Trump's America Is Restructuring the Business Elite. History Shows What Comes Next.
Independent wealth is a threat. Dependent wealth is a pillar of support. Strongmen have always known the difference.
In the first two installments of this series, we covered courts and the media. Two institutions that can say no to power and make it stick. The strongman neutralizes both before moving to the third technique, because the third technique requires that the legal and informational environment already be under control.
The third technique is corrupting the business elite.
For American readers, this installment may be the most immediately recognizable of the series so far. You do not need to look up the history of Argentine newsprint allocation or Philippine coconut monopolies to understand what it describes. You can read it in the business news. You can hear it in what American executives say publicly versus what they say privately. The technique is older than any of the historical cases examined here, but it is also entirely contemporary. What follows is the history. You will recognize the present in it.
This is the third installment of The Strongman’s Playbook. It is a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.
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Not nationalizing industry. Not eliminating private wealth. The Soviet model of state ownership is not what we are examining here. What strongmen across the twentieth century discovered, and refined into something approaching an art form, is a subtler arrangement. You leave the business class nominally in place. You let them keep their companies, their wealth, their social status. You simply restructure the relationship between their continued prosperity and their relationship to you. Once that restructuring is complete, the business elite is no longer a potential source of opposition. It becomes a pillar of support.
The mechanism is straightforward. In a functioning market economy, businesses succeed or fail based primarily on what they produce, how efficiently they produce it, and whether customers want it. The state is a regulator and tax collector, occasionally a customer, sometimes an obstacle. In an authoritarian system, the state becomes something different: the primary determinant of whether a business thrives or dies. Licenses, contracts, regulatory approvals, access to credit, protection from foreign competition, the allocation of scarce inputs — all of these flow through the state. And the state, under a strongman, flows through the strongman.
Once that is true, the rational calculation for a business owner changes completely. Opposition becomes economically suicidal. Support becomes the price of survival. And active, visible, enthusiastic support becomes the path to exceptional rewards.
Mussolini worked this out earlier than most. He came to power in 1922 with the backing of significant parts of the Italian industrial and agricultural elite, who saw fascism as a useful tool against labor organizing and socialist politics. They thought they were using him. He understood, from the beginning, that the relationship would eventually run in the other direction.
By the mid-1920s Mussolini had established the corporatist system that would define Italian fascism’s economic model. The corporations were not corporations in the modern sense. They were state-supervised bodies that organized each sector of the economy, bringing together employers and workers under state mediation. The independent trade unions were destroyed. Labor was organized through fascist syndicates that had no genuine bargaining power. Employers who worked within the system gained access to state contracts, protection from foreign competition, and relief from the kind of labor militancy that had terrified them before 1922.
The price was compliance. Industrialists who publicly supported the regime flourished. Those who showed independence found that their regulatory environment became suddenly more complicated, their access to credit more difficult, their labor relations less protected. The system did not require the state to expropriate anyone. It required only that every significant business owner understand that their prosperity was conditional on their political behavior.
Agnelli of Fiat understood this and adapted. So did the major steel and chemicals interests. The ones who did not adapt quietly disappeared from the landscape of Italian industry, bought out or marginalized or simply made an example of.
What Mussolini built was not a planned economy. It was a protection racket organized at national scale. Pay the protection, demonstrate loyalty, and the state shields you from competition, labor unrest, and regulatory inconvenience. Refuse, and everything becomes harder.
Perón in Argentina had the advantage of radio, and he used it more aggressively than any Latin American leader before him. Radio Belgrano became in effect the voice of Peronism. It broadcast the regime’s version of events, Evita’s speeches, and the emotional content of the Peronist movement directly into Argentine homes. This was not propaganda in the crude sense of obvious distortion. It was something more sophisticated: the saturation of the information environment with a particular emotional register, a particular set of heroes and villains, a particular way of understanding Argentine history and identity.
At the same time, Perón dealt with the print press through a combination of methods that would become a template for the region. Newsprint was a scarce commodity in postwar Argentina, and the government controlled its allocation. Papers that criticized the regime found their newsprint allocations cut. Papers that supported Perón found the supply reliable. This is an almost elegant form of media control because it is deniable. The government never told any newspaper what to write. It simply managed the supply of paper.
The opposition newspaper La Prensa held out longer than most. It was one of the most respected papers in Latin America and had been publishing since 1869. Perón eventually had it expropriated in 1951, handing it to the General Confederation of Labor. The message to every other media owner in Argentina was clear. Hold out long enough and you lose everything.
The same logic applied across the business sector. Import substitution policies protected domestic manufacturers from foreign competition — but that protection was not automatic. It flowed to businesses that cooperated. State contracts went to the politically reliable. Access to the banking system, which the state increasingly controlled, was easier for those who supported the regime. Perón’s government was not anti-business in any straightforward sense. It was selective. Business was welcome to prosper, provided it prospered in the right direction.
The rural elite, the traditional landowning oligarchy that had dominated Argentine politics before Perón, faced a different and more sustained pressure. Perón taxed agricultural exports heavily through a state marketing board that bought produce at below-market prices and sold it abroad at world prices, capturing the margin for the state. The landed elite lost economic ground throughout the Perón years, partly by design. They had been the power behind Argentine politics for a century. Perón needed them weakened.
What he replaced them with was a new business class more dependent on state favor, more tied to the Peronist political project, and less capable of organizing effective opposition. This is the deeper logic of the technique: you are not just buying compliance from the existing elite. You are restructuring who the elite is, replacing independent wealth with dependent wealth, and in doing so changing the social base of potential opposition.
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Marcos in the Philippines took this further than either Mussolini or Perón, in part because martial law gave him instruments of control that the Italian and Argentine leaders had to acquire more gradually.
The result was what historians and economists call crony capitalism, though that term understates the deliberateness of what Marcos built. He did not simply allow corruption to develop around his inner circle. He engineered a system in which the major sectors of the Philippine economy were divided among a small number of allies, each of whom owed their position entirely to Marcos and whose continued prosperity depended on his continued power.
Eduardo Cojuangco controlled coconut. Roberto Benedicto controlled sugar. Lucio Tan controlled tobacco and later banking and aviation. These were not independent businessmen who happened to be friendly with the president. They were, in effect, state-franchised monopolists whose licenses to operate came directly from Marcos and could be revoked just as directly.
The mechanisms were various. Monopoly boards were established for key commodities, with Marcos allies at the head. Coconut farmers paid a levy into a fund that was nominally for development but was in practice controlled by Cojuangco and used to acquire businesses and fund political activity. The sugar industry was reorganized under a single marketing authority that Benedicto ran. Banks were pressured to extend credit to politically favored businesses and to decline credit to businesses associated with opposition figures.
What made the Marcos system particularly effective was how thoroughly it blurred the line between public and private. His cronies were not simply businessmen who supported him. They were mechanisms of state economic control operating through nominally private corporate structures. When the World Bank or foreign investors looked at the Philippine economy, they saw a private sector. What they were actually looking at was a patronage network organized to sustain one man’s hold on power.
When Marcos fell in 1986, the economic damage was severe. The Philippines entered the post-Marcos period with an economy distorted by two decades of cronyism, a private sector incapable of competing internationally because it had never needed to, and a set of economic institutions that existed primarily to serve political rather than productive purposes. Recovery took a generation.
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I have been following the relationship between the Trump administration and the American business elite with considerable attention, and I find it recognizable in ways that deserve to be said plainly.
What has happened since January 2025 is not identical to what Marcos built or what Perón constructed. American institutions are more robust, American wealth is more diversified, and the legal and political constraints on what any administration can do are more substantial than what any of these historical cases faced.
But the direction of movement is familiar.
The largest technology companies, whose executives were publicly critical of Trump in his first term, have in the second term become conspicuously cooperative. Regulatory investigations that were proceeding against major tech platforms were quietly shelved or deprioritized. Federal contracts continued to flow. Executives who had kept their distance appeared at the inauguration, attended meetings at Mar-a-Lago, and made large donations to inaugural funds.
Tariffs have become a political instrument in ways that go beyond trade policy. The threat of tariffs, and the promise of exemptions, creates exactly the kind of leverage that Perón exercised through newsprint and regulatory approval. A business facing a 25 percent tariff on its inputs has an extremely strong incentive to maintain a good relationship with the administration that can grant an exemption. That incentive does not require anyone to say anything explicit. It operates through the logic of the situation.
The atmosphere among American executives is well documented: privately critical, publicly silent, carefully present at the right events. This is not courage under pressure. But it is also not a fully free business class operating in a political environment where their choices are genuinely independent of their relationship to the state.
Mussolini did not need to nationalize Fiat. He needed Agnelli to understand the terms of the relationship. That understanding, once established, was self-enforcing.
The common thread in these historical cases carries a direct warning for what Americans should expect after Trump. Recovery from authoritarian consolidation is never as fast or as clean as the fall itself. You can restore press freedom relatively quickly. You can reappoint independent judges. The restructuring of the relationship between private wealth and state power is more durable, because it reshapes incentives, habits, and expectations that do not change with a change of government.
The Philippine recovery after Marcos was slow and painful precisely because the crony system had penetrated so deeply into the economic structure that dismantling it required dismantling the economy itself in some sectors. The coconut and sugar monopolies had destroyed the competitive capacity of those industries. Rebuilding them took decades.
The Italian case after Mussolini was complicated by the postwar political settlement, in which many of the industrialists who had supported fascism retained their positions and their wealth under the new republic. The Christian Democrats found the same business elite useful that Mussolini had cultivated, and the relationship between Italian industry and Italian politics remained unusually close for decades after the war. The technique outlasted the regime that had introduced it.
The Argentine case produced something different: a legacy of economic nationalism, state intervention, and business-government entanglement that has shaped Argentine economic policy ever since, across governments of very different political orientations. Peronism reshaped not just the business class of its own era but the expectations and habits of Argentine political economy for generations.
Americans who are watching what is happening now and wondering what comes after need to take this seriously. A future administration committed to democratic restoration will face a business class whose habits and incentives have been reshaped by years of calculated cooperation with state power. Undoing that is not a matter of policy announcements. It is a matter of rebuilding the expectation that prosperity does not depend on political loyalty. That rebuilding takes time. The historical cases suggest it takes more time than most people expect.
This is why the technique matters even before it reaches its most developed form. The early stages, when businesses are still making calculations about how cooperative to be, when the terms of the relationship are still being negotiated, are the moment when resistance is most possible and most consequential. The further the process goes, the more the business class becomes structurally dependent on the relationship continuing, and the more it has to lose from any democratic correction.
I think about the American executives sitting in those meetings at Mar-a-Lago, calculating the cost of cooperation against the cost of independence. That calculation is not new. Agnelli made it in the 1920s. Argentine industrialists made it in the 1940s. Philippine business families made it in the 1970s.
The ones who cooperated mostly kept their wealth, for a while. The countries they helped entrench paid for it long after the strongman was gone.
Part 4 is next. We move to the civil service.
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Stay inspired,
Alexander
This is the third installment of The Strongman’s Playbook — a ten-part series examining how authoritarian leaders consolidate power once they have won office. One technique per installment. The historical cases do the argumentative work.
If you missed the previous series, The Fall, it is all in the archive: ten parts on how authoritarian regimes end. Together, the two series tell the complete story — how power is seized, and how it is eventually lost.
If you know an American who is watching the news and wondering how this is supposed to end, send them Part 1. The courts are where the story begins.
New subscribers get 20% off the first year.
More from Alexander Verbeek:
If you missed part 2 of The Strongman’s Playbook:
Before Trump, There Was Franco. The Playbook for Silencing Journalism Is Old.
Last week we examined the first technique in the strongman’s playbook: capture the courts. Without a judiciary willing to say no, everything else becomes possible. This week, we move to the second technique. It follows the first almost immediately, because it has to. You cannot hold power indefinitely if people can still read accurate accounts of what y…
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Notes and further reading
Mussolini’s corporatist system and relationship with Italian industry: Adrian Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919-1929, Princeton University Press — https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691008486/the-seizure-of-power
Fiat and Agnelli under fascism: Jonathan Zeitlin and Gary Herrigel (eds.), Americanization and Its Limits, Oxford University Press — https://global.oup.com/academic/product/americanization-and-its-limits-9780198296010
Perón’s import substitution policies and business elite: Paul Lewis, The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism, University of North Carolina Press — https://uncpress.org/book/9780807842645/the-crisis-of-argentine-capitalism/
Perón’s state marketing board and agricultural taxation: David Rock, Argentina 1516-1987, University of California Press — https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520061781/argentina-1516-1987
Marcos crony capitalism, coconut and sugar monopolies: Paul Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines, Cornell University Press — https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801485138/booty-capitalism/
Eduardo Cojuangco, coconut levy, and crony network: Alfred McCoy, Closer Than Brothers, Yale University Press — https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300064148/closer-than-brothers/
Philippine economic recovery after Marcos: World Bank Philippines country reports — https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/philippines
Trump administration and business elite, regulatory shelving and tariff exemptions: Courthouse News — https://courthousenews.com
Full attribution photo Marcos: derivative work: Bluemask (talk)Ferdinand_Marcos_and_George_Shultz_DA-SC-84-05877.JPEG: Spec. 4 Dino Bartomucci, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Reading this, seeing it in black and white is more sobering than what we already know and see with our own eyes.
This is a stunningly insightful analysis of what America is currently living with and must use as a guide to prepare for the future.
To see those in upper echelons of business comply with authoritarianism is infuriating but gives stronger respect and appreciation for those who’ve held firmly to principles and character unlike their counterparts.
“The atmosphere among American executives is well documented: privately critical, publicly silent, carefully present at the right events. This is not courage under pressure.” We see you, we know who you are and we will not forget.
Your vast knowledge and deep perception of these historic ‘strongmen’ and how you impart these details is brilliant. This series is vitally important and I thank you for the time and work you put into these articles.
Resistance from everyone from regular citizens to business powerhouses and those in political leadership is essential to put the darkness of fascism behind us.
Such fine studies in comparative analysis, Alexander. You might think about extending to book-length in future—or not. It is such a valuable aide memoir in its present form, and you are already writing up a storm. I really enjoy your insights and international perspective.