabbard), extralegal persecutions of designation internal enemies (Patel), and "holy war" against immigrants and others (Hegseth), the risk for Musk is that the country will fall apart in such a way that it will be hard for him to become a trillionaire. American deconstruction is a process that Musk will want to curate himself, and so here his interests can diverge from Trump's.

In serious times it is important to be creative, because we need the creativity for concepts, and we need the concepts to see the facts before us. Trumpomuskovia is the coming reality, and the word gives us some angles of view.

The better we see the new regime, the more clearly we might also see its fractures and weaknesses. Analysis is the first step to action, and analysis begins with the words. I hope that you find this one useful.