Trump is a blustering numbskull who has no idea what Elon Musk's DOGE project is really about, argues Mike Brock in his essay, "The Plot Against America, How a Dangerous Ideology Born From the Libertarian Movement Stands Ready to Seize America."
Donald Trump, the supposed strongman at the heart of it all, is oblivious. He has no grand ideological project beyond his own power. He does not understand the system being built around him, nor the fact that his own presidency is merely a vehicle for forces that see him as a useful, temporary battering ram against democracy.
But those around him? They understand perfectly.
J.D. Vance, the Vice President in waiting, has studied Curtis Yarvin's work. Peter Thiel, his longtime patron, has been funding this vision for over a decade. Balaji Srinivasan is writing the blueprint. Elon Musk is laying the infrastructure. And the young operatives now wiring AI models into the Treasury Department—disbanding civil service, bypassing traditional government, and replacing democratic accountability with technological sovereignty—are working toward a future that will long outlast Trump himself.
DOGE is a program to replace democratic governance with engineering principles and AI:
Silicon Valley elites who had built successful companies began to view democratic processes not just as inefficient, but as fundamentally irrational—the product of what they saw as emotional decision-making by non-technical people. This merged perfectly with Hoppe's critique: if democracy was simply a collection of "feeling-based" choices made by the uninformed masses, surely it could be replaced by something more "rational"—specifically, the kind of data-driven, engineering-focused governance these tech leaders practiced in their own companies.
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The more radical conclusion, embraced by the figures at the forefront of this movement, is that government should be actively dismantled and replaced with a more "efficient" form of rule—one modeled on corporate governance rather than democratic participation.
"This is not about Trump," says Trump. "This is about what comes after him."
