Coffee Break: Amway Oligarchy and Trump’s Willing Figureheads

Certain high profile appointees in the Trump administration, think Pete Hegseth or Kash Patel, function as figureheads to distract from the increasing power of what Matt Stoller calls the “Amway oligarchy”.

I’ll come back to Stoller’s analysis, but let’s start with Whitney Webb’s diagnosis of what we’re seeing six months into Trump’s second term.

Webb guested on Briahna Joy Gray’s Bad Faith podcast and had the following to say:

“You know, my opinion generally is that some figures in the Trump administration were kind of chosen as a PR move and that they’re not actually in charge of what they’re nominally in charge of.

“So, like Pete Hegseth, head of the Pentagon, he’s kind of a Fox and Friends, you know, he’s a TV show host. And the. The Deputy Director of the Pentagon, Steve Feinberg of Cerberus Capital, is most likely the person actually running the Pentagon, not Hegseth, in my opinion.

“And I think that’s true also for, RFK Junior in charge of HHS. I don’t really think he’s running. He’s just kind of this figure that connected with Trump’s base, particularly during the COVID era, and made them think reforms would come. And those reforms haven’t really come, but he’s kind of there to give the impression that things have changed. But the person behind him, the deputy secretary, is Jim o’Neill, who’s a career affiliate of Peter Thiel who’s also the power behind J.D. Vance and, you know, the man that made Palantir what it is.

“And so, you know, I think it’s just a way of sort of masking the people that are actually running stuff. And I think that’s probably true, too, of Kash Patel and Don Dan Bongino, who were basically out there. You know, they were making the rounds on podcasts and were making these connections and building trust and relationships with the public in Trump’s base. But it seems like they’re not actually, running anything, in my opinion. They’re kind of figureheads in a way, and they’re willing figureheads. I would say.”

Or, to put it more concisely:

Whadya say, folks? Who's probably running the Department of Defense, left or right? pic.twitter.com/hWMt0ZXuBW

— Sense Receptor (@SenseReceptor) July 29, 2025

Just for fun, let’s compare the Wikipedia biographies of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and his Deputy Steve Feinberg (pictured at left above).

Here’s Pete’s:

Hegseth studied politics at Princeton University, where he was the publisher of The Princeton Tory, a conservative student newspaper. In 2003, he was commissioned as an infantry officer in the Minnesota Army National Guard, serving at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Hegseth worked for several organizations after leaving Iraq, including as an executive director at Vets for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America. He became a contributor for Fox News in 2014. Hegseth served as an advisor to President Donald Trump after supporting his campaign in 2016. From 2017 to 2024, Hegseth was a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend. He has written several books, including American Crusade (2020) and The War on Warriors (2024).

And from the “Amway oligarchy,” Feinberg:

After graduating from college, Feinberg worked as a trader at Drexel Burnham in 1982 and later at Gruntal & Co.

In 1992, at the age of 32, Feinberg co-founded Cerberus Capital Management with William L. Richter and $10 million under management; by 2024; its assets under management would grow past $60 billion. In 1999, the firm hired former vice president Dan Quayle as a chairman of Cerberus Global Investment. In 2006, the firm hired former United States Secretary of the Treasury John Snow, who serves as a chairman of Cerberus.
…
Feinberg has been described as “secretive” in The New York Times. In 2007, Feinberg told Cerberus shareholders, “If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.”

A quick comparison of Google News results comes up with a telling contrast:

pic.twitter.com/o7QBqdUHci

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 30, 2025

pic.twitter.com/PQ2wuf6GRf

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) July 30, 2025

Other than a couple of hits during the nomination process, Feinberg has kept his name out of the news for most of his tenure. Big contrast with Pete.

Advantage Amway oligarchy.

A recent internal conflict in the Department of Justice exposes this conflict between nominal appointees who checked off populist campaign promises and the Amway oligarchy who actually holds power.

From Semafor:

A bitter tug-of-war over antitrust enforcement is testing the White House’s dual impulses to challenge tech companies’ consolidation and to simply back big American business.

Capitol Forum reported today that acting associate attorney general Chad Mizelle overruled Justice Department antitrust chief Gail Slater to approve HPE’s $14 billion takeover of Juniper Networks.

The argument turned bitter when Slater’s team reportedly pushed HPE to dispense with two consultants close to the Trump administration, the vocal MAGA legal activist Mike Davis and lawyer Arthur Schwartz, and negotiate directly with the government’s lawyers.

Slater and her antitrust allies didn’t just lose the argument: Earlier this week, top Trump DOJ officials told associates that two of Slater’s deputies, Roger Alford and Bill Rinner, were out, two lawyers close to DOJ told Semafor.

By Thursday morning, the men’s names had been removed from the department’s website. They were restored a few hours later, and a DOJ spokesman said Thursday morning that the two had not, in fact, been ousted.

The episode deepens the perception that Trump’s efforts to, for example, support Big Tech in the AI race with China or punish corporate diversity initiatives are crowding out the antitrust enforcement popular with parts of his base.

Matt Stoller adds some analysis:

The coup at the Antitrust Division is a useful window through which to understand the kind of politics we’re experiencing. We are in a historic period, with Trump and the GOP reengineering the American social order. It’s hard to grasp its full contours, because we are just not used to the way that MAGA works. But it’s important to discuss, because this kind of politics, is happening everywhere.
…
Trump is overseeing a significant transformation of the American order, a Bizarro New Deal, shifting us towards a far more hierarchical corporatized state, aka an oligarchy, an Amway oligarchy.

Talking about an oligarchy is tricky. Just what does an oligarchy feel like in a society like ours? The superrich don’t engage in open Mr. Burns-style malevolent finger gestures, that would be too obvious. Louis Brandeis once offered the key to enslaving people who are otherwise used to liberty. “The longing for freedom is ineradicable,” he wrote. “It will express itself in protest against servitude and inaction unless the striving for freedom be made to seem immoral.” The last clause is the important bit. Somehow, the political culture of our oligarchy must make the striving for freedom itself be “made to seem immoral.”

Well, you’ll recognize it in the crypto world of scammers saying “diamond hands” and “have fun staying poor.” It’s the culture of pyramid schemes, so-called ‘multi-level marketing,’ like Amway, Herbalife, and Mary Kay, and it’s full of positive thinking Dale Carnegie-esque salesmanship of fraud. From Tony Robbins to Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad, this culture pervades TikTok, Reddit message boards, and airport book stores. If you’re not an oligarch, that’s your fault. If you are in trouble, that’s on you. The money is there, for the taking, Glengarry Glen Ross-style. Are you man enough to take it? Longing for freedom is for losers.

Vitamin supplement scamming is the culture of the Republican Party, and has been since Reagan’s alliance with this odd scuzzy world in the 1980s, particularly the DeVos family of Amway wealth. Donald Trump himself has done multi-level marketing, which is the way the “industry” rebranded itself after “pyramid scheme” got a bad name in the 1960s. (This story is told wonderfully by Bridget Read in Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America. I taped an Organized Money episode this week with her, which is fantastic, so you can listen to it here.)

Pyramid scheming is also the culture of MAGA, MAHA, Wellness, and evangelical Christianity, as well as large chunks of Wall Street and big business. They are endlessly ludicrously confident. It’s why Sam Bankman-Fried got plastered on the cover of lots of business magazines, his bullshit jargon didn’t sound any different from that of the CEO of Pepsi, or Tony Robbins. Incidentally, the FTC under Lina Khan tried to crack down on such schemes, but her rule was dropped by Trump and House Republican appropriators.
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Pretty soon, I doubt there will be many good lawyers left in the Antitrust Division or FTC, there’s no reason to stay if it’s just to do a bunch of work that results in nothing but a payoff for sleazy lobbyists. It’s low paid work, and the prestige will evaporate.

Taking a step back, it’s important to see that populism on the right just doesn’t fit, because at heart today’s GOP is still the party of Reagan scammers, or George W. Bush confidence men. What we have, instead, is some populist discourse, with the goal of establishing a hierarchical system based on the whims of Trump and the billionaires he bosses around. Our old models, our old language, our old ways of thinking, our old political leaders, just cannot grapple with the oligarchy in which we increasingly find ourselves, and the Amway-style rhetoric and money-drenched politics we are seeing.

The fate of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Trump 2.0 is also a win for the Amway oligarchy. Per The Baffler:

…it’s a new world under the second Trump term, and he wants to refashion the CFPB in his own image. Instead of protecting consumers, he wants to protect shady financial interests. So he appointed his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, as acting head of the CFPB. Vought is a coauthor of the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025 document that became a blueprint for the new administration’s defenestration of government campaign. (He is also a self-described Christian nationalist who supports a total abortion ban.) The administration then installed Clarence Thomas’s BFF Mark Paoletta as the chief legal officer of the CFPB. Working with Elon Musk’s fake “government efficiency” agency, they attempted to fire about 1,500 workers, whose case is in the hands of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Meanwhile the two hundred or so remaining employees still at the CFPB are now working to undo its previous work.

The gutted CFPB will deemphasize regulation of nonbank entities, according to a memo from Paoletta. In describing its new priorities, the memo suggested less concern about medical debt and student loans, as well as taking less interest in statistical assessments of discriminatory lending. The protection of consumer data or investigation of digital payment platforms and peer-to-peer lending will be deprioritized. Critics in Washington speculated that Musk had a direct interest in weakening financial regulations because he wants to turn X into a payment platform without the aggravation of bothersome rules or regulatory supervision.

Doubtless, the Trump-Musk falling out will not impact the oligarchy-friendly changes Musk made in his brief tenure at DOGE.

Nonetheless, the neutering of the MAGA friendly figureheads is causing some cognitive dissonance on the right as Stoller chronicles:

This scam is coming out in public, but these people don’t care about most criticism. Outside actors, especially reporters or Democrats, are always trying to get Trump, and so their criticism or commentary is just evidence that Davis and Schwartz are on the right track. After all, riling up the libs is good, right? One of their problems, however, is that criticism started coming from the right as well. Here’s Raheem Kassam, a former colleague of Steve Bannon, alleging corruption, though not naming names.

What if I told you this was happening because greedy, fake-MAGA world grifters and lobbyists are upset that the antitrust team was actually doing their job instead of taking cash from big corporates to turn a blind eye to monopolistic practices? 👀 https://t.co/UL9ymj0bVu

— Raheem J. Kassam (@RaheemKassam) July 29, 2025

In addition, a very important MAGA influencer, Laura Loomer, who is personally close with Trump, also reported angrily on what went down in a series of tweets she has subsequently deleted, naming Trump’s Attorney General, who she nicknamed “Pam Blondi,” and her chief of staff Mizelle. There’s a bunch of baroque insider-y stuff in these tweets, but the gist she alleges is quite ugly.

Hewlett Packard, she alleged, gave unnamed MAGA consultants million dollar payoffs to get its merger through, with Mizelle getting his wife, Kat Mizelle, a circuit court judgeship in return. In her second tweet, Loomer notes that other influence peddlers are asking for “$1 million plus” to “make the DOJ’s anti-Trust case against Ticketmaster go away,” fingering Trump pollster Kellyanne Conway in particular. (I’ve put the tweets, which are quite long, at the bottom of this email in a footnote.)1

Loomer matters on the right, and it looked like she was stirring something up. But then, she deleted her tweets. Why? Well, someone, and it’s not clear who, got her to do that.

It’s hard to keep everyone onside when the kayfabe gets complicated, but the overall trend is clear: Trump routes around power whether it’s the Amway oligarchy or a powerful China.

Sure Trump may bluster and bullshit. He may appoint MAGA-pleasing media personalities like Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and Kash Patel, but when push comes to shove, Trump gives way to powerful opposition.