Trump and the Grotesque Climate of The Inevitable Power
I believe there is no doubt that one of the most debated topics in the media over the last two years, namely since the date of his election, concerns the figure and political actions of the new President of the United States, Donald Trump.
Equally indisputable is the incredible variety of analyses that so many political commentators continue to produce regarding this, striving to rationally explain statements and political moves that appear, for most, disorienting, volatile, and capricious in relation to declared goals or institutional practices in use in liberal democracies.
The continuous outbursts on strong and controversial topics – through executive orders, interviews, posts on his social media, comments, rallies, etc. – by the president of one of the most influential nations in the world practically force both international public opinion and political interlocutors to maintain high alert to elaborate and understand how to address issues on which, it seems, no margin for intermediation is offered – every diplomatic tone is in fact abandoned and international relations now advance with the “stick and carrot” technique.
Faced with such attitudes, within the United States itself, many people have organized grand protests under the slogan “no kings” to contest the return, in a liberal democracy, of a sense and practice of power typical of an absolute sovereign.
Probably, this is the key to trying to understand what enabled the posture of this new form of power in the heart of Western democracies. A recent collection of essays on the Trump theme by social scholars offers several interesting reading points, helping us understand what could be the new enabling condition for re-exercising the concept of absolute sovereignty in a democracy that defines itself as liberal. But let us proceed in order.
The new incarnations of power
Since we began – gradually and in accordance with the possibilities offered to us via online environments – to shift or conjugate our ways of acting in/with digital spaces, we embarked on a direction in which we could hand ourselves over to the course of a new political power.
The expansion of communicative possibilities offered by the Internet at all levels could – as we believed and still hope – increase both cooperative practices and the different ways of governing autonomously.
In short, as anthropologist and technologist Arturo Escobar suggests, network technologies give people the possibility to discuss and design more possible worlds in accordance with different living environments, distancing them from the centralizing wills typical of the usual mindset of control and domination (2018).
Unfortunately, in the long architectural evolution that characterized the concrete making of the Internet, we were not attentive enough to evaluate how this new communicative ecosystem, if not governed appropriately in industrial and political terms, could also reinforce that very will for control and domination today embodied in algorithmic sovereigntism.
Algorithmic sovereignty
Algorithmic sovereigntism, as sociologists Davide Borrelli, Christian Laval, and Nilton Ken Ota explain (2026) analyzing current US policy and the figure of its president Trump, is the latest evolution of a power that feels strong because capable of governing fully – by right and in fact – a society, now presupposing to also have cognitive control of those economic processes which, in a typical liberal/neoliberal political order, one had – precisely due to the lack of real knowledge – to leave to the so-called market, with which one was forced to interact more or less mildly through various independent public authorities.
Now that everything passes through applications and digital infrastructures, there are evidently ways to monitor, collect, process, and design algorithmic procedures that, through the data produced by our digital lives, reconstruct, simulate, and predict almost everything.
Indeed, it is time that Internet scholars warned of the dangers that the fragmentation of network governance processes by nation-states, as well as the growing technological dominance of private companies in the development of applications and content management, could entail regarding the ability to preserve autonomy of judgment and action on the part of people and their social communities (Bertola, Quintarelli 2023).
The success and social diffusion of digital tools at a global level has enriched us individually in every field, but this incredible “digital plenitude” fails precisely in the political sphere, which lives on the capacity to inform oneself critically, to discuss and decide together to guide one’s own communities autonomously.
The political sphere online is thus derailed by a fragmentation of environments prone to being manipulated by various interests and by the very mechanisms that reward divisions and clashes, from which algorithmic platforms draw media profit, making the conditions for deliberation difficult (Bolter 2019).
And so, even in a context of relations with partner countries and/or politically fairly homogeneous regions, the presence of extranational entities exercising powers in terms of infrastructures and/or applications/content, recall the need for individual nations to obtain a digital sovereignty that protects their decision-making autonomy.
There are different ways of defining and interpreting the concept of digital sovereignty, but it can be summarized as the right and duty of an independent State to effectively impose specific rules on the use of the Internet by its citizens and by foreign actors who provide them with fundamental digital services, so that such use is in compliance with the laws, values, and interests of that State (Bertola, Quintarelli 2023).
In general, when we deal with network communication technologies, monopoly problems always arise. Network technologies tend to trap (lock-in) users as the rise in their numbers increases their benefits in terms of connective possibilities (network effect), an aspect that encourages service owners to close it (walled garden) denying interconnections and exchange with other similar services.
Furthermore, the initial lack of binding rules at the privacy level and the implicit exchange between the free service and the surreptitious exploitation of data generated in interactions between operators and users – all aspects initially used to expand the audience and sell more targeted advertising – favored in what would later be defined as “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2020). Indeed, the profiling of billions of people confers
above all, an additional, enormous economic power. Knowing with such precision the tastes and habits of consumers, thanks to the evolution of technologies like Artificial Intelligence and large-scale data analysis (big data), these companies can realize products and services better than those of competitors, who do not have the concrete possibility to compete effectively, not only for a lack of economies of scale, but also for a lack of a sort of data economy, namely the availability to aggregate information so precise and detailed on every possible consumer… and the lack of availability of data nullifies the competitive drive in markets already conquered by oligopolists, undermining one of the assumptions of liberal economies and thus laying the foundations for the end of capitalism as we have understood it so far (Bertola, Quintarelli 2023).
Historically, monopolies in the field of telecommunications services were regulated, in terms of abuses and rebalancing of powers, within nation-states. Now the problem is much more complicated given the supranational nature of the Internet and, above all, the geopolitical ambitions of States that find themselves, in this situation, in a position of strength.
Alliance between politics and high-tech oligopolies
The concentration of hi-tech companies that have a global role in the information economy and that respond politically to the USA because born and consolidated there is evidently offering a unique opportunity to a politics that wants to expand its sights in terms of control and domination thanks to the cognitive possibilities offered by algorithmic devices increasingly central in the activities of people and businesses – the US goal, they tell us, is to “make America great again”.
The matter is so evident that the captains of the large digital companies themselves often become lecturers and political advisors, intertwining also lucrative deals with the US administration in the promise to build and release computer machines increasingly sophisticated, powerful, and intelligent to manage algorithmically and autonomously more and more things, including wars.
The race and triumphalism over Artificial Intelligence is the latest step of this strategy. Let us consider today the game of the big big tech, with their stock market relaunch, and their push to make AI a charismatic technology, whose very name raises expectations almost to infinity, projecting uncritically an informational power capable now, thanks to big data, of also self-learning.
In this context, one does not even try to discuss whether we must impose a cap on the mad investments – and at this moment without even the idea of economic returns – in technologies that consume enormous energy and environmental resources, and thus are socially unsustainable given also the concomitant and dramatic climate emergencies.
Instead, as stated in a petition by over 300 IA scholars – whose aim is not to commit the same mistake made with the “laissez-faire” of Internet developments – we must exit the interested hyperbole, in which we are confined to speak of “revolution, of machines that ‘think’, of artificial consciousness, of replacement of people” to bring the discussion back to clear and realistic bases, explain its flaws and limits, and digitally literate people, including managerial and political classes (Adnkronos 2026).
Awareness of new infrastructural fragilities
Evidently, such a climate at the same time intoxicates the mind and swells the chest of the president of the nation who can exercise his own algorithmic sovereigntism on all others, making it act as a One Man Show that says and does everything and the opposite of everything, disorienting and almost silencing the rest of the world – at least the Western one – aware that it depends on US digital technologies – it is no longer a secret the fear that the USA, besides exploiting European user data for every hegemonic purpose, could “switch off” (kill switch) the digital services on which they rest (The Guardian 2026).
And it is this awareness, very likely, that, in the face of threats or bizarre theories, silences interlocutors, psychologically frightened also by the fact of not knowing what instead Trump, equipped with all that algorithmic arsenal, could now know.
From this point of view, the power of algorithmic sovereignty manages to explain to us also all the grotesque of Trump’s attitudes and stances since it shows interlocutors precisely “the insurmountability and inevitability of power” – the grotesque, as Borrelli, Laval, and Ota explain citing Foucault, is the product of the power effects of individuals “who hold by statute power effects of which, due to their intrinsic quality, they should be deprived”.
References
Adnkronos, 2026, Innovazione, alla Camera la lettera per una visione realistica dell’AI
Bertola, V., Quintarelli, S., 2023, Internet fatta a pezzi. Sovranità digitale, nazionalismi e big tech, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, versione digitale.
Bolter, J. D., 2019, The Digital Plenitude: The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of New Media, Boston, The MIT Press.
Borrelli, D., Laval, Ota, N. K., 2026, “Trumpism and Algorithmic sovereignty”, in Cartografie sociali. Rivista di sociologia e scienze umane, n. 21.
Escobar, A., 2018, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Durham and London, Duke University Press.
The Guardian, 2026, EU aims to ensure foreign governments or firms cannot disrupt tech services with ‘kill switch’.
Zuboff, S., 2020, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, New York, PublicAffairs.
