The Trump administration’s recently announced ban on in-flight laptops, tablets, and other electronic devices for travelers flying from Middle Eastern countries to the United States is the latest chapter in his racist immigration policy. This part is clear. What is perhaps less clear, but no less interesting, is who else benefits from Trump’s new policy wrinkle. The new laptop ban is also effectively a giveaway to Trump’s private equity backers and the US airline cartel they control; it comes at the expense of the Gulf carriers who threaten the US airlines’ domination of international long-haul routes and the business travelers who are their most lucrative customers.

This may have a whiff of conspiracy theory, but the contours of an emergent “Trumpian” monopoly capitalism become clearer by the day. If global free trade, or globally competitive capitalism, was the dominant ideology of the past three decades, Trump’s revanchist nationalism signals something new — the ideology of a re-trustified world economy, where shareholders assemble national monopolies under the guise of competing brands and use government policy to battle over international markets.

When we consider the nature of these monopolies, particularly their relationship to Trump, an interesting picture emerges. In many respects Trump’s foreign policy fits with the kind of imperialist structure proposed by Rudolf Hilferding. Hilferding’s theory of late nineteenth-century financial capitalism went something like this: large financial institutions had acquired control over domestic producers, consolidating and cartelizing them into effectively national monopolies. These national monopolies then dueled with each other over international markets and used their political power to capture favorable government policy, including tariffs to shield them from international competition and armies to conquer captive overseas demand.