Israel’s attack on Iran has been, and continues to be, negotiated largely in public — on X and Truth Social. This is not fully explicable in terms of President Trump’s personal style or willingness to flout precedent, but rather by slower-gestating, historical shifts in how power flows and expresses itself. The spectacle of world leaders operating out in the open has only recently become normal.
Trump’s announcement of a ceasefire (“CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!”) and then his flurry of accusations of it being broken (“ISRAEL DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS”) suggest that he is using social media to operate outside of the invisible institutional state systems that have constrained presidential action since at least the days of President Truman. We can infer that Trump is posting as Trump, not as the Trump administration. Trump is posting as a sovereign. The contrast with Biden’s Twitter/X account couldn’t be clearer. This is a style of wielding power.
And it is one, I suspect, which is not limited to Trump, but enabled by both new tools and shifts in capital accumulation towards tech and crypto. State monopolies of money and information have been disrupted and only the monopoly on violence remains. Under the old forms of state sovereignty, new forms of sovereignty are emerging. Individuals leveraging different kinds of platforms — whether financial, technological or media-related — have started to wield state-like influence. Elected officials at odds with intelligence agencies, bureaucracy and legislators can step outside of the parameters of government to persuade, isolate and break up conglomerates of power.
When a populist with ties to capital and tech, such as Trump, gets elected, this kind of disruption reaches its heights. The President behaves in some ways like a non-state actor operating within the state, and in other ways, like an avatar of the state. If this sounds confusing, it’s because it is. Trump is clearly using his Truth Social posts to increase his own leverage and to change the direction of negotiations, not only with Israel and Iran, but potentially with his own military and administration officials. The negotiations, happening in real time, are complex and multidimensional.
The ability to instantly disseminate global communiqués has increased the powers of the US President to shape events around the world. When Trump tweeted that the citizens of Tehran should evacuate, all the highways leading out of the city were jammed within minutes. In this century, neither Biden nor Obama nor George W. Bush used the powers of the presidency this way.
Critically, these new forms of sovereignty and power politics are not just emerging within the framework of states, but outside of them, suggesting new, covert forms of power. When a billionaire like Bill Ackman tweets his support of Israel, he is not just sharing an opinion, he’s hinting at where and how his capital will flow. Trump’s battles with Harvard, similarly, are not just about sticking it to the libs in a symbolic sense, but about cauterising certain sources of soft counter-power. USAID was dismantled for similar reasons.
Perhaps the most significant indication that something has radically shifted in the way power works was the explosive social media war between President Trump and Elon Musk. For 24 hours, the spat absorbed the full attention of the discursive ecosystem. Rather than work through representatives or behind closed doors, the world’s richest man and the world’s most powerful man engaged in a public tit-for-tat. I don’t think they did this to entertain us, but to test the limits of their power.
“Trump’s tweets have amplified the powers of the presidency through direct communication with the public.”
The Trump-Musk feud felt like a clean break from the tone, style and dynamic of managerial liberalism, which has been the American norm for 100 years. Rather, Musk’s language (“without me, Trump would have lost the election”) was classically Shakespearean: a powerful vassal lashing out against the king he helped to enthrone. The dynamic reminded me of Henry Percy (Hotspur) and Henry Bolingbroke in Henry IV. Hotspur feels he helped win the throne but hasn’t been adequately rewarded. Worcester, Hotspur’s uncle, tells the King bluntly that he owes his throne to the Percy clan — without them, you couldn’t have deposed even weak Richard II. The implication is threatening: we can overthrow you just as we helped you overthrow your predecessor. After Trump hit back, Tesla’s $150 billion plunge in market value felt like a battlefield loss, like Hotspur’s armies fleeing. When Musk threatened to “begin decommissioning SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft”, he resembled a grand duke refusing to send his retinue to join the king’s military campaign.
These are examples of feudalism, not of centralised or modern state power. Power increasingly seems shared, asymmetrically distributed; absolute only in small spheres, and those spheres overlap. These exchanges — whether between Trump and Musk or Trump and Khamenei — recall the depictions of Johan Huizinga, in his book The Waning of the Middle Ages, of a time when feuds and vendettas were “the cardinal point of policy” and populations gathered behind aristocratic figures clamouring for “vengeance”. The late-medieval period was one where personality underwrote political stability, personal instability predicted political chaos, and pride drove public affairs.
Techno-aristocrats like Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg already possess state-like wealth and functional power. Trump 2.0 models itself after a tech company, and tech companies increasingly resemble governments. Now that Trump can negotiate a ceasefire, or crash Tehran traffic, with a tweet, and Musk can threaten to withdraw space infrastructure over personal grievances, we’ve returned to a world where individual character matters more than systemic process.
Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Back then, the system was strong. Presidents were thought-leaders who helped steer the ship but weren’t solely responsible for it. Now the system seems weak, fragmented; showmanship and emotion are weirdly reassuring to us. Someone, not something, is in charge.
This return to Shakespearean feudalism suggests both promise and peril — certainly peril for Iran. In Shakespeare’s plays, genuine personal risk and nobility exist alongside terrifying unpredictability in court politics. And it won’t be long before charismatic personalities once again eclipse institutional constraints, and sovereign individuals come to rival sovereign states. This is our new Shakespearean politics — the personal and tragic, played out on a global scale.
