Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire (“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!”) and then his flurry of accusations of it being broken (“ISRAEL DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS”) suggest that he is using social media to operate outside of the invisible institutional state systems that have constrained presidential action since at least the days of President Truman. We can infer that Trump is posting as Trump, not as the Trump administration. Trump is posting as a sovereign. The contrast with Biden’s Twitter/X account couldn’t be clearer. This is a style of wielding power.

And it is one, I suspect, which is not limited to Trump, but enabled by both new tools and shifts in capital accumulation towards tech and crypto. State monopolies of money and information have been disrupted and only the monopoly on violence remains. Under the old forms of state sovereignty, new forms of sovereignty are emerging. Individuals leveraging different kinds of platforms — whether financial, technological or media-related — have started to wield state-like influence. Elected officials at odds with intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and legislators can step outside of the parameters of government to persuade, isolate and break up conglomerates of power.

When a populist with ties to capital and tech, such as Trump, gets elected, this kind of disruption reaches its heights. The President behaves in some ways like a non-state actor operating within the state, and in other ways, like an avatar of the state. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Trump is clearly using his Truth Social posts to increase his own leverage and to change the direction of negotiations, not only with Israel and Iran, but potentially with his own military and administration officials. The negotiations, happening in real time, are complex and multidimensional.

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The ability to instantly disseminate global communiqués has increased the powers of the US President to shape events around the world. When Trump tweeted that the citizens of Tehran should evacuate, all the highways leading out of the city were jammed within minutes. In this century, neither Biden nor Obama nor George W. Bush used the powers of the presidency this way.

Critically, these new forms of sovereignty and power politics are not just emerging within the framework of states, but outside of them, suggesting new, covert forms of power. When a billionaire like Bill Ackman tweets his support of Israel, he is not just sharing an opinion, he’s hinting at where and how his capital will flow. Trump’s battles with Harvard, similarly, are not just about sticking it to the libs in a symbolic sense, but about cauterizing certain sources of soft counter-power. USAID was dismantled for similar reasons.

Perhaps the most significant indication that something has radically shifted in the way power works was the explosive social media war between President Trump and Elon Musk. For 24 hours, the spat absorbed the full attention of the discursive ecosystem. Rather than work through representatives or behind closed doors, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man engaged in a public tit-for-tat. I don’t think they did this to entertain us, but to test the limits of their power.

The Trump-Musk feud felt like a clean break from the tone, style and dynamic of managerial liberalism, which has been the American norm for 100 years. Rather, Musk’s language (“without me, Trump would have lost the election”) was classically Shakespearean: a powerful vassal lashing out against the king he helped to enthrone. The dynamic reminded me of Henry Percy (Hotspur) and Henry Bolingbroke in Henry IV. Hotspur feels he helped win the throne but hasn’t been adequately rewarded. Worcester, Hotspur’s uncle, tells the King bluntly that he owes his throne to the Percy clan — without them, you couldn’t have deposed even weak Richard II. The implication is threatening: we can overthrow you just as we helped you overthrow your predecessor. After Trump hit back, Tesla’s $150 billion plunge in market value felt like a battlefield loss, like Hotspur’s armies fleeing. When Musk threatened to “begin decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft”, he resembled a grand duke refusing to send his retinue to join the king’s military campaign.

These are examples of feudalism, not of centralized or modern state power. Power increasingly seems shared, asymmetrically distributed; absolute only in small spheres, and those spheres overlap. These exchanges — whether between Trump and Musk or Trump and Khamenei — recall the depictions of Johan Huizinga, in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, of a time when feuds and vendettas were “the cardinal point of policy” and populations gathered behind aristocratic figures clamoring for “vengeance”. The late-medieval period was one where personality underwrote political stability, personal instability predicted political chaos, and pride drove public affairs.

Techno-aristocrats like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg already possess state-like wealth and functional power. Trump 2.0 models itself after a tech company, and tech companies increasingly resemble governments. Now that Trump can negotiate a ceasefire, or crash Tehran traffic, with a tweet, and Musk can threaten to withdraw space infrastructure over personal grievances, we’ve returned to a world where individual character matters more than systemic process.

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Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Back then, the system was strong. Presidents were thought-leaders who helped steer the ship but weren’t solely responsible for it. Now the system seems weak, fragmented; showmanship and emotion are weirdly reassuring to us. Someone, not something, is in charge.

This return to Shakespearean feudalism suggests both promise and peril — certainly peril for Iran. In Shakespeare’s plays, genuine personal risk and nobility exist alongside terrifying unpredictability in court politics. And it won’t be long before charismatic personalities once again eclipse institutional constraints, and sovereign individuals come to rival sovereign states. This is our new Shakespearean politics — the personal and tragic, played out on a global scale.

Given the way the lawfare against Trump was conducted, however, it doesn’t really matter whether this particular case had merit or not, or whether Trump really did engage in fraud or not. Both sides in this political dispute made up their minds long ago.

But even when it seemed that Trump had finally been cornered by some truly insurmountable legal costs, serendipity appeared to once again intervene on his behalf. The tiny social media platform, Truth Social, which Trump helped to create partly in response to having his Facebook and Twitter accounts banned, last week went public, leading to a truly staggering explosion of the company’s value. Like a phoenix, Trump’s fortunes seemed set to rise from the ashes yet again — only for Truth Social’s stock to plummet yesterday.

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Now, there’s really no way to spin it: Truth Social is a joke as a company. Founded mostly as a result of a specific, parochial political grievance, it has a minuscule user base and almost no revenue streams to speak of. Even the business models of today’s largest social media companies are questionable in the long-term, especially now that the fairy-tale period of permanent zero interest rate policies seems to be over. If Twitter can’t turn a profit, then Truth Social definitely can’t.

Still, even despite yesterday’s collapse, to say that Truth Social is a foolish investment is to miss the point. The company that owns Truth Social — Trump Media & Technology Group — has the stock ticker “DJT”, which is itself very revealing. Just as the courts, which are meant to be impartial and non-political, can be weaponised in the ongoing war between America’s two political tribes, so can stock purchases. Though stocks are in theory expressions of non-political, cold economic logic, in practice, they can be easily turned into a political cudgel. Indeed, many people buying Truth Social stock are doing so in order to both literally and figuratively invest in Donald J. Trump — though others are probably hoping to pass on the stock to a greater fool down the road. To be clear, this isn’t the first time stock purchases have become a backdrop for political drama; a while back, the stock of the video game retailer, GameStop, became the centre of a similar campaign of buying a stock as a form of revenge.

In any event, the result will be the same: an almost voluntary, “consensual” stock market bubble, where few people are likely to have any illusions as to what the end point of it all is. In a way, the Truth Social gambit is actually incredibly inspired: in the US, political campaign donations are ring-fenced with a massive number of rules and regulations. Investing in $DJT, on the other hand? That is every man, woman and child’s unalienable and unrestricted economic right.

In this way, Trump has, entirely by accident, run rings around the entire campaign finance regulatory framework. The same logic of “us-versus-them” that allowed American liberals to approve of any attempt to stop Trump from running for president, no matter how spurious or far-fetched, is now on display in equal measure from the opposite side of the political divide. It’s hard to shake the feeling that the battle between Trump and his political enemies is starting to resemble something out of an old cartoon show. Like Bugs Bunny battling it out against his arch-nemesis Elmer Fudd, neither Trump nor his enemies are ever truly defeated. As the show goes on, each side simply comes up with increasingly bizarre methods to get their enemy into trouble or escape it themselves.

But this is not a laughing matter. Even though the individual twists and turns in this political drama may seem absurd or humorous, the underlying truth is that the American political system is rapidly being destroyed. A functioning republic requires a base level of respect for political opponents, and that is now being torched on both sides. Worse yet, the US is inching closer to a massive financial crisis and even real bankruptcy, as the constantly increasing levels of debt will sooner or later result in a situation where the burden of interest payments breaks the federal budget.

This combination of acute social and economic problems, and a political system so mired in infighting and mutual hatred that it can’t focus on anything else, is — and this is putting it mildly — not a happy one. Yet this is exactly the situation in which the US finds itself. There is no longer any real possibility of fixing the fiscal situation at all; the most recent numbers show that the US is now adding debt at a ground-breaking pace of roughly $1 trillion per three months. To get a sense of what this means in practice, it now takes slightly less than three months for the US to add enough debt to make its added interest payments larger than the annual budget of the entire US Marine Corps. This is in no way sustainable even over the short term; yet the US political class is too obsessed with infighting, grandstanding and demagoguery of various kinds to even notice the very real iceberg that is now straight ahead of them.

Given that neither Trump nor Biden nor anyone else seems able to escape this dynamic, 2024 might turn out to be one of those elections where there is no winner. For who seriously still believes that either man has got what it takes to turn over a new leaf in 2025 and heal all that has been poisoned, and repair what is now being broken? Perhaps, at a time like this, we find the true poetic genius of the Truth Social scheme: like the American political system, it doesn’t even pretend to have a business model anymore.