How Winning Became the Shared Ethos of the US Oligarchy

Two brothers are playing chess. One checks the Queen. The other ponders but does not seem to see the saving move. The father steps in and gives it away. “That’s not fair,” the first brother complains. The other concedes and puts down his King.

What the father had done was not simply give an unfair advantage—he had ruined the game. If they were to continue playing and the player with the checked Queen ended up winning, he could not truly claim victory.

Winning is all that seems to matter to Trump—winning big and claiming victory even when it’s cheated or not even real. He has claimed that the U.S. won a war launched illegally against Iran. He has claimed that the U.S. is winning through tariff revenue and $18 trillion in investment. He has taken credit for “historic” low crime rates, border control, and stopping illegal drug trafficking. All of these are fake victories.

The claim of victory over Iran is a misconstruction of reality. The claims about tariffs and economic investments are smoke and mirrors. The claim of low crime rates cannot be attributed to his policies alone, and illegal immigration and drug trafficking controls are pyrrhic victories at best.

Trump is not an anomaly. He is, perhaps, the most strident representation of an oligarchic ruling class and its ethos, for whom the sole measure of success is to always win. To win no matter the cost, because winning confers legitimacy.

“People inside the process, constituting as they do, a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is,” wrote Joan Didion in her seminal essay Insider Baseball for The New York Review of Books in 1988.

By “people out there,” Didion meant the average American. The political discourse is built for them to hear, not to reflect reality. Its purpose is to manage them and convince them that “the process” is working. The only difference between Trump and other U.S. politicians is that he has changed the tune, but not the genre.

Didion spoke about how the elite do not care about the reality of the citizens they govern. Instead, they are obsessed with the “process”—polling data, tactical maneuvers, optics, and the “narrative.” They treat governance like a private game whose rules only they understand.

She describes this ruling class as an exclusive club composed of politicians, campaign strategists, corporate donors, and elite journalists. They argue with each other on television, but they eat at the same restaurants, attend the same weddings, and share the exact same class interests.

Didion notes that this elite class prefers low voter turnout because a disengaged public is easier to manage. By reducing politics to a highly scripted, theatrical performance, they alienate ordinary people, reducing the citizenry to mere “vassals” who have no real say in the trajectory of the empire.

Donald Trump made a cameo in Insider Baseball. He was mentioned as someone who is part of the process—one of the TV personalities who brings it closer to the people. That’s why Trump is obsessed with polling data, the numbers on the stock market, and fighting the media. He is an insider; that’s the world he’s lived in all his life, and the only style of politician he’s ever known.

However, something happened that allowed him—someone whose job in the process was merely being a TV personality—to take on the role of the professional politician. The high offices of the White House, especially the presidency, had traditionally been reserved for those who were part of America’s “political dynasties,” as Stephen Hess called them.

What had happened, in fact, was a two-fold but interconnected event. On the one hand, the “process” had been hollowed out even for those who ran it. Didion showed, in later essays collected in her book Political Fictions, that the process was increasingly geared towards the “affluent, educated, diverse, suburban, ‘wired’, and moderate.”

She quotes The Washington Post as saying about the 1988 election, that “apathy is the single biggest reason why an estimated 100 million Americans will not vote on Tuesday.” Apathy, she explains, is the way the Post—which is part of the process—referred to those who were alienated by it.

From 2000, culminating with the financial crisis of 2008, “the process” was exposed as an empty shell which, increasingly, not even those inside it believed. When Barack Obama was elected on the promise of reining in the financial class and making them pay, the opposite happened. He bailed them out.

“The process”—that is to say, the state—had been taken over by the financial and corporate class. The second thing that happened was that after 2009, 9 out of 10 dollars invested in Silicon Valley came from central bank money through Quantitative Easing (QE). That is the premise upon which Yanis Varoufakis has written his book Technofeudalism.

Central banks gave this money to commercial banks at near-zero percent interest. The financial system couldn’t make enough money on normal loans so that money was channeled into high-risk, high-reward Silicon Valley investments. Essentially, 90% of the valuation of tech start-ups and the cash flows that kept them afloat were indirect lines of credit tracing back to Quantitative Easing.

In the 20 years that passed from 1988, when Didion’s essay was first published, to 2008, when the financial crisis hit, the financial and corporate takeover of the state culminated. From 2008 to 2026, the financial oligarchy, through state-sponsored QE, staged one of the largest transfers of wealth ever witnessed from society to the oligarchy.

This gave rise to Silicon Valley as a new speculative field and created a new technological elite. As the wealth of this elite increased and their technology became more sophisticated—and as they were able to show that it could be used to maintain the oligarchic status quo—they began to stake their claim in politics, bringing their own agenda. This is the tune that Trump plays.

Donald Trump and J.D. Vance perfectly exemplify this. Trump is a member of the “process” elite but not of the great dynastic political families. He is there because he represents the interest of the financial class. Vance is a product of Silicon Valley, a protégé of Peter Thiel; he is there to act on their behalf. Because “the process” had been delegitimized and because the new elite did not believe in it, they needed someone to break it. That is Trump.

So what is left to lend legitimacy to oligarchic rule? Winning. Because that is the shared ethos of the financial class and the technological one. Winning no matter what. But there’s no honor in winning when you are cheating