Trump Is Handing the Country Over to a Wealthy Cabal
Is there any chance 'we the people' will wake up and punish him and them for this?
If this were a movie, the impending collapse of the nation’s democracy would be heavy with expectation. The musical score would surreptitiously guide us to move closer to the edge of our seats. It could even be one of those moments when you pause the movie to go to the bathroom, fill up your water glass, and refresh the popcorn — knowing that “it” would happen at any minute. You don’t want to miss anything so you better to be prepared.
Trump used inflation to lull Americans into the intellectual doldrums. The $ 6 gallon of gas he was screamed about before the election hadn’t been seen anywhere in the country in years. The prices that have set sail revolutions in the past had dropped significantly and were still dropping when he won a second term. Prices are crawling upward again for various reasons, and predictions are that they will go up substantially when Trump drops the tariff guillotine. Suddenly, though, for Trump and the incompetent traitors around him, inflation is no longer so important.
Inflation, however, is an important issue for the 90 percent of Americans who are being left out of Trump’s vision for a post-democratic America. Donald Trump is assembling the wealthiest group of advisors the world has ever seen, and he is letting it be known they will have as much power to do whatever they want as he decides to give them — Congress and everyone else be damned. The naive among us, the ones who still think this is all fairly normal, say stuff like, “Well, if the Senate doesn’t approve this or that, then he can’t (won’t) do it.”
My response to this is: Is that sarcasm? Or, “good one, dude.” Donald Trump is going to do whatever he wants, and “we the people” will not be able to stop him.
Consider this: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos know more about most Americans than God does. Millions of Americans think they are anonymously skipping around Twitter, but their digital fingerprints are everywhere. Someone — anyone — can tell us what you liked when maybe it wasn’t the best thing to “like.” They can also tell us what you commented on and then deleted. The same power goes for Jeff Bezos and Amazon. He knows everything about everything you have bought for the last few decades.
An ex-girlfriend in Russia asked me to purchase for her some sex toys — things I would never have bought — and I did (she didn’t have an Amazon account or a debit card). Those items are now part of my Amazon virtual being. In a country where the fascist Christian right is seizing power, these toys could, in theory, come back to haunt me. Who knows, people? We are entering into uncharted waters, and no one can say with any certainty what might happen next.
I am not sure if Donald Trump owes his presidency to the oligarchy coalescing around him, but he realizes that the likes of Musk, Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Bill Ackman, and others are much better company than the trailer-park warriors with his image tattooed on across their flabby bellies and chests. Trump is much more comfortable with the wealthy than his base, and so he is using his elected position to give them our country.
Of course, the hyperwealthy have always found ways to bend the political system. In a 2014 study, the political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page reviewed thousands of polls and surveys spanning more than 20 years and found that the preferences of the wealthiest Americans were much more likely than those of average citizens to affect policy changes. But influence machines were once subterranean: Few people would have known about the political influence machine that the Koch brothers built in the past several decades if not for the work of investigative journalists. The hedge-fund billionaire George Soros has long bankrolled liberal nonprofits. In 2016, Rupert Murdoch made it a point to say that he had “never asked any prime minister for anything,” after The Evening Standard reported that he had boasted about being able to tell the British government what to do: The media magnate wanted to at least partially conceal his influence. Until recently, elites and politicians who worked together feared the scandal of the sausage-making process being revealed, and the public backlash that could come with it.
The energy is different now. “There’s a real shift in ruling-class vibes,” Rob Larson, an economics professor who has written about the new ultrarich and Silicon Valley’s influence on politics, told me. Many of America’s plutocrats seem not to care if people know that they’re trying to manipulate the political system and the Fourth Estate in service of their own interests. Billionaires such as Andreessen and Ackman are openly broadcasting their political desires and “definitely feeling their animal spirits,” Larson said. Or, as the Northwestern University political-science professor Jeffrey Winters put it in a postelection interview with Slate, this feels like a moment of “in-your-face oligarchy (Even the Koch Brother Weren’t This Brazen).”
The refusal by two of the largest newspapers (The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post), both apparently liberal leaning, to endorse Kamala Harris seemed to be the first example of “preemptive compliance.” After Trump’s election, those refusals almost seem like conditions for being allowed to join the “Star Chamber.”
Could this be a moment, though, when Americans, genuinely sick of the swamp and sick of being played the fools by the super-rich and the spineless politicians they buy so openly, put aside their Big-Media created differences and fight back against this machine? I don’t believe all MAGidiots are racists. Racism is a by-product of MAGA. I do think that a lot of the people who voted for Trump suffer from the same things as people who voted for Kamala. The reason many of those people voted for Trump was because they consume Fox News and are influenced endlessly by the lies of the right-wing media machine, which supports the oligarchy.
The young man who assassinated the UnitedHealth CEO in New York City last week has become somewhat of a folk hero. I won’t be surprised if people in West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia write songs about him. The fact that so many Americans across the political spectrum have found common ground in this murder demonstrates that there could be a backlash to Trump’s all-in on the oligarchy.
There could be a day not so far off when we might see Musk, egg-head Andreessen, and others make their best impression of Mussolini and his lover. I don’t think anyone on the right or left, from “we the people,” will care much if that does indeed happen.