Trump Inc, American kleptocracy and the art of US State Capture

South Africans need no introduction to State Capture. We lived with it, paid the costs of it and are still suffering from it. But for the uninitiated, it loosely defines a form of systemic corruption in which private interests appropriate the machinery of government to enrich themselves. Crucially it is more than just politicians stealing; it is the wholesale subordination of the state to those who control it, for their interests. 

The term was popularised by the World Bank around 2000 to describe the experience of post-communist economies in eastern Europe, where politically connected elites commandeered public institutions for personal gain. South Africans subsequently became all too familiar with the concept under Jacob Zuma, in one of the more sordid episodes of our democratic experience.

Increasingly, however, it is becoming clear that something worryingly similar is happening in the richest and most powerful country on the planet.

The latest example, and what is merely the tip of an increasingly enormous iceberg, concerns Kimberly Guilfoyle.

At 3.41pm on 3 July 2025, Guilfoyle sent a message to a man named Eric. “Honey, please, I need you to get this done for me today,” she pleaded.

What she needed, according to revelations published in the Wall Street Journal last week, was $100,000 to settle her American Express bill. “It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she explained. “Please.”

Eric was Eric Deters, a Trump donor who made his fortune through a pizza chain called Snappy Tomato. Guilfoyle was a former Fox News presenter, Donald Trump Jnr’s former fiancée and, at the time, awaiting confirmation as the US ambassador to Greece. (She had also previously been married to Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom - make of that what you will.)

Deters had already paid Guilfoyle $300,000 in speaking fees. According to the Journal, their correspondence suggested that she was offering access to senior administration officials in return for financial favours. Guilfoyle disputes the veracity of the messages. But if they are authentic, they come close to the definition of corruption: access for cash. “I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,” she told him as she begged for money. 

Industrial-scale looting machine

At the centre of it all sits the president himself. Take Nvidia, in which he has reportedly traded with uncanny timing ahead of his own announcements on, among many other things, whether the chipmaker may sell its most expensive chips in China. From this alone he is estimated to have made tens of millions of dollars.

But as with Zuma, the point of the exercise is about far more than one man, it is the entire family. This is a generational project of industrial-scale looting.

The Trump Organization, run by Eric and Don Jnr, licenses the family name to anything that will hold still long enough to be branded, which means the presidency has effectively doubled up as a marketing department. There are Trump sneakers ($299), Trump watches ($499 to $100,000), Trump guitars ($1,250, or $10,000 for the “autographed” model). There is even a Trump bible. The shoes, perfumes, watches and books have reportedly netted the president more than $10-million.

In December, Forbes published a gushing piece on how Don Jnr’s fortune had grown sixfold in a single year to $300-million – “the kind of fortune that would make his father proud”. Eric did better still, “supersizing” his wealth tenfold to $400-million, supplementing his stock trades with cryptocurrency punts.

Crypto and online betting are where the family has honed their kleptocracy. Given the nature of the assets, nobody can say with any degree of certainty how much they have made, but estimates run to several billion dollars. 

Nothing on this scale has happened before in US history. Something remarkably similar has happened in Russia, where Vladimir Putin has used the presidency to amass a vast personal fortune while ensuring the oligarchs around him are generously remunerated. As one critic put it, Trump “has basically hung a for sale sign outside of the Oval Office”; pay him and you will have his attention.

Differences with State Capture in South Africa

There are, of course, fundamental differences with our own experience in South Africa. The first is scale. Capturing a mid-sized emerging market at the southernmost tip of Africa is one thing. Capturing the richest, most powerful nation in history is quite another. The opportunities for looting in a country of that size, with a state apparatus so powerful – not least its military-industrial complex – are limitless. So is the global reach; hence recent Trump resort deals in countries from Albania to Saudi Arabia.

The second is the political architecture. South Africa is a parliamentary democracy; the US executive is far more powerful, and in areas such as foreign policy the president can operate almost without restraint. Our Constitution is among the youngest in the world, drafted with the benefit of centuries of other countries’ mistakes. America’s is among the oldest, written in the 18th century by a group of men with almost no precedent to guide them. It remains a remarkable historical achievement, but its durability has depended as much on restraint and convention as on its actual provisions.

Trump has demonstrated just how fragile those conventions can be.

The third is the courts. South Africa’s fiercely independent judiciary, above all the Constitutional Court, was critical in ending the Zuma era, most memorably over the Nkandla saga. Trump has stacked his supreme court with pliant conservatives who have shown little appetite to stand up to him.

Accountability is key

But the real lesson of State Capture in South Africa is the importance of accountability. Was Zuma ever held accountable? He spent a handful of days in prison – for contempt, not corruption – but the answer has to be no. This meant that the culture of corruption which set in under him has continued since he left, leaving South Africa in the perilous, desperate mess it is today. The looting may be less brazen now – Phala Phala aside – but that makes it more insidious, not less.

Which brings us to the midterms. If the Democrats can retake the House, and perhaps even the Senate, prosecutions must follow. If the Trumps escape without consequence, the precedent is set, and there will be nothing to stop the next lot from doing the same.

In fairness this has been coming for some time. The whataboutery is endless; Republicans counter immediately by asking how Joe Biden could pardon his own son. And they have a point; the cesspit has been filling for a long time, arguably ever since Nixon was pardoned for Watergate. Trump is, in many respects, a consequence of the system, not the cause.

But this is the critical fork in the road. If the next government cannot put Trump and his cabal in prison, then America will have been captured for good.