Staffed by MAGA loyalists, billionaire donors, golf buddies, professional wrestling executives, vacant-eyed psychopaths promising not to drink on the job, and a gaggle of reactionary tech elites dreaming of a silicon Reich, whose money brought them to Mar-a-Lago at exactly the right time, the second Donald Trump administration is a rough bunch. The trappings of power can launder some of the crudest personalities toward legitimacy, but this is a special cohort. Drawing their cues from the president, MAGA nationalism, and the extended Heritage Foundation Universe, Trump’s lieutenants have their shared ideological and policy commitments, which deserve scrutiny. But the new cadre of White House advisors, policy czars, and secretaries and undersecretaries are usefully understood through what could gently be called a shared way of being: they’re criminals.

Well, not all of them. Legal status and personal opinions may vary by jurisdiction. I am not a lawyer, and this is not a value judgment; morality has no purchase here. Criminality is a modus operandi, the grubby mise-en-scène of Trumpworld. It’s a certain ontological approach to acquiring money and power, a disregard for rules, social expectations, and incumbent authority that happens to be congruent with political success. When the system is rotten, deserving of our disrespect, these people feel entitled to further break it. They are products of what sociologists call a low-trust society.

The leading officials of the vanquished Biden administration are criminals of a higher order. They’re war criminals, overseeing atrocities in their tuxedos, Kissingerian facilitators of genocide who will never be held accountable by the liberal “norms” and institutions they claim to hold dear. But give future National Security Advisor Mike Waltz a few years at the helm, and perhaps he’ll get his chance to expand the Ukraine-Russia war or masterplan the military occupation of Greenland.

As a legal designation, criminal is certainly a category to which many past Trump advisors belong—Michael Flynn, Tom Barrack, Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen. Some are set to return to the White House: after serving a four-month prison sentence for refusing to cooperate with a congressional investigation into the January 6 riot, Navarro was hired in December by Trump as his second-term White House advisor on trade and manufacturing.

The most prominent confirmed criminal in the new administration is the president himself, convicted of thirty-four felonies but essentially unpunished. With his penchant for bullying, his transactional attitude that turns every alliance into a demand for money, his demands for loyalty, and his contempt for the law, Trump has often been compared to a Mafia don. (There may also be a matter of past relations with the actual Mafia.) He runs his organizations in a similar spirit.

Trump famously doesn’t pay his bills. Neither does Elon Musk. When Musk acquired Twitter in a debt-laden buyout, he didn’t settle up with a number of company vendors and landlords, which spawned dozens of lawsuits. “Elon doesn’t pay rent,” a Musk advisor allegedly told a future plaintiff.

The leader of the world’s most lucrative protection racket (besides NATO!), Trump has a lot of favors to dispense.

Musk hasn’t been charged with a crime, although the SEC has twice brought civil charges against him for securities law violations. (Recent reporting suggests that Musk may have committed immigration fraud in 1995 when he entered the United States on a student visa but decided instead to go work for a startup—an infraction that could make him eligible for having his U.S. citizenship stripped.) But he is constantly surrounded by litigation. Shareholder challenges to his pay, self-driving regulatory investigations, securities fraud allegations, vindictive lawsuits against OpenAI and other corporate enemies—he may be America’s most frequently deposed executive. Like any sensible corporate titan, he even has a favorite judge: Reed O’Connor, a Tesla shareholder in the northern district of Texas who is overseeing Musk’s ruinous lawsuit against Media Matters, the liberal media watchdog group.

Trump has his own protective bench of judges and a Republican majority on the Supreme Court that has granted him almost total immunity. He can extend his personal impunity to anyone he chooses. The new administration could very well lead with a veritable mass jailbreak, with Trump planning to pardon more than a thousand January 6 rioters now that he’s back in the Oval Office. The leader of the world’s most lucrative protection racket (besides NATO!), Trump has a lot of favors to dispense. His advisors, donors, appointees, and assorted sycophants will be looking to him for help with their own legal issues.

That might be the case with Justin Sun, a globally notorious crypto entrepreneur who recently became the largest investor in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family crypto venture. Rather than negotiate a traditional equity investment in the company, Sun supposedly bought $30 million worth of WLF crypto tokens—which, it should be noted, can’t be sold or moved off of Trump’s crypto platform. It’s a one-way transaction, a donation, and an easy way for practically anyone to channel large sums of money to Trump.

Sun has long been trailed by numerous investigations, aggrieved investors and customers, bizarre hacks of his companies, and murky movements of billions of dollars worth of crypto. He’s a Chinese citizen but is known for hopscotching jurisdictions, at one time occupying the role of ambassador to the World Trade Organization for the island nation of Grenada. He’s currently the prime minister of Liberland, an unrecognized, right-wing libertarian “micronation” striving to establish itself in a disputed Serbian-Croatian border region. Sun’s Tron blockchain is widely used by cybercriminals, especially those that use Tether, the most widely traded crypto token. In 2023, the SEC sued Sun for securities fraud and claimed that he engaged in market manipulation. That lawsuit, along with almost every other federal investigation into the crypto industry and its shady overseas operators, now has a strong chance of going away.

A similar promise might be extended to the reactionary venture capitalists and tech executives around Trump. Many of them have dipped into the crypto industry’s grey markets. Trump nominated Scott Kupor to be director of the Office of Personnel Management and Sriram Krishnan to be a White House advisor on artificial intelligence. Both men are partners at Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm and crypto investor whose eponymous founders took in the election returns alongside Musk and Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia, which backed FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and was recently accused by the Indian government of potentially bribing a finance minister, is reportedly advising Trump on intelligence appointments. Incoming crypto and AI czar David Sacks invested in crypto through Craft Ventures, his venture capital firm, which put hundreds of millions into crypto companies and crypto hedge funds. Craft was also a lead investor in Done Global, a telehealth startup that the federal government has since alleged was operating as an Adderall pill mill, with most of its staff not in its San Francisco headquarters but in China. Done’s CEO and president were arrested in California last June and charged with a number of federal crimes. Craft Ventures has since scrubbed all mention of Done from its website.

Not wanting to go to jail is a powerful motivator of fealty. So many lawsuits and criminal investigations will be simply dismissed or wither on the vine under the second Trump administration. Even more will be overlooked. That’s an invaluable quality for a tech industry whose products and ideology have come to infiltrate and disrupt so much of American life. If Silicon Valley billionaires are latter-day robber barons, then they will act like robber barons to further their interests.

“If he loses, I’m fucked,” Musk said to Tucker Carlson in the lead up to the election. America’s top oligarch wasn’t exaggerating. Immediately after, everything changed for Musk: his legal horizon, the security of his contracts, his potentially compromising relationships with foreign leaders like Russian president Vladimir Putin. Musk’s already obscene fortune larded itself with another two hundred billion dollars, thanks to a run-up in Tesla’s inflated stock price—one of the beneficiaries, along with bitcoin and private prison stocks, of the new Trump boom. Musk closed another round of investment in xAI, his artificial intelligence startup, with a heavy infusion of Saudi cash. He continues to smear shit on the walls of X and call it art. But he has the right; he owns the place.

Musk is supposedly poised to transform the size and scope of the U.S. government with an assist from Vivek Ramaswamy, whose fortune rests in part on a successful stock play around Axovant, a biotech startup he spun up to generate excitement about an Alzheimer’s treatment that one pharma company had already shelved. Two former employees of Strive Asset Management, Ramaswamy’s most recent venture, sued the firm, Ramaswamy, and his cofounder, claiming that they were pressured to violate securities laws. During his presidential campaign, Ramaswamy tried to use his candidacy to get out of attending a hearing for another civil lawsuit he faced. (In 2019, I briefly worked for Ramaswamy at Roivant, a biotech company he founded.)

They won: the oligarchs, grifters, crypto conmen, VCs laundering Saudi blood money into defense startups optimizing death-dealing in Ukraine and Gaza, biotech execs who spun IPO gold out of nothing. The lobbyists for Gulf dictatorships, Israeli genocidaires, a radicalized business over-class that recoils at the sight of a homeless person. Worm-brained Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the entire UFC wing of the MAGA movement. Laura Loomer! They will pick your pocket and steal the silverware on the way out—but, hey, that’s the cost of victory.