A year from now, after the Republican bicameral majority has been obliterated in the midterms, Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation from Congress may come to be recognized as the first leak in the hull of the sinking GOP ship of state. Trump, of course, regarded it as a victory over a weaker rival, as he does most things. But it was the opposite. Greene’s refusal to march to Trump’s orders was the cracking noise of a vessel under too much strain. If you ignore it, you know what comes next.

And you don’t have to look that closely to see that there are cracks everywhere.

This weekend, the New York Times ran a story on David Sacks, Trump’s “A.I. and crypto czar,” detailing his many alleged conflicts of interest. The case is based more on spatters of blood than a smoking gun, and Sacks and his tech mogul friends responded to it with smug indignation. Sacks tweeted irritably about “NYT’S HOAX FACTORY.” Marc Andreesen, Elon Musk, and Bill Ackman chimed in to praise Sacks as an example of “American greatness.” Sacks’ podcast co-host Jason Calacanis mused, moustache-twirlingly, about buying the New York Times.

But whether or not Sacks is personally profiting off his position in the White House matters little in the greater scheme of things. Sacks is a billionaire and a giant in Silicon Valley. He has grander aspirations than boosting his investment portfolio by putting his thumb on the regulatory scales. He’s open about what he wants: to keep the American tech industry at the center of the global AI revolution. The profits he would reap from achieving that goal dwarf any marginal advantage he could milk out of the petty venality the New York Times accuses him of. But I doubt that even vast levels of personal enrichment is what motivates Sacks’ work in the Trump administration. Those at the frontier of AI believe that their industry will change not only world history, but possibly the direction of the entire human species. Sacks is putting his mark on the universe.

It’s hard to conceive of a dream more “globalist” than that one. Sacks wraps up his AI plans in the American flag because that’s how you sell things to MAGA. But the policies he has pushed for include such things as easing export controls on NVIDIA microchips to China, on the assumption that driving innovation everywhere strengthens America by benefiting its ownership class. These are ideas that give Steve Bannon aneurysms. The tech right are unreconstructed stateless neoliberals; they just tweaked their branding to exploit the opportunity they saw in Trump. It’s worked out extraordinarily well for them.

Social Studies is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

But it’s becoming more and more obvious that the glaring internal contradictions the tech oligarchs have imposed upon the MAGA coalition will rip the Republican Party to shreds. Democrats cleaned up in last month’s elections for Georgia’s utility board because of surging electricity bills driven in part by the voracious energy appetites of new data centers for the AI industry. The same issue cropped up in races Democrats won in Virginia and New Jersey, and is now festering all over the country, as data centers spring up like mushrooms after a storm. We’re not even at the stage yet of mass worker displacement by artificial intelligence, and already the interests of the AI-driven tech industry are diverging radically from those of ordinary American voters.

Among the issues from which Marjorie Taylor Greene broke from the Trump administration was the President’s fervid devotion to his AI-obsessed tech donors. Before it was stripped from the legislation, Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ included a decade-long ban on state regulation of artificial intelligence, which Greene vocally opposed. She also criticized the President’s AI Action Plan, co-written by Sacks, for its push to steamroll construction of data centers over local opposition.

There were other issues too, of course, including Trump’s about-face on the Epstein Files and his eagerness to embroil the United States in foreign entanglements, including regime change war on Venezuela. But they all have something in common: whether it’s billionaire pedophiles, neocons like Marco Rubio, or the tech right, Trump has steadily abandoned the principles that once endeared him to his MAGA base and let billionaires, corporate lobbyists, and the war-mongering Deep State dictate his administration’s goals and priorities to him.

Secure in his second term and cozy in his bubble-wrapped echo chamber, the President has allowed himself to drift further and further out of touch with the people who voted for him, putting his Congressional allies in the impossible position of choosing between their loyalty to him and to their populist-leaning constituents. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, as Trump has clearly always coveted the approval and admiration of elites, adopting populism only in response to the rejection they met him with and the seething resentment it stoked in him. Now he has those elites kissing the ring, even if only to swindle him into doing their bidding. The fealty of his vassals has put him in a magnanimous mood. But the peasants are still starving.