"Kleptocracy: a society whose leaders make themselves rich and powerful by stealing from the rest of the people."—Cambridge Dictionary

America has been backsliding into kleptocratic territory for years now, but this may finally be it.

A kleptocracy is literally "rule by thieves."

It is a form of government in which a network of ruling elites "steal public funds for their own private gain using public institutions." As analyst Thomas Mayne explains, it's "a system based on virtually unlimited grand corruption coupled with, in the words of American academic Andrew Wedeman, 'near-total impunity for those authorized to loot by the thief-in-chief'—namely the head of state."

One could fairly say that a kleptocracy was always going to be the end result of the oligarchy that was America.

The signs were visible long before now: power and wealth have been trading places for decades.

Indeed, it has been more than a decade since researchers at Princeton and Northwestern concluded that the U.S. is a functional oligarchy in which "political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups," while the influence of ordinary citizens was at a "non-significant, near-zero level."