Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s dispatch:
A further dissection of the differences between the first and second Trump administrations, focused in this case on the sexual fantasies that structure the politics of each; and
an examination of Chinese manufacturer TikTok and its response to the Trump tariffs.
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What type of perverts are we dealing with here?
A few weeks ago, in a post called “Soy Right ascendant,” I tried to map out what I see as some essential differences between the first and second Trump administrations. My theory has been that shifting power balances within the Trump coalition have led to differences in what you might call the “affective experience” of Trumpism. If the first administration was defined by MAGA populism, old-school conservative ghouls, and the “alt-right,” the second administration has so far been defined by techno-accelerationism, Silicon Valley reactionaries, and the “soy right”:
The MAGA populist fraction of the Trumpist coalition has been relatively marginalized in favor of the austerian-accelerationist Silicon Valley right. The archetypal article about Trump voters in rural diners has been replaced with magazine stories about obnoxious arrivistes comparing Trump to Beyoncé and the inauguration to Comic-Con. […] The end beneficiaries of Trumpist upward redistribution haven’t changed much. But the affect of the second Trump administration is, so far, wholly different. Gone is the apocalyptic malevolence of “American carnage,” supplanted by the unctuous corniness of “DOGE.” Gone is the sense of a lasting political realignment, succeeded by an inescapable minoritarian whine. Gone are Steve Bannon, the alt-right, and the “forgotten man and woman” Trump celebrated in his 2016 victory speech. In their place: Elon Musk and the Soy Right.
In retrospect, I was missing an important--arguably the fundamental--dimension of this taxonomy: The sexual fantasies and fetishes shaping the political and moral vision of each Trump administration. The question is not simply “what type of guy is tweeting about Trump this time around?” but “what type of pervert?” The Trump project, across both administrations, has always obviously been animated by an intense, whole-body racial-sexual terror--but how that terror manifests itself, i.e. in which specific sexual pathologies, is an important question. For each administration, which Pornhub category is providing a kind of governing logic? Is it the same?
The answer for Trump I was, obviously, cuckoldry, which stirred imaginations across the Trump bloc throughout his campaign and first administration. “Cuck,” no one will have forgotten, was the preferred insult deployed against enemies by Trump supporters online, while at the same time prominent members of the Trump campaign and administration were apparently active enthusiasts of the practic--according to leaked texts from his daughters, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort pressured his wife into sex with strangers, while longtime advisor Roger Stone and his wife were more openly and, as far as we know, healthily involved.
But beyond its role in rhetoric and enjoyment as a pastime, cuckoldry as a concept also seemed to structure the first Trump administration’s understanding of politics and focus its obsessions: The idea of a black or brown stranger entering one’s home in order to replace and emasculate its owner is almost too on-the-nose as a parable about the Trumpist understanding of immigration. (So too, with respect to Trumpist gender politics, is the idea, implicit in the fantasy, that the female partner prefers the new guy.)
But cuckoldry, conceptually and actually, seems less important to Trump II, which--recent events notwithstanding--is much more focused than its forerunner on international politics, trade relations, and America’s place in the world. If not cuckoldry, what fetish structures the politics of the second Trump administration? Recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli provides an interesting answer:
Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multiple sources close to the tech entrepreneur said they believe the true number of Musk’s children is much higher than publicly known. […]
Musk has warned that “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t start having more children, a view popularized as pronatalism in right-wing circles. The pronatalism movement is composed of people concerned about the birthrate and eager to implement policy and cultural solutions to the problem.[…]
[Musk fixer Jared] Birchall was involved in acquiring the property for a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences, according to a person familiar with the matter. He is involved in other property deals across Musk’s different businesses.
Zilis lives in the gated community with their children, and Musk comes and goes. Musk also attempted to get Grimes to move to the compound, but she refused. Similarly, he tried to get St. Clair to spend some time in Austin “with our kid legion,” according to a text he sent her.
I’m sure that many “pronatalists” would insist that their concern over birth rates is entirely practical, and completely unrelated to their sexual preferences or racial anxieties. But I have personally had a hard time shaking the sense that “pronatalism” is, basically, a weird sex thing--especially given how eager practical pronatalists like the Reddit gadflies Simone and Malcolm Collins are for attention.
And as Trumpism moves from the more narrowly focused domestic project of its first, populist instantiation--i.e., ending immigration--to the more international “civilizational” project of its second, techno-reactionary instantiation, so too should its sexual fantasies be reconfigured. What better to replace cuckoldry as the world-ordering perversion of the Trump project than a sort of public-policy “breeding” fetish? As Quinn Slobodian wrote in the New Statesman last year, Musk and company’s “pronatalism” is effectively a policy solution to the reactionary fever dream of a “great replacement”:
Fears of fewer humans are almost always fears of fewer specific humans. This was true in the 19th century when the French panicked over their shrinking nation and it was true at the height of the Cold War when the spectre of overpopulation was decidedly non-white. In the most iconic novel of the New Right, Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, Calcutta slum-dwellers drift in an enormous flotilla of rusted ships to arrive in the south of France where liberals welcome them with open arms, only to be plundered and slaughtered. While long-termist debates speak of humanity as such, racial and cultural anxieties lie just beneath the surface.
In Rome, Musk struck a pose as the defender of the human species but drew his biggest applause when he responded to a softball question about immigration by saying that “we don’t want Italy as a culture to disappear”. Italy, he added to further applause, was not its buildings but its people. Implicit in what he was saying was that newcomers could never be true Italians and that something was fundamentally important about a continual inheritance through a population of certain values and habits and tastes. The statistical curve of human population seemed to divide into different subpopulations after all. Demographic catastrophism rescued cultural particularism through the back door.
The concern here is less “strangers fucking your wife” and more “strangers fucking their own wives while you and your wife don’t fuck at all.” (It’s hard not to see a version of this concern lurking behind the Trump tariffs policy.) This is not to say that cuckoldry has disappeared from the Trump imaginary--more that it’s been sublimated. And plus, maybe there is a synthesis between cuckoldry and breeding to be found.
Unrelatedly, here’s the end of a Wired piece from Februray about Stephen and Katie Miller and Elon Musk:
Still, Musk’s relationship with the Millers has become a subject of great intrigue in Washington as DOGE continues to wreak havoc on the federal government. Little is known about how often they interact outside of work and how the relationship grew over the late stages of the campaign into the transition.
“If you can find out anything about Stephen Miller’s social life, I don’t wanna know the answer,” says a longtime Republican operative who knows the couple personally.
“Stephen and Katie are very attentive to [Musk],” the Republican who referred to Stephen as “prime minister” tells WIRED. There’s also only one audience which truly matters, they say: “He’s got a forgiving audience: the audience of one, and all of us around him.”
The TikTok tariffs
Among the many reasons I am skeptical of the the idea that the U.S. and China are engaged in some kind of grand “civilization conflict” is the fact that we are, by and large, very similar countries: Large, wealthy, abundant in natural resources, heavy-drinking, internet-obsessed, prone to a cheeky little ethnic cleansing and/or real-estate bubble every now and again. I found myself particularly struck by the essential similarities between our countries this past week when TikTok and downstream social networks like Twitter and Instagram have been flooded with videos from Chinese factories in which people claimed to be revealing the secrets of luxury-good manufacturing as a response to the Trump administration’s new tariffs on China.
“For the past more than 30 years, we have been the OEM [original equipment manufacturer, i.e. the factory that makes the stuff for the company that ultimately sells it] factory for most of the luxury brands around the world: Gucci, Prada, Coach, Louis Vuitton,” says the guy above, a representative for Sen Bags, in one of the more widely seen videos. “Now, as the U.S.A. and its little European brothers are trying to refuse Chinese goods… why don’t you just contact us and buy from us? You won’t believe the prices we give you.”
This video, and others from accounts like LunaSourcingChina, were immediately repackaged and reshared on TikTok and Twitter as evidence of China opening a new front in the trade war--possibly with government coordination. “The best part about this trade war so far has been the Chinese manufacturers exposing your favorite ‘luxury’ brands and letting everyone know it all comes from them,” went one fairly typical tweet. “They’re NOT playing anymore and I’m here for it.”
But as many people have now pointed out, the claims being made in the videos--especially as extrapolated into breathless American tweets--are hard to take seriously. Birkenstock shoes are almost all made in Germany; Birkin bags are (very famously!) hand-made in France. It’s true, many brands produce misleading “made in” tags for products that are substantially manufactured elsewhere (often in China) but Chinese manufacturers are serious people, and no O.E.M. worth its salt is going to burn some very lucrative bridges by naming and shaming clients to prove a political point on TikTok.
No, what these guys are doing--and to return to my original point--is savvy internet marketing. For the last couple years “doing funny viral TikToks” has become a speciality marketing tactic for Chinese manufacturers looking to expand their markets, as Rest of World reported last year:
As the domestic economy slows, Chinese manufacturers are trying harder to win orders in a competitive export market. While most users watch online videos for entertainment, factories are now on the platforms to sell everything from electronics components to lighting products and industrial chemicals. The vast reach of short videos and recommendation algorithms have helped some find new business customers. Chinese sourcing agents — people who help overseas buyers look for suppliers, and factories in countries like Vietnam and Cambodia — have also promoted goods on TikTok.
It’s a delicate task promoting factory products in a format designed for lip-syncing videos, Zhu told Rest of World. If a video is too commercial, he said, it will have a low reach and bring in little business. But if the content is too funny, it will get lots of views but put off potential clients. “We strike a balance between entertainment and business in every piece of content,” he said. The firm gets, on average, one business inquiry for every 1,000 views on TikTok, and about 3% to 10% of inquiries are converted into orders, according to Zhu.
The most famous Viral O.E.M. Guy is 25-year-old Tony Zhu, quoted in the article, who works in sales at a light-box manufacturer and whose videos--usually stitch reactions in which he immediately moves into a smooth sales patter in a variety of surprisingly accomplished accents--have become popular enough that he was invited to meet iShowSpeed on the megapopular YouTuber’s recent tour of China:
@lcsign_lightboxRechargeable light box🙌😘😘 #lightbox #ledlightboxes #businessigns #businesstipsforyou #businessproposal #smallsbusiness #slimlightbox #factory #factorylife #lcsign #funny #foryoupage #pvc #menudisplay #us Tiktok failed to load.
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Tony, and the bag salesman above, are hardly products of a deeply alien civilization, and they’re certainly not some kind of C.C.P. psy-op designed to undermine American business. It’s a bit spooky and cyberpunk to imagine that the Chinese government has unleashed a mass viral social-media campaign to undermine the luxury-brand market as a sophisticated infowar response to tariffs. But it’s much funnier, and therefore much more cyberpunk, to realize that what’s actually happening is a bunch of sales guys at Chinese O.E.M. factories are sufficiently tuned in to American social media to realize that “luxury brands are fake, America is trash, and China is the future” is actually a crazy good sales pitch to American consumers on TikTok.
