The Ghost of Empire Cashes Out:

Trump is the Specter of a Long Line of Capitalist Corruption

Whoooo is haunting the cabinet of Empire?

The charge that Donald Trump is “the most corrupt president in American history” is a claim that easily resonates across liberal discourse. And yet, the premise itself—like so much in U.S. political speech—relies on a forgetfulness that masks not only the deep roots of American governance but also the shifting architectures of global capitalism. Corruption, in the historical materialist sense, is not the failure of a president’s character. It is the rational outcome of an imperialist system organized to ensure that private accumulation reproduces and masquerades itself as public service. (Harvey, 2012. p.82)

To call Trump the most corrupt is to misrecognize the transformation underway. Corruption under capitalism is not static—it evolves. Its modes of operation change as capital itself shifts form: from land grabs to financial derivatives, from plantation to private equity, from Cold War militarism to blockchain speculation. Trump did not invent this. He simply stopped hiding it.

Since the days of Manifest Destiny, the U.S. presidency has served as a managerial post in an expanding project of capital accumulation. From Jackson’s genocidal land transfers to McKinley’s overseas annexations, the presidency has legitimated both internal and external conquest—reinforced by the Monroe Doctrine’s hemispheric policing, and later institutionalized through Pax Americana and the Marshall Plan’s financial capture of postwar Europe. Grant’s railroad kickbacks, Reagan’s Iran-Contra arms-for-oil diplomacy and his litany of free-market deregulations and entrenchment of neoliberalism as praxis and principle, Clinton’s NAFTA-laced tech booms, and Obama’s drone-enforced globalization—each era has worn corruption differently. But across these epochs, the office has remained tethered to capital’s needs, repackaged as strength, security, or modernization. Trump’s innovation is to have stripped the pretense, collapsing the line between state and self—and celebrating the fusion as the ideal.

What makes the current phase appear more dangerous is not just the theatricality of corruption but the infrastructural shifts that sustain it. Since the 2008 financial collapse, a quiet transformation has occurred in the legal and accounting scaffolding of U.S. governance. Regulatory regimes were not rebuilt but re-routed—circumvented by private compliance firms, rewritten through industry-drafted legislation, and deferred to a class of technocrats who serve capital more than the public good. Multi-trillion dollar asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard, hedge funds operating through sovereign debt speculation, and a constellation of private equity firms have emerged as de facto governors, wielding influence over housing, health care, infrastructure, and even monetary policy. The federal debt—now surpassing $37 trillion—is not merely a fiscal burden. It is a structural condition, one that indexes a deeper reality: that wealth-generating industries have outpaced the state itself. We have been in the throes of an American Perestroika—a slow, privatized unraveling of the institutions that once claimed democratic legitimacy, replaced by liquidity flows, managed risk, and the securitization of governance.

Trump did not create this system, but he thrives within it. His politics are not a rupture from neoliberalism—they are its natural extension, repackaged as populist revival. He governs not through lineage, but through capital itself: extractive, unaccountable, and self-justifying. He realizes the Ayn Rand fantasy—a ruling class mistaking accumulation for merit. In Trump, Atlas doesn’t shrug. He cashes out.

And when we talk about spectral capitalism—the kind that operates through derivatives of meaning, through debts that can never be repaid, through assets that exist more in algorithm than in soil—Trump is an apparition of capital’s final form: detached from production, liberated from the nation-state, and hollowed out of public purpose. He haunts the ruins of governance like a real estate developer wandering an empty casino, promising revival while selling off slot machines and floor tiles. In the logic of Assets under Management, extraction becomes metaphysical: power is no longer exercised through branding, spectacle, or access. He does not need to govern institutions because he has already replaced them with himself.

What makes Trump’s current presidency—whether official or shadow-state—so illustrative is the way it absorbs the latest phase of capitalism into its very governing logic. As discussed in the New Republic article, Trump did not travel to the Persian Gulf as a diplomat. He traveled as a dynast. Beneath the choreography of meetings and memoranda lies a cruder pursuit: the unification of empire and enterprise, cloaked in the language of dealmaking.

Saudi Arabia and Qatar did not simply receive a sitting American president. They engaged with a global investor whose personal brand has become inseparable from state power. The $400 million Boeing jet offered by Qatar, dressed up as a “gift” to the Pentagon, functions as both tribute and transactional leverage—a royal favor traded in the coin of access. That the jet may be transferred to Trump's personal foundation after his term is not an aberration. It is the expected outcome of a model where empire is collateral, and diplomacy is an extension of branded capital.

This is not bribery in the traditional sense. There is no envelope passed under a table. Instead, access is coded into real estate portfolios, investment incentives, and cryptocurrency markets. Trump’s heirs, in the meantime, are busy extending the family's financial perimeter through luxury developments in Jeddah and Dubai, while brokering crypto schemes that promise elite investors direct proximity to executive power. The president’s meme coin, $TRUMP, is not just a financial instrument—it is an invitation-only channel of governance, where buying into the speculative frenzy is itself a mode of influence.

This collapse between governance and private interest marks a deeper shift in the character of global capital. The age of industrial monopoly gave way to financial abstraction, and now, in this late phase, we arrive at specular governance—where symbolic tokens, meme currencies, and digital assets haunt the halls of policy, possessing the forms of civic process while exorcising public accountability. Governance no longer legislates—it circulates, as if each decree were a share in a startup state.

Trump is not an aberration. He is the clearest expression of what American governance has become. His presidency is not a collapse. It is the culmination of a system where empire and enterprise are one and the same.

Trump in the Global Spectral Context

But enough waxing the ghost of capitalism. It’s a haunting that feels hopeless as if we are possessed, occupied, and in need of an exorcism. Let’s talk about BRICS.

The Belt and Road Initiative and the expansion of BRICS shine a light on the increasing irrelevance of dollar hegemony in South-South trade: these are the counterweights to Western overreach. They are indicators of an exhausted imperial order and the slow reassertion of multipolar sovereignty.

As BRICS+ nations design new institutions for finance, energy, and digital infrastructure, they are not simply replicating the Bretton Woods model—they are rejecting the presumption that Western governance is a universal good. This has profound implications for how we interpret corruption, legitimacy, and accountability. Where once Western states could cast themselves as guardians of the rules-based order, today both Trump and Biden treat governance as a self-enriching performance. The hypocrisy is no longer deniable. It is structural. And visible to all.

In this light, Trump is not just a U.S. phenomenon. He is a symbol of how the Western imperial project has cannibalized itself. Governance serves to privatize the remnants or empire, no different from how Eddie Lampert stripped Sears of its assets. In contrast, emerging alliances in the Global South are experimenting with new forms of statecraft—ones still vulnerable, still uneven, but increasingly rooted in resource sovereignty, regional integration, and mutual infrastructural development.

The question is no longer whether corruption exists in any given state. The question is: whose corruption serves which global order? Trump’s is the corruption of a declining empire, desperately monetizing its waning authority. The BRICS bloc, for all its contradictions, represents something else—a refusal to participate in the theater, and a search for alternatives beyond the spectacle.

In the end, Trump is not an aberration. He is the ghost of empire cashing out.