AMERICAN REMORA
How a Parasitic Extraction is Killing the American Shark
In marine biology, the remora is a small fish that attaches itself to a shark using a suction disc on the top of its head. It feeds on the shark’s scraps. The relationship is mutualistic — the remora gets a free meal and transport, the shark gets cleaned of parasites. Both benefit. The shark does not notice.
What I am describing is a new remora — one that was never built on mutualism, never designed to clean or to serve, never constrained by the logic of keeping the host alive. This one was built to feed on the shark itself. It attaches the same way, uses the same suction, moves with the same speed and opportunism. But it grows. It multiplies. It recruits. And at a certain scale — when the remoras are larger than their host, when they are feeding not on scraps but on muscle and organ — the relationship is no longer biological symbiosis. It is extraction without limit. It is the systematic consumption of the thing that makes the feeding possible.
The shark slows. The shark weakens. The shark does not recover.
The new remora crosses the threshold where it no longer needs the shark.
I want to introduce a framework I’ve been developing through my own intelligence analysis work. I’m calling it REMORA: Rent Extraction via Manufactured Oligarchic Regulatory Apparatus.
It describes what is happening to the United States right now. Not as metaphor. As mechanism.
What REMORA Actually Is
REMORA is not corruption in the traditional sense. Traditional corruption is furtive. It requires secrecy because exposure is the threat. What I’m describing operates openly, at scale, at speed, with the structural confidence that the mechanisms of accountability have been sufficiently degraded to make exposure irrelevant.
The apparatus has four components:
Rent Extraction — the systematic conversion of public resources, regulatory power, defense procurement, and foreign policy into private wealth. Not stealing from the treasury. Something more sophisticated: using the levers of governance to create the market conditions that make specific private investments inevitable winners.
Manufactured — the epistemological infrastructure required to keep the host population from recognizing the extraction. The conspiracy theories weaponized against institutional credibility. The cult behavior that reframes theft as patriotism. The Christian nationalist theology that sanctifies the operator as divinely protected. This isn’t organic ignorance. It was built. Deliberately. Over years.
Oligarchic — the extraction doesn’t flow to one actor. It flows through a layered ecosystem. The visible primary extractor creates cover and market conditions for a more sophisticated secondary layer. The billionaire class uses the chaos, the deregulation, and the institutional degradation as the conditions under which genuinely large-scale wealth consolidation becomes possible. And above them, foreign sovereign capital — Saudi PIF, UAE, Qatar — acquires durable structural positions inside the American economy at a moment when, for the first time, it is genuinely for sale.
Regulatory Apparatus — the machinery of the state, captured and redirected. Not destroyed. Redirected. The Pentagon still awards contracts. The SEC still exists. The Commerce Department still approves export licenses. They simply now do so within an institutional architecture that has been systematically cleared of the independent actors who would otherwise constrain the extraction.
Three Receipts (I have dozens of receipts)
I documented the full architecture in my six-part series The Trump Military Industrial Monarchy. But let me give you three data points that illustrate the REMORA model in action.
One. Donald Trump Jr. joined the advisory board of Unusual Machines — a drone component maker — in November 2024, receiving 200,000 shares as compensation. His stated criterion for screening Pentagon job candidates: whether they wanted to “spend more on drones.” The people he screened are now in the positions that awarded the contracts. Unusual Machines received a $12.8 million Army contract. It then invested $50 million in Powerus — another drone company the Trump brothers back — while simultaneously serving as Powerus’s customer. The Pentagon confirmed in writing to Congress: no effective processes exist to stop this.
Two. 1789 Capital — the venture firm Donald Trump Jr. partners in — invested in Vulcan Elements’ Series A in August 2025. Vulcan makes rare-earth magnets. Three months later, the Pentagon awarded Vulcan a $620 million loan — the largest in the Office of Strategic Capital’s history, more than twice Vulcan’s entire valuation. That $620 million loan funds the magnets that go into the motors that go into the drones that the Army is buying from the companies the president’s son invested in. One family. Five consecutive layers of the defense supply chain. Every layer publicly funded.
Three. On January 6, 2026 — a date with its own resonance — Trump purchased between $500,000 and $1 million in Nvidia stock. Seven days later, the Commerce Department approved the sale of Nvidia chips to China. On February 10, he purchased another $1 to $5 million in Nvidia shares. One week after that, Nvidia announced a major computing deal with Meta. In Q1 2026 alone, Trump executed 3,642 stock transactions — roughly 58 trades per trading session — in companies his own administration directly regulates. No blind trust. No independent oversight. The OGE disclosure runs 113 pages. It was released three days ago. No charges. No committee hearings. Washington noted it and moved on.
That is not coincidence. That is a trained operator reading terrain and executing against time-critical targets before the window closes. I spent two decades in intelligence work learning to recognize that pattern. I recognize it here.
The Brazen Exemplar: Open for Business
If you want to understand what REMORA looks like at full operational confidence, look at what happened this week alone.
On May 13, Air Force One landed in Beijing. Aboard it: Elon Musk, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Tim Cook of Apple, Larry Fink of BlackRock, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone, David Solomon of Goldman Sachs, and a dozen more American executives whose combined net worth approaches $1 trillion. Also aboard: Eric Trump and Lara Trump. Sean Hannity. The president introduced the group to Xi Jinping as “distinguished representatives from the American business community” who “all respect and value China.” Xi assured them American companies would have “broader prospects” in China.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang joined the trip at the last minute — boarding Air Force One at a stopover in Alaska — hoping to unlock stalled chip sales to China. Trump holds Nvidia stock. He bought it the week before the Commerce Department approved Nvidia chip exports. He is now in Beijing personally lobbying China to buy more of them. The receipt, when it arrives in the next OGE disclosure, will be worth reading.
The same day the Beijing trip concluded, ABC News reported that Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion personal lawsuit against the IRS — a lawsuit in which the president was suing his own government — in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion taxpayer-funded compensation fund for allies who claim they were “wrongfully targeted” by the Biden administration. The fund’s commission would operate with no mandatory disclosure requirements. The identities of recipients could be kept private. Trump would retain the authority to remove commission members without cause. Rep. Jamie Raskin called it precisely what it is: “a $1.7 billion fraud on the American taxpayer to line the pockets of his MAGA political allies.”
A $1 trillion business delegation to Beijing. A $1.7 billion slush fund for political allies funded by the taxpayers those allies claim persecuted them. Taiwan described as “a very good negotiating chip.” All in the same week.
This is not the behavior of a system under stress. This is the behavior of a system that has concluded the constraints are gone.
The Flat Spin
In aviation, a flat spin is a specific kind of emergency. The aircraft is rotating and descending simultaneously, but unlike a standard spin, the nose is relatively level — which means the pilot’s instincts about recovery are wrong. The inputs that should work don’t work. The altitude is bleeding out faster than it looks from inside the cockpit.
That’s where we are institutionally.
The Senate confirmed the loyalists. The inspectors general were removed. The Pentagon admitted it has no effective oversight processes. The president is executing 58 stock trades per trading session in companies his own administration regulates, with no blind trust, no independent review, and no legal constraint that has survived contact with this administration’s lawyers.
The epistemological capture I have been writing about since before January 6th — the manufactured ignorance, the weaponized conspiracy theories, the cult behavior — was not the destination. It was the security system for the financial architecture. You cannot prosecute what cannot be seen. You cannot see what has been captured. You cannot de-capture what has been theologically sanctified.
The remoras are no longer feeding on scraps.
And the shark is in a flat spin.
Why I’m Writing This
I left Congress on December 10, 2020, and said on the floor what I believed was coming. I was the only Republican to stand against QAnon on the record, in October of that year, when my colleagues thought it was a punchline. I spent two years inside the January 6th investigation following the digital money and the network architecture of an attempted coup. I wrote The Breach because some things need to be named even when naming them is costly.
The AMERICAN REMORA is the next thing that needs naming.
Not because naming it stops it. I’m 56 years old and I don’t believe this particular machine reverses in my lifetime. Institutional capture of this depth doesn’t reverse without a forcing function that isn’t yet visible on the horizon.
I’m naming it because every transaction leaves a trace. Every layer of the architecture is documented. The annual financial disclosure — the 278e — hasn’t dropped yet. The Beijing receipts aren’t fully visible yet. The Taiwan transaction will eventually show up in a corporate filing or a foreign investment announcement or a contract award, the way every other transaction in this operation has eventually shown up.
The machine is running on the confidence that the traces don’t matter.
That confidence is the only vulnerability it has left.
Denver Riggleman is a former U.S. Representative for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, a trained and operational USAF and NSA intelligence and data analytics professional, senior technical adviser to the House January 6th Select Committee for almost a year, and the CEO of multiple technology development and intelligence analysis companies. He is the NYT bestselling author of The Breach and is writing The Machine.
Thank you for your outstanding and honest reporting. Thank you for your endless strength towards defending our constitution and rule of law. In these times, Thank you for Not Lying to Us. Your efforts are not going unnoticed and listened to. Your bulldog devotion to our constitution is an honor to follow. Watch your six, head down, focus,and keep fighting like our constitution and rule of law depends on it because it does.
Very thought provoking Denver, as always. Everyone needs to read this article- all of them.