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Donald Trump's second term as US President stands for a targeted restructuring of US democracy towards an autocratic oligarchy. Based on current analyses, the FERI Cognitive Finance Institute predicts that this will massively change the current image of the USA. Entrepreneurs and investors should not ignore the resulting risks.
Trump's second presidency is heavily influenced by libertarian tech billionaires and major entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, according to the core thesis of the FERI Institute. “While Musk has actively contributed to Trump's election success through large donations and logistics, Thiel has been politically building up US Vice President J.D. Vance for years. Both entrepreneurs pursue an ultra-libertarian agenda that largely rejects democratic principles,” explains Dr. Heinz-Werner Rapp, founder and director of the FERI Cognitive Finance Institute. According to their ideas, America should be run like a company in the future - with Donald Trump as the all-powerful CEO at the helm. “Trump and his billionaire supporters want full control and maximum disruption - not only in the US political system, but also with regard to important future technologies.”
According to the analysis, there is also an entrepreneurial agenda behind Trump's goal of radically transforming the USA. Powerful US technology companies and digital platforms want government structures to be dismantled - something Trump is now pushing to implement. “There is a high degree of alignment of interests here, as evidenced by Musk's dubious role in the new DOGE efficiency agency,” says Rapp. The enormous influence of leading tech entrepreneurs on politics is turning the USA directly into a “buddy economy”, in which autocrats like Trump and rich big businessmen make common cause. Rapp cites the new US space program as an example, from which Musk's company Space X in particular is benefiting massively. “Mixing public office with private business interests has always been Donald Trump's trademark. But his second presidency will take this principle to a whole new level - towards a tech oligarchy with a few ultra-rich profiteers.”
Like former Italian Prime Minister and media entrepreneur Silvio Berlusconi before him, Trump has also recognized that the interplay of entrepreneurial power and media reach - both supported by digital technologies - results in enormous political power. “Such a wealth of power always leads to abuse - and can also be directed against entrepreneurs and investors at any time in the future,” warns Rapp. Oligarchies are fundamentally corrupt and create serious political deformations, as the example of Russia clearly shows. “The current and impending changes in the USA are worrying and their consequences are often underestimated.” As a result, there is a threat of a dangerous erosion of political systems, both in the USA and beyond, according to the FERI Institute's forecast, which has already been expressed several times.
The FERI Cognitive Finance Institute has already published several groundbreaking analyses on the political upheaval in the USA - most recently “America on the road to autocracy” in 2022 and “Trump reloaded” in 2024 and a study on the “Global recession of freedom”. All analyses are available in German in the download area on this page.