The Heist State
“We are being robbed by the worst people in the world.”
In May, former GEO Group executive David Venturella became the acting director of ICE. Venturella’s ascent marked the latest victory for GEO Group, a behemoth in the world of private prisons and detention centers, which saw its annual profit rise nearly eightfold during the first year of Trump’s second term. After years of weaving its profit-making machinery into the fabric of the prison industrial complex—with ICE as its largest customer—Venturella’s appointment signals an unabashed merger between GEO Group and the US deportation machine: an arrangement that positions GEO Group to extract ever greater profits as detainees are funneled into its detention centers, shackled with its electronic monitors, and warehoused in facilities it owns, manages, or helps operate.
If this sounds like it should be illegal, it almost is. New government employees are typically barred for one year from working on contracts that would benefit their former employers—an already inadequate buffer that was waived for Venturella, who worked for ICE for 22 years before working at GEO Group in various capacities for over a decade, and who reportedly continued as a paid GEO consultant until less than two weeks before returning to ICE. As Elizabeth Warren highlighted in an open letter to Venturella on May 27, the new acting director’s appointment also comes amid reports that he used DHS personnel and resources “for personal or political favors.” A cartoon caricature of revolving door politics, Venturella’s appointment reeks of corruption, but it hardly feels out of place on the current landscape.
While corruption is neither exceptional nor unheard of in the U.S., Trumpism has ushered in an era of corruption and consolidation as governance. The rules, practices, and processes that have ordered our lives are being collapsed into an ongoing heist, as billionaires and corporations dismantle systems that benefit the public, supercharge systems of surveillance and control, and extract as much wealth and as many resources as they can in the process. Henry Giroux recently described this phenomenon as “the systemic fusion of authoritarian power, organized greed, spectacle, state-sponsored cruelty, and impunity, a fusion that transforms corruption into a governing principle and a cultural ideal.”
Giroux argues that by treating corruption as a “staging ground,” the Trump administration is reorganizing public life around “values of self-interest, commodification, hyper-individualism, and ruthless competition.”
This reorganization is realized in Trump’s pardoning of January 6 insurrectionists and other dubiously chosen individuals, and in his naked avarice—turning the presidency into a massive conduit for personal profit. By creating spectacles of cruelty and reveling in a white supremacist, Christian nationalist hierarchy of supremacy, Trump celebrates the violence of bordering, the violence of exclusion, and annihilatory politics as natural and necessary. A circus of redemptive violence entertains his aggrieved, cultish following while billionaire gangsters carve up the world, gutting life-sustaining structures and services as they seize water and land, and further monetize the isolation, surveillance, and containment of human beings—including those who believe they benefit from the current order.
This model of corruption as governance, and oligarchic mass extraction, is also visible in other appointments that mirror Venturella’s. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan was infamously recorded accepting a bag containing $50,000 from undercover FBI agents during a 2024 corruption sting, after allegedly promising to help secure immigration-related contracts in a second Trump administration. Homan has also worked as a paid consultant for GEO Group.
Homan’s office reportedly played a role in Venturella’s appointment.
Tom Schultz, a former timber industry executive, now heads the U.S. Forest Service. Schultz is the first Forest Service chief with no prior experience inside the agency. Under his leadership, experienced staffers have been pushed out or pushed to leave, regional offices and research facilities are being shuttered or consolidated, and the administration has advanced policies that allow for expanded logging and less environmental review. As Jim Pattiz wrote in April, “One hundred and ninety-three million acres of your national forests. An area larger than Texas. The largest public land agency in the country. Just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”
Mehmet Oz, a famed wellness grifter and multimillionaire, is Trump’s administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Oz, who now oversees Medicare, Medicaid, and Affordable Care Act coverage, has ties to the private insurance world, and once advocated for the elimination of traditional Medicare, arguing that Medicare Advantage should be expanded in its place. At the time, Oz held around half a million dollars in UnitedHealth stock. UnitedHealth is the largest private insurer in Medicare Advantage.
During his time with DOGE, Elon Musk and his lackeys routinely targeted agencies that regulated, investigated, funded, or contracted with Musk’s companies, while vindictively gutting programs that supported the survival and well-being of vulnerable people. ImpactCounter’s model estimated that USAID and global health funding cuts associated with DOGE had contributed to more than 750,000 deaths by January 2026, most of them children.
Chris Wright, Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Energy, was the CEO of a fracking company before joining the administration. Since then, he has canceled billions in clean energy funding, used emergency powers to keep fossil fuel plants open, and pressured the International Energy Agency to abandon its support for efforts to reach net zero emissions.
I could go on, but for some of you, these names and conflicts of interest are already beginning to blur. The ubiquity of heist politics makes each individual outrage less defined and less legible. Even among those who care, a chorus of well-reasoned callouts can easily merge into a mind-numbing cacophony. Tasked with distinguishing one billionaire looter or industry insider-turned official from the next, one might ask, why bother? “I get the gist,” we might say. “It’s all bad.” Every theft, act of destruction, and point of extraction seems familiar and indistinguishable from whatever happened last week.
Similarly, the wrongs of the present blur with the wrongs of the past. After all, the revolving door is not new. Industry insiders landing government jobs and officials moving into the private sector have made conflicts of interest a way of life in D.C. for many years. It’s easy to point to the corruption of the past and say, “This is not new.” But to say the excesses of Trumpism aren’t new is a bit like saying violence isn’t new. Of course it isn’t. People have been committing acts of violence throughout recorded history. Across the country and the world over, people are being brutalized and killed right now. Does that mean we should shrug our shoulders when our government wages war, or when police gun people down in the streets, or when a serial killer walks among us? Should all of this violence be treated as inevitable and interchangeable?
Under the Trump regime, corruption and governance have become indistinguishable, and the normalization of this pattern threatens us all. This keeps happening can quickly become this always happens, and then it’s always been this way, until we’re locked into a sense of permanence and inevitability manufactured by fascists.
No one can be blamed for allowing the looting in the background to blur out of focus when the violent morality tale of the moment is so high-stakes, and when its villains are so loathsome that one can easily spend a full day hating them out loud, and then wonder where the time has gone. The terror, abductions, deportations, bombings, blockades, and engineered scarcities are not distractions.
Fascist atrocities and corruption should not be viewed as competing stories. The spectacle of violence and dehumanization provides the architecture for the heist: enemies to punish, spoils to claim, repression to normalize, and a public too demoralized and exhausted to track every hand in its pocket.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore teaches us that organized abandonment is “maintained, bordered and boundaried by the forces of organized violence.” Services and capacities that sustain communities are hollowed out, privatized, and destroyed, while police, prisons, borders, surveillance, and militarism manage the struggle and upheaval that follow. When entire communities, regions, and nations are looted, and our previous ways of living and being are rendered unsustainable, the robbery happens at gunpoint.
The costs of militarism, violence, and marginalization are also used to discipline our social aspirations. At a White House Easter lunch, Trump said he had told Russell Vought, “Don’t send any money for day care because the United States can’t take care of day care.” He continued, “We’re fighting wars. It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these things.” There’s no money for child care, we are told, while the administration squanders $2 billion a day on a senseless, botched war with Iran. No money for healthcare, while ICE pays Palantir $30 million for “ImmigrationOS—a system designed to provide “real-time” tracking of “self-deportations” and facilitate the “selection and apprehension operations of illegal aliens.”
Giroux’s account of gangster capitalism helps name another dimension of the present: the heist is performed as spectacle and public pedagogy, a morality play about winners and losers. Giroux writes that corruption under Trump is “performed openly as spectacle,” and that decades of market-driven propaganda have normalized a moral language in which “greed becomes aspiration” and “cruelty becomes entertainment.” Its architects are barely straining to persuade us that privatization, deregulation, austerity, or mass death will somehow serve the common good, beyond the old racist insistence that public goods are being squandered on the undeserving. They are teaching the public to admire conquest, impunity, and accumulation as proof of fitness. They are inviting some people to imagine themselves on the side of the winners, while training others to experience the theft of the world as unstoppable. It’s governance as reality television.
In May 2025, DHS was reportedly vetting a pitch from Rob Worsoff, a reality producer known for shows like The Biggest Loser, for a program where immigrants would compete for U.S. citizenship. Worsoff claimed to have had three conversations with DHS about the project and said he believed discussions were “trending in a good way.” Even if this Hunger Games-like spectacle never materializes, you can’t blame Worsoff for believing that the administration might embrace his vision—which it apparently entertained on multiple occasions. During Operation Metro Surge, when roving gangs of federal immigration agents terrorized Minneapolis, Stephen Miller reportedly insisted the agents “force confrontations” with protesters in order to win a “PR battle.” That battle was notably lost after federal immigration agents shot and killed Alex Pretti.
To the Trump administration, with its sizzle reels of state violence and AI slop casting Trump as action star, superhero, king, pope, and Jesus Christ, human beings are props, and state violence against marginalized people is something to aestheticize, monetize, and enjoy.
Trump himself appears diminished, at times dragging himself through the motions of the spectacle he’s instigated. He is rarely convincing as the commanding strongman of his own mythology. He nods off, rambles, forgets, lurches, and often seems less like an author of events than a decaying mascot for forces that no longer require his full attention. But he’s the star—the right’s grotesque signifier. The spectacle is the moral language of the heist, and the show doesn’t work without him.
We are being robbed by the worst people in the world: extremists who are resurrecting Jim Crow and breathing new life into Nazism, and opportunists who will seize upon any narrative they can leverage to pillage a dying world. For the ultra-rich, this is the endgame. As large swaths of land become uninhabitable, as millions attempt to migrate due to the consequences of capitalist environmental violence, everything is a land grab. While the desperate seek refuge, those with the most power seek to reinforce borders, as oligarchs create new stratifications, seize upon water supplies, and foster new systemic dependencies, further partitioning realms of labor, areas of habitability, and the means of survival. Civilization is a collapsing box, and people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are spinning fairy tales for the gullible about why they are owed a place inside it.
It’s a story some people like.
Militarism and spectacles of dehumanization are the public persona of the heist state. The strong white man, in the style of an anti-hero assassin or master criminal, avenges the wrongs against him, destroys his enemies, and takes what he believes he’s entitled to on the basis of grievance and greatness. The Turner Diaries meets Breaking Bad, at scale. In January, when Stephen Miller was questioned about the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, he offered what the New York Times called “a strongman’s view of the world,” saying, “The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.”
In the same interview, Miller told journalist Jake Tapper, “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
That is the operating premise of the billionaire looters and the corporate heist class: that they can take anything from anyone, whether it is Venezuela, Cuba, starving children in Africa, or you. The project is theft, and the fortification of the spoils. Its architects do not care how many millions die horribly—starving in a desert, burning in the wake of a bombing, or simply fading away without health care in an American city—because, in their moral universe, the vulnerable are not people to whom anything is owed. They are obstacles, surplus populations, cautionary tales, or raw material.
What we need now is something that carries the insurgent spirit of Occupy, but with greater precision: a movement that understands the heist state as a historic redistribution of wealth upward, and organizes to force that transfer into reverse. The arrangements that preceded this crisis were built on abandonment, extraction, and the manufacturing of premature death. Those mechanisms will always bring us back to the same brink of destruction. The plunder must be reclaimed and converted into universal health care, guaranteed housing, clean water, food, energy, education, transit, child care, elder care, and other nonnegotiable public goods. The movement we need would reject the right of anyone to profit from illness, debt, borders, disaster, surveillance, or war. It would refuse the world tech oligarchs are building, where people are deskilled, monitored, ranked, managed, and replaced, and where every ordinary act can be tracked, scored, and made conditional. It would treat the wealth accumulated by billionaires and the corporate heist class as stolen life. Their empires and fiefdoms were built from stolen time, stolen care, stolen land, and stolen futures. The task is mass reclamation and transformation: taking back what has been stolen and making it impossible for so few to steal so much again.
Author’s Note: After this week’s episode of Movement Memos, I will be taking some medical leave. I appreciate everyone’s support as I continue to navigate the limits of what my body can sustain. While I’m away, I hope you’ll spend some time with the archive and continue sharing anything that feels useful.
