Mark Powell

The Billionaire Junta

In 1928, Herbert Hoover inherited a market swollen by illusion, a public intoxicated by speculation, and a Cabinet that mistook its own avarice for intelligence. In 2025, Donald Trump presides over an eerily similar stage-his gilded retinue composed not of engineers and economists but of charlatan technocrats, speculators, and disciples of self-interest.

At his side were Elon Musk, the mercurial impresario of algorithmic fortune; Howard Lutnick, the financial tactician who treats catastrophe as a marketplace; and Russell Vought, the ideological bookkeeper tasked with converting policy into profit. Together, they form the Billionaire Junta-a regime where capital masquerades as patriotism and governance functions as a subsidiary of personal dynastic enterprise.

The resemblance to Hoover’s America is not theatrical coincidence. It is structural déjà vu. Then, as now, speculative wealth masqueraded as national health, propaganda displaced arithmetic, and the President’s cronies amassed fortunes while the nation’s balance sheet smoldered beneath them. The difference is velocity. Hoover’s collapse unfolded over years; Trump’s, if it comes, will occur at the speed of code-a digital implosion rather than a dust-bowl decline.

The United States, once the steward of global order, now teeters between empire and enterprise, its fiscal arteries pumped not by production but by perception. And the men steering its fate-Trump, Musk, Lutnick, Vought-have learned the oldest trick of oligarchs: that collapse can be monetized if one owns the theater.

I. The Delusion of Prosperity: Hoover 1928 vs. Trump 2025

Herbert Hoover promised a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage. Donald Trump promises a factory in every county and a crypto wallet in every pocket. Both slogans shimmer with the same narcotic optimism-the conviction that abundance itself is a policy.

In 1928, Wall Street’s delirium was fueled by easy credit and the gospel of eternal growth. In 2025, the delirium returns, this time denominated in tokens, algorithms, and speculative faith. The Hoover investor bought railroads and radio; the Trump investor buys digital currencies endorsed by the President himself. Each generation insists that its bubble is “different.” Each learns that gravity does not modernize.

Hoover’s circle of plutocrats-men like Andrew Mellon-believed in a sacred market that self-corrected by destroying the poor first. Trump’s cohort believes the same theology, merely translated for the digital age. Mellon said, “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers.” Musk reframes it as “creative destruction.” Both are euphemisms for the same ritual sacrifice: ordinary citizens offered upon the altar of speculative cleansing.

The parallels are not poetic-they are ledger-accurate. In both eras, the national economy appeared invincible while its foundation quietly fractured. Hoover mistook speculation for progress; Trump mistakes branding for governance. Hoover engineered dams, Trump engineers narratives. Hoover believed in numbers; Trump believes in applause. Yet the machinery of ruin operates identically beneath both performances.

Trump’s presidency, like Hoover’s, is wrapped in the trappings of prosperity-a stock market inflated by deregulation, a currency strained by deficit, and a citizenry narcotized by spectacle. The President’s private enterprises thrive under his public policies: luxury developments underwritten by foreign funds, cryptocurrency ventures bolstered by deregulation, licensing deals that translate diplomacy into cash flow. Every decree bears an invisible dividend.

Where Hoover’s folly was optimism, Trump’s is ownership. The twentieth century’s Depression was born of collective delusion; the twenty-first may be born of deliberate extraction. And when the crash arrives-as all bubbles do-it will not be history repeating itself, but profit taking in real time.

II. The Crash Refracted: When the Money Gods Play Nation-Building

In 1930, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon prescribed liquidation as moral therapy. “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers,” he intoned, believing that suffering purified markets. The economy obeyed his command. Factories dimmed, breadlines lengthened, and the illusion of permanent prosperity evaporated into hunger. Yet the creed survived. It slumbered for a century and has now awakened beneath another golden dome-this time emblazoned not with Liberty, but with branding rights and crypto tickers.

Trump’s America has reinvented Mellon’s austerity as entertainment. The liquidation now occurs in real time, livestreamed through trading apps and amplified by algorithmic applause. When Musk tweets, markets convulse; when Trump declares a tariff, fortunes pivot overnight. Policy is no longer deliberated; it is monetized. Economic management has become a form of content creation, and every citizen is an unwitting shareholder in the spectacle.

At the center of this carnival stands the President-Merchant, whose public duties blur seamlessly with his private balance sheet. His family’s corporate empire-stretching from luxury real estate to crypto speculation-feeds upon the very policies he signs. The White House hosts investors in World Liberty Financial, the Trump-affiliated digital-currency venture whose valuation rises each time the President denounces regulation. Cabinet members echo the rhetoric; markets reward the loyalty. What Mellon achieved through taxation, Trump achieves through branding: the conversion of national policy into personal equity.

Meanwhile, Howard Lutnick translates chaos into arbitrage, profiting from volatility as if recession were a harvest season. Russell Vought, cloaked in ideological piety, drafts blueprints for a government small enough to fit inside a campaign donor’s wallet. And Elon Musk, the self-anointed engineer-prophet, supplies the technological illusion that such a system is “innovative” rather than extractive. Together, they form the modern incarnation of Mellon’s dream-a ruling clique convinced that collapse is not tragedy but cleansing fire.

The true ingenuity of this new economic priesthood lies in its inversion of responsibility. When markets fall, they blame “globalists”; when they rise, they claim divine ordination. The language of liquidation has been replaced with euphemisms-reset, disruption, creative destruction-but the consequence is identical. Labor is expendable, debt is devotional, and inequality is recast as destiny.

In this climate, the next crash will not resemble 1929’s slow descent into despair. It will erupt instantaneously, transmitted through fiber-optic veins and detonated by sentiment rather than scarcity. Bank runs will manifest as app notifications; unemployment lines will appear as vanished login credentials. Hoover’s Depression began with silence and ended in dust. Trump’s will begin with noise-and end in code.

III. President Businessman: The Conflicts of Interest Economy

There was once a quaint notion that public office required separation from private gain. That covenant perished the moment Donald Trump reclaimed the presidency and rebranded it as an investment vehicle. The Oval Office, once symbolic of civic restraint, now functions as a boardroom where policy doubles as product placement.

Every president has courted influence; only this one invoices it. The Trump Organization, resurrected under his children’s stewardship, thrives not despite his administration but through it. Each executive order, trade negotiation, and regulatory rollback carries the faint perfume of self-arbitrage. The line between governance and grift has dissolved into a seamless ledger entry.

At the epicenter of this convergence stands World Liberty Financial, the family’s cryptocurrency enterprise-a speculative empire baptized in nationalist rhetoric and buoyed by the administration’s crusade against financial oversight. When Trump decries “globalist bankers,” coin valuations soar; when the Justice Department hints at investigation, patriotic investors are exhorted to “defend American innovation.” It is the most elegant con ever institutionalized: the transformation of criminal inquiry into marketing collateral.

Flanking this digital mint are the familiar brick-and-mortar indulgences-Mar-a-Lago, Bedminster, the Trump International properties-where policy becomes a guest amenity. Foreign dignitaries still rent proximity, Gulf monarchs still purchase access, and corporations still book “events” that coincide, curiously, with legislative favors. The hotel lobby has become a diplomatic annex, the front desk, a tollbooth of influence.

To render the scale visible, imagine the following chart, the balance sheet of a presidency-a table of transactions so vast it resembles a national budget:

V. From Hoover to Hitler: How Collapse Breeds Strongmen

History rarely repeats itself with precision, yet its echoes are often deafening. When Herbert Hoover watched the economy crumble beneath his doctrine of self-correcting markets, he stood as a monument to good intentions shackled by ideology. When Donald Trump presides over the next collapse, he will stand as something darker-a man who manufactured catastrophe to profit from the ruin.

Hoover believed the market was divine, an invisible deity of equilibrium. Trump treats it as a slot machine, calibrated to his personal advantage. Hoover’s tragedy was faith; Trump’s is cynicism weaponized. Yet both men share an almost tragic blindness to consequence-the certainty that personal instinct could outwit economic gravity. Each believed that image and confidence could substitute for regulation, that markets-like mobs-could be tamed through charm and slogans.

Where Hoover preached “rugged individualism,” Trump peddles “America First,” a recycled mantra of self-reliance masquerading as patriotism. Both phrases translate to the same policy: abandonment of the vulnerable in the name of national pride. Hoover’s breadlines and Trump’s tent cities-soon to bloom across foreclosed suburbs and deindustrialized exurbs-are separated by a century yet united by the same moral arithmetic: privatize the gain, socialize the grief.

The Hoovervilles of 1929 were built from cardboard and despair. The New Hoovervilles of 2025 will glow with LED signage and streaming Wi-Fi, sponsored by corporations “committed to community resilience.” It will be poverty with branding-misery franchised, homelessness reimagined as “patriot housing.”

And when despair festers long enough, it demands a savior. The 1930s gave Europe Mussolini and Hitler, both selling restoration to those humiliated by modernity. The 2020s have Trump, Musk, and their courtiers-Russell Vought, Howard Lutnick, and the other apostles of deregulated decay-hawking a similar elixir. Each promises revival by destruction: tear down the “deep state,” the “globalists,” the “woke elites.” The vocabulary differs, but the melody is identical. It is the same fascist lullaby: You were great once. Someone stole it. Follow me, and you will be great again.

Where Hitler built autobahns, Trump builds media empires. Where Mussolini staged parades, Trump hosts rallies that mimic religious revival. The choreography is the same-mass hypnosis through grievance. Yet unlike the dictators of the past, Trump’s authoritarianism is commercialized. He sells autocracy in monthly installments: branded caps, digital coins, “patriotic” investment funds. It is tyranny for subscribers.

The terrifying ingenuity of Trumpism is its merger of populism with profit motive. Traditional fascists sought to dominate the economy; Trump simply monetizes it. The state no longer seizes corporations-it becomes one. Every nationalist sermon doubles as a product pitch, every policy as market manipulation. The Reichstag fire has been replaced by the algorithmic feed; propaganda no longer shouts-it trends.

In this new iteration of decline, fascism is not imposed by force but adopted by convenience. Americans will not march in lockstep; they will scroll in unison. The Führer is not a general but a brand. The brownshirt is a marketing affiliate. The dictatorship comes not with bootsteps but with a discount code.

And yet, beneath the spectacle, the economic pattern remains chillingly precise. As in Weimar Germany, wealth consolidates upward, currencies erode, and confidence metastasizes into rage. The stage is identical; only the lighting has changed. Hoover’s silence, Hitler’s fury, and Trump’s performance art are variations of a single refrain: the belief that the collapse of truth can somehow stabilize the collapse of capital.

The question, then, is not whether America can survive another crash-it is whether it deserves to. For when corruption ceases to scandalize, and catastrophe becomes content, the republic has already surrendered. We are not watching the fall of an empire. We are participating in its live-streamed IPO.

V. The Currency of Decline: The Dollar and the Death Cycle of Empires

Empires do not die when their armies lose. They die when their currencies do. The last breath of imperial power is not the bang of artillery but the quiet recalibration of exchange rates. Rome had its debased denarius; Spain, its silver that inflated into dust; Britain, its pound sterling dethroned by American ascendancy. The United States, intoxicated by its own myth of exceptionalism, now wades into the same historical undertow-dragged down by its most sacred fiction: the dollar’s immortality.

For nearly a century, the greenback has been the liturgical instrument of empire, the paper faith on which global commerce kneels. It bought wars, oil, and allegiance. It built the illusion of permanence. But every dominant currency carries within it a timer-an economic memento mori. On average, no global reserve currency has ruled for more than a century. The cycle is as cruel as it is predictable: dominance, overreach, debasement, collapse.

VI. Epilogue - The Marketed Apocalypse

If the 1930s gave the world breadlines and radio sermons, the 2020s offer livestreamed ruin with sponsored content. The nation’s unraveling is not hidden in bank vaults or smoky backrooms but broadcast daily, wrapped in the pageantry of digital patriotism. Every crash now comes with a theme song, every scandal with a subscription plan. America, once the world’s producer of goods, has become the world’s producer of crisis narratives.

Trump and Musk, the twin impresarios of this new order, understand the choreography perfectly. Musk supplies the illusion of future-rockets, AI evangelism, self-driving salvation. Trump supplies the illusion of past-lost greatness, purified identity, divine right to rule. Together they form a political centrifuge where truth, policy, and spectacle spin into one indistinguishable blur. What the public consumes is not governance but serialized drama, an episodic descent sold as national entertainment.

The language of apocalypse has been rebranded as content strategy. The decline of the dollar is “innovation.” The implosion of democracy is “restructuring.” The economic wreckage of millions is “creative disruption.” Catastrophe, once the enemy of civilization, has become its business model. Trump’s rallies and Musk’s X broadcasts serve as mirrors for the masses-each reflecting their fears back as validation, their economic pain as patriotism. Despair is now monetized engagement.

In another age, dictators relied on censorship; in this one, they rely on saturation. Truth drowns not because it is suppressed, but because it is outproduced. For every revelation of corruption, there are ten counter-stories, five memes, and a viral distraction sponsored by a hedge fund. The effect is not silence but static-an empire so noisy it can no longer hear itself think.

And hovering above it all, the financial elite-Lutnick, Vought, and their doctrinal offspring-play the same ancient melody: austerity for the many, indulgence for the few. They whisper the theology of “discipline” while siphoning the remains of a looted treasury. Their piety is numerical; their morality indexed to the Dow. It is Hoover’s ghost in designer shoes.

Meanwhile, the Republic’s citizens scroll past their own collapse, distracted by algorithmic consolation. Food prices rise; wages stagnate; yet the illusion of choice persists-vote, post, purchase, repeat. The end arrives not with revolt but with fatigue. No coup is required when indifference performs the work of tyranny.

When future historians study the twenty-first century, they will not find a single cataclysmic event that ended the American era. They will find a long, slow auction-each institution, each ideal, each currency of trust sold off, branded, and live-streamed for engagement metrics. The apocalypse will not have a narrator. It will have a marketing department.

The most haunting parallel to 1929, then, is not economic but spiritual. Hoover believed recovery lay in confidence. Trump, Musk, and their cohort have learned the inverse: collapse can be profitable if you own the spectacle. They are not captains of a sinking ship-they are shareholders in its wreck.

And so America closes the century where it began: worshipping the market that devours it, mistaking motion for progress, and monetizing its own demise. The final irony of this age is almost divine in its precision. The empire of consumption has consumed itself-and sold the footage.

As of October 21, 2025, the U.S. national debt stands at approximately $37.8 trillion, with interest payments exceeding $1.2 trillion annually. This marks a significant increase from just five years ago when the debt was around $27 trillion. The debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to surpass 100% by next year, indicating a concerning trajectory.

The U.S. Debt Interest in Porsche Terms

• Total annual interest: $1.2 trillion
• Cost per second: ≈ $38,050
• Price of a top-end Porsche 911 Turbo S Cabriolet: $284,300

Meaning: Every 7 seconds, the U.S. government is effectively buying one of the world’s most expensive Porsches-not as a car, but to pay interest on the national debt.

• Per day: ≈ 12,300 Porsches/day just to cover interest.
• Mental Picture: Imagine a conveyor belt of gleaming Porsches rolling off the assembly line nonstop, vanishing into the Treasury vault every 7 seconds, forever, just to pay interest. No principal, no payoff-purely interest.

Projected Financial Snapshot at the End of Trump's Second Term (2029)

• National Debt: Approximately $50 trillion
• Annual Interest Payments: Around $2 trillion
• Annual Deficit: Estimated at $2.5 trillion

In 2029, at the end of Trump’s second term in office:

If the U.S. pays $2 trillion in interest per year, then every second that money could buy a Tesla Model 3:

In other words: every second, the interest alone could purchase more than one Tesla Model 3.

With $2 trillion per year in monetary interest, the U.S. could buy about 110,000 Tesla Model 3s every single day.

•   Federal Debt Held by the Public: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that federal debt held by the public will reach 107% of GDP in 2029, surpassing the previous post-World War II peak of 106% Congressional Budget Office
•   Total Federal Indebtedness: When considering both explicit debt and implicit obligations, total federal indebtedness is projected to be approximately 340% of GDP Penn Wharton Budget Model

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Trump and His Money Men Are Repeating 1929 Crash in 2025 Real Time

Mark Powell