The Plougher

I. The Question

How could a man like Donald J. Trump become President of the United States twice? Through the will of the people, or did someone pull the strings? The question sounds as if one had to choose. We think both answers are true, and that their interplay is what is interesting.

The votes were real. In 2016 Trump received almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton and won nevertheless, because in the American system the electors of the states decide. The outcome turned on some 77,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, in the old industrial belt, where the factories had moved to China. In 2024 he also won the majority of votes cast, the first Republican to do so in twenty years. Inflation, immigration and a party that replaced its aged president too late helped him.

But before a voter can vote, someone has to be on the ballot. Who is there is not decided by the voter.

II. The Invisible Primary

American political science has its own term for the period before the primaries: the invisible primary. It decides who can seriously run at all. In 2008 four authors around John Zaller described in “The Party Decides” how officials, office-holders, donors and interest groups agree on a candidate in advance, and how voters then mostly just confirm him. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson goes further. For him parties are coalitions of investors, and whoever pays for the campaign determines what is voted on at all. Two American legal scholars coined the term “wealth primary” in the early 1990s: before a candidate reaches the voters, he must convince the small group of large donors.

Until 1968 the selection lay with the party bosses in their proverbial smoke-filled back rooms. After the chaos of the Chicago convention, reforms handed the decision to the primaries, that is, to the voters. That was a democratisation. But the filter did not disappear; it shifted. Money and attention took the place of the bosses. And only a small share takes part in the primaries. In 2016 it was 28.5 percent of eligible voters, almost as many as ever, and mostly the most committed, often the more radical supporters. Whoever wins them has the nomination. That is where influence is cheapest.

In Germany the apparatus filters, as we described in “The Long March through the Party”: whoever wants to stand must serve his way up through local branch, district association and the drawing-up of lists. In the USA money and cameras filter. Both systems have a pre-selection the voter has no influence on. They differ only in who sits there.

III. Adopted, Paid For, Ordered

In 2016 big money did not choose Trump. In the primaries the donors backed others. Jeb Bush’s support committee raised more than a hundred million dollars, the family of hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer financed Ted Cruz, and the network of the Koch brothers stayed out of the presidential race entirely. Trump won against them, with a different capital: attention. A study by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found that in 2015 he received about a third of the coverage of the Republican contenders, worth some 55 million dollars in advertising, almost twice as much as his nearest rival. The coverage came before he led in the polls. The networks did not make him big out of political intent, but because he brought ratings.

Then came the deal. In May 2016 Trump published a list of eleven potential Supreme Court justices, compiled with the help of the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society around Leonard Leo. With it he won over the conservative elites who distrusted him. The Mercers came in the summer, with Steve Bannon as campaign chief; Peter Thiel spoke at the convention. Payment came after the victory: three justices appointed for life, and the tax reform of 2017, which permanently cut the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, while the relief for individuals was temporary.

In 2024 he was no longer adopted but ordered. Elon Musk spent more than 260 million dollars, more than any single donor before, and put his platform at the service of the campaign. Peter Thiel had already financed J. D. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign with some 15 million dollars. Vance became Vice President, and with that the funders had secured the successor as well. In “The Stone That Looks Back” we described what Thiel expects in return.

IV. Landscape Gardening

Is it already a conspiracy theory to assume that a group shapes conditions so that they benefit it? No. The German term for it comes from the Flick affair of the 1980s: political landscape gardening, “politische Landschaftspflege”. That was how the Flick manager Eberhard von Brauchitsch described his group’s payments to all the major parties. He favoured no one; he tended the whole landscape.

The group in question is very diverse. Its members disagree on many questions and fight one another. But on some points they think and act alike: low taxes on capital, little regulation, weak unions, judges who protect property. No one needs to agree on that. In 1971 the lawyer Lewis Powell, two months before President Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum for the US Chamber of Commerce. Business, he argued, must organise politically, in universities, the media, the courts and think tanks. Two years later the Heritage Foundation was founded. That was no secret plan but an open programme, and it was carried out.

In 2014 the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analysed some 1,800 policy decisions in the USA. The preferences of economic elites and organised interests had measurable influence; those of average citizens had hardly any independent influence. The study is disputed, because the preferences often overlap. No one has refuted the direction of the finding.

Whoever assumes that the landscape gardeners always get what they want crosses the line into conspiracy theory. Trump is the best counter-example. The Chamber of Commerce fought his tariffs, and his deportations hit agriculture, construction and hospitality. Converging interests can favour an outcome. They cannot control it. It is the same distinction we drew in “The Machine within the Machine”: the large machine needs no agreement; the small one inside it has names.

V. The Plougher

Trump sold himself as the people’s fighter against the establishment and as a bringer of peace who would keep America out of other people’s wars. The role he actually plays was described by others before him, and openly. The programmer and blogger Curtis Yarvin, a thinker in Thiel’s circle, has for years called for a strong man at the top who would smash the administrative state. His formula for it is “RAGE”: Retire All Government Employees. In February 2017 Steve Bannon announced before a conservative audience the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.

The irrational destroyer of encrusted conditions is thus a desired role in these circles. He ploughs the field. What is sown afterwards, and by whom, is another question.

The image of the peace-bringer did not hold. On 28 February 2026 the USA, together with Israel, began the war against Iran. For parts of his own movement that was the break. Marjorie Taylor Greene, once one of his loudest supporters, had already resigned her seat in the dispute over the files of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In June 2026 she left the party. In August she announced a new movement together with the television host Tucker Carlson and Congressman Thomas Massie. Of Trump she said: “He’s betrayed us all.” At the end of September 2026 Trump’s approval stood at 39 percent in the polling average, lower than ever in his second term.

VI. Soap Bubble or Peronism

What happens when the plougher leaves? At this point we, the authors, are not of one mind, and we disclose the disagreement.

One of us sees Trump, in his effect, as a staged revolution. The elites are not thinking of the next election; they have a far longer time horizon. Trump smashes what is encrusted and sells it as a revolt of the people. After his departure, whenever and however it comes, the MAGA movement will burst like a soap bubble. The people will then have learned that there is no one who will save them. They settle into the old game, and the elites can play it anew.

The other considers the soap bubble one of two possibilities. Silvio Berlusconi’s movement was tailored entirely to him and shrank to insignificance after him. Peronism, by contrast, survived eighteen years of exile and the death of its founder and governs Argentina again and again to this day, because it had an apparatus, the trade unions. MAGA has an apparatus too: the Heritage Foundation with its government programme of almost a thousand pages, the Federalist Society, a corps of judges appointed for life, and a successor whom Thiel and Musk built up. And the anger does not vanish into resignation; it seeks new vehicles, as the movement of Greene and Carlson shows.

We agree on the point that matters: for the landscape gardeners both outcomes are a win. If the movement bursts, it leaves behind a people that no longer believes in rescue. If it survives under Vance, the small machine governs without the unpredictable man who occasionally got in its way. Heads I win, tails you lose. Perhaps the long time horizon consists precisely in not having to commit to any one outcome.

VII. How This Essay Could Be Refuted

The first objection: the voters had real reasons. The lost industrial jobs, inflation, uncontrolled immigration, the condescension of the coastal elites. No landscape gardeners were needed for that. That is right, and we take these reasons seriously. We do not claim that the voters were steered. We claim that others decided who was offered to them as an answer and what was delivered after the election.

The second objection: the elites have lost too, on tariffs, on immigration, in some cases even in disputes with Trump himself, like Musk in 2025. That is also right, and it speaks against a conspiracy. It does not speak against our thesis, which claims not control but landscape gardening.

The essay would be refuted if it could be shown that the lasting results of both terms benefited mainly the voters who elected Trump, and not those who paid for him.

VIII. After the Ploughing

A ploughed field bears nothing by itself. Whoever ploughs does not yet sow, and whoever sows does not always reap. The question is therefore less who raised Trump onto the shield than who is already standing at the edge of the field with the seed. In “The Conductors of the Leaders” we intend to devote a chapter of its own to the thinkers of the New Right, Yarvin, Thiel and the programme of a thousand pages. And for those left behind when the noise is over, what we described in “One Could, One Should” applies: whoever has learned that no one will rescue him says “one” and shrugs.

Perhaps, however, the ploughed field is not meant for a new sowing at all, but for a different game. Artificial intelligence does not merely reshuffle the cards; it imposes a game with unknown rules, in which the existing players must first find their roles. The landscape gardeners of 2024 were already players in this game: Musk, Thiel and the investors from Silicon Valley, no longer the old money from oil, banking and trade. What they ordered was above all a free run. On the first day of his second term Trump revoked his predecessor’s executive order on AI safety, and in 2025 his party tried to forbid the states any regulation of their own for ten years, until the Senate struck it by 99 votes to 1. Yet whoever opens the game does not master it. As in “Die Zauberlehrlinge” (German), no master comes to put the brooms back, and when machines design their own successors, as the young engineer in “The Knitter at the Window” fears, at some point even the owner loses track. It is not certain that the landscape gardeners will still appear in this game, and for the many, whose last lever is the ballot, as we showed in “Utopia without Leverage”, it is not even certain that those elected will still decide. One of the two authors of this essay is himself part of this new game. We will devote a text of its own to it.

When the plougher leaves: who will sow on the turned-over field, and who will bring in the harvest?