Vulture Democracy

The President will sell you national security intel for your protection. It is the end point of a vision for how government and the market relate.

March 19, 2026

There has been much press around the fact that Donald Trump sent out a photo of himself, disrespectfully wearing a hat over the coffin of a dead American soldier, as part of a fundraising email.

It speaks to his solipsism, his inability to see that other people suffer losses and feel pain. But the email also speaks to his pay-for-play approach to governance, and the wider worldview that that underwrites it.

In it, Trump offers to trade national security intelligence for donations. Specifically,

The email says the president is “opening up spots on the National Security Briefing Membership.”

“As a National Security Briefing Member, you’ll receive my private national security briefings, unfiltered updates on the threats facing America. The straight truth on border invasions, foreign adversaries, deep state sabotage, and every danger the fake news hides.”

Now, obviously, this is bullshit. The Presidential Daily Brief is not going to be blasted out to the fundraising email list (I mean, it isn’t, right??). What National Security Briefing Members will receive is certainly boilerplate, braggadocio, anti-immigrant ideology and further requests for money. But still, let’s take this idea at face value for a moment, and suppose that Trump is offering donors in this group real intel on threats that other Americans are ignorant of. In other words, let us imagine that it is a good faith transaction of value for money and not a straight-up con.

First, this comes on the heels of news that the White House killed a memo to local law enforcement agencies on the predictably heightened threat of terrorism after the Iran invasion. The people who protect public safety are not on the Need To Know list. But those who have some money to pony up are, I guess.

This move speaks both to the griftiness and the partisanship that is deeply ingrained in the person of the president. There is clearly nothing he will not do to make a buck, at least so long as the harm or the cost is borne by someone else. He continues to rake in campaign donations, but mostly not from those who respond to churlish direct appeals like this. Time notes:

According to data from the Federal Election Commission, analyzed by my colleagues at The Brennan Center, Trump’s super PAC, MAGA, Inc., has raised over $300 million since the 2024 election. That’s more than five times the previous fundraising record for a second-term president, almost all from donors giving $1 million or more.

The article notes that personal enrichment of Trump and his family is also a hallmark of his presidency, corrupting the office and our political culture more broadly:

Recent reporting also shows that the Trump family has made considerable profits during his time in office, though exact estimates vary due to different measuring criteria and the lack of publicly available information. In Aug. 2025, The New Yorker reported that the Trump family had potentially profited to the tune of $3.4 billion. By Jan. 2026, the New Yorker said that figure had ballooned to $4 billion.

“Mr. Trump has used the office of the presidency to make at least $1.4 billion,” reported The New York Times. “We know this number to be an underestimate because some of his profits remain hidden from public view.”

These figures are worrying on multiple levels. Unlike donations to MAGA, Inc., for example, crypto money can come from foreign nationals seeking favorable treatment from the administration.

Trump is the consummate kleptocrat.

And the idea of protecting his supporters while letting the rest of us wander haplessly in harm’s way, well, that checks out, too. President Trump has never been president for all Americans, never hid his disdain for those who fail to give him adulation. After months of targeting resolute blue cities with ICE shock troops, the idea that he would sell greater safety to his supporters and leave others in the cold is not so farfetched. His griftiness benefits from the accompanying hyperpartisanship.

But this email also reflects, and is a bit of a culmination of, a long history of privatization of public goods, and the increasing monetization of everything in American society.

Elected Prime Minister in 1979, Margaret Thatcher set out to privatize the United Kingdom’s semi-social democratic welfare state. Over a decade, roughly a trillion dollars of state-run programs and agencies were sold off to private investors. in the U.S., Ronald Reagan came to power soon after on a similar anti-government platform, though no equivalent privatization wave followed, perhaps because there were few assets in the leaner American system that might survive in the private sector.

But the idea that the market can do better has been Republican dogma ever since, and many furtive efforts have been made to get the state out of the way. George Bush, Jr. rode into his second term confident enough to touch the third rail of American politics, though his argument that Americans should be trusted to invest their money themselves rather than rely on Social Security faltered, and fed into Democratic victories in the midterms as nervous seniors turned away from the GOP. But earlier, in 1997, a plan to partially privatize Medicare was enacted when private health insurers were allowed to offer competing plans to seniors, a program formalized as Medicare Advantage in 2003. Republicans, I think, hoped the private plans would outcompete and replace the government-run program. These plans are typically cheaper, but they come with hidden costs. The murder of the United Healthcare CEO in 2024 led to news reports of high levels of denials of care for Medicare Advantage patients. My own mother was denied authorization for rehabilitation services by her Aetna Medicare Advantage plan as she lay in a hospital bed with a spinal injury and a broken leg. Medicare Advantage maintains its profitability at the cost of sometimes severe medical need.

Meanwhile, the American economy increasingly runs less on creating value and more on schemes to squeeze more money from goods and services that people have shown they will pay for. Planned obsolescence emerged first, really taking off in the 1990s, which is why my 40 year old refrigerator still runs while my 2019 one is on the fritz. More recently, things you would once have purchased outright are now available only for rent, from streaming music to Microsoft Office. Enshittification infects all things digital; now, even providers of tools for nonprofits are offering less for more. Airlines charge for the ticket, and separately for the seat, and separately for luggage, and most recently, for storage of carry-ons in the overhead bin.

In such an environment, the idea that a President might offer security briefings for a fee is not nearly as outlandish as it should be.

To put it another way, what Republican political philosophy has offered us over the last 45 years is the enshittification of government. In the years since Reagan said government is the problem, our idea of what we can expect of the state and what it should provide has coarsened, our expectations lowered by incrementally less value for our dollar. Reagan made us skeptical, and Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist half drowned the government in the bathtub, with Bill Clinton’s assistance, and here we are.

Increasingly on our own, with a fraying safety net that offers less reason for confidence by the year, it is difficult to think the government has our backs. We have returned to the days before FDR’s fireside reassurances and government-subsidized jobs saw Americans through the Great Depression. In a world where mutual aid and common defense through the collective mechanism of government may seem unreliable or a pipe dream, why not pay for security briefings so you know what to watch out for?