If billionaires are so powerful, how come so many of them are behaving like such weaklings around Donald Trump?
One by one, they seem to kiss the ring. Most recently, we have Mark Zuckerberg tugging at his curly forelock before our next president, demonstrating loyalty if not subservience by promoting a former Republican operative within his own organization, naming a close Trump pal to its board of directors, and announcing policies to eliminate fact-checkers and move “content review” teams from blue California to red Texas. (The fact-checkers will be replaced by “community notes”—you know, the system that has worked so well at “X.”)
Before him had Jeff Bezos, who like Zuckerberg has bent his knee, and who has overseen a shift at the newspaper he controls, the Washington Post, to dial-back criticism of Trump. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has required similar changes. (Zuckerberg, Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Sam Altman and many others have also written big checks to support Trump’s inauguration.)
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The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, has gone even further, paying rent to live at Trump’s side at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s monument to sycophancy.
A total of 13 billionaires (so far) have signed on to serve in Trump’s incoming administration. Between them, they control wealth worth some $600 billion, more than the GDP of all but about two dozen countries—Musk alone is worth nearly half a trillion dollars. And that, of course, does not count the billionaires like Bezos, Soon-Shiong, Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and others across the financial and business elite who support Trump but are not actively serving in the administration.
You would think their kind of money would buy power, not such displays of cravenness. But you shouldn’t.
There are many ways to explain their behavior. One is simply that what each of these men (and the billionaires club around Trump is predominantly male) is doing is what made them rich in the first place: Advancing their self-interest by playing the game in any way that benefits them. That’s understandable. In one way or another, it is how power is won, and wielded in Washington.
Trump has, of course, raised the stakes, being more overt than most DC shake-down artists in telegraphing how he will benefit his supporters and harm those he perceives as enemies. It may seem gross, but it has worked. Pearl clutching from old school fans of the Constitution, the rule of law and “decency” notwithstanding, it has to be acknowledged that his bare knuckles, laws-are-for-little-people brand of politics has been a big success.
It is time, in fact, that the public at large acknowledge that Trump has not changed American politics or society. Rather, he has revealed them for what they are. As inequality has grown, democracy has been decaying for years as the power of the richest among us has been compounded by captive courts and legislators in much the same way as their holdings have benefited from the compounding of market returns.
In fact, engineering that decay is no accident. It is part of a sustained, organized power grab by the world’s most power-hungry people.
These billionaires who are now enlisting as MAGA foot-soldiers are not schmucks. They are not just kissing up to Trump because he will be the big man on campus for the next few years, or because it will help them further feather their nests—although, as noted above, when you are as pathologically greedy as you must be to become a billionaire, that kind of thing is never far from your thinking.
They are doing it because they have seen that democracy is often costly for them, with its periodic elevation of people whose policies nag at them—raising their taxes, increasing regulations, diminishing their influence, promoting the competition they say they love but that in actuality they hate and seek to destroy at all costs.
How do you ultimately eliminate the risk that a government might, even for a moment, favor the masses rather than the richest few among us? You get campaign finance laws changed so that the wealthiest are super-empowered. You get voting rights legislation changed to reduce the influence of those who might oppose your agenda. Check and check.
What next? Well, you don’t stop just because you have taken control of the courts and the Congress and the presidency.
While there is a lot of focus on concerns about creeping authoritarianism in today’s America, there are other ways to neutralize or otherwise manage the influence of American voters. One of the most powerful of these is to control the information flows upon which an electorate depends on to make informed political decisions. Truth is the most dangerous enemy of would-be (and actual) autocrats.
Recognizing that, these people have long worked to change and corrupt our information ecoystems to advance their narratives and compromise those of their opponents. Their scheme is designed to once and for all make it impossible for voters to know what is true and what is not. Getting billionaires to move their fourth-estate vanity projects and social media hubs out of the news business and into the propaganda business is part of the plan. Rupert Murdoch may have started it but Musk, Zuckerberg, Soon-Shiong and the less overt but nonetheless wobbly-kneed owners of other major platforms and outlets are following his lead.
Trump’s administration will chart a new path. They will do it by cooking the books produced by U.S. government agencies so the numbers tell a story, any story, as they wish it were rather than as it really is. (You recall previous efforts to do this during the COVID-19 pandemic, or the nonsensical time Trump employed a Sharpie to redraw the path of a hurricane.) They will do it by threatening and perhaps prosecuting those who offer “alternative facts” and critical views. They will do it by getting rid of experts whose focus on facts and science undermines the political positions of those in power—and by defunding education programs more broadly.
Making truth indistinguishable from the self-serving lies of the leadership class is as deadly a blow as can be struck against any democracy, especially one that is in as fragile state as our own. It is every bit as fatal—indeed it is much the same—as denying voters the right to express themselves or rigging election results.
And that is what many of the billionaires currently making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago—like Zuckerberg and Bezos—are doing.
