Trump’s plutocracy
MARCH 1, 2025
Over the last three decades, a global billionaire class has seized more and more control over the way states and economies operate. It is a process that has been led by the United States. At his inauguration as President, Donald Trump was flanked by four of the richest men in the world, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
Two years before the financial crash in 2008, a leading Wall Street investment bank, Citigroup, advised its clients that the US had come to resemble a “plutonomy”. This is a society in which economic decision-making is heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny super-wealthy minority.
Three days before he took office, the outgoing President, the 82-year old Jo Biden, in his final speech from the White House, issued the country with a stark warning: “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms.”
Biden’s speech was not just hyperbole. Under Trump, plutocratic power has been taken to new heights. His administration includes at least 13 billionaires with a combined fortune of over $400 billion. Biden’s Cabinet, in contrast, was worth about $118 million. Trump’s government, is, by some stretch, the wealthiest democratically elected government in US history.
His appointees are there because of the cash they poured into Trump’s election campaign. Operating as if in a medieval court, their role is to activate Trump’s agenda. The new ambassador to the UK, the investment banker Warren Stephens, has a fortune of $3.4 billion. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, is worth $2 bn. The richest of them all, Elon Musk, has been charged with auditing federal spending. His ‘efficiency czar’ as Trump likes to call him, has recruited a small gang of youthful tech-savvy ‘Muskrats’ to sift through the US Treasury’s financial and personal records, a first step towards the shrinking of the state.
Donald Trump had once been remarkably candid about mixing politics and extreme wealth. “When they call [for donations], I give,” he said on live TV in 2015 – of those seeking high office: “When I [later] need something from them, I call them. They are there for me. And that’s a broken system.”
What is striking is the resurrection of the nineteenth century American ‘gilded age’. The industrial tycoons were later dubbed the ‘robber barons’ for their ruthless industrial tactics and the harsh conditions they imposed on workers. Some of today’s billionaire class may have started as mould-breakers and innovators. But they have also exploited their power, through monopolisation and collusion, bringing much social damage, including crushing levels of inequality. JD Rockefeller, who created Standard Oil, controlled over 90% of the world’s oil supply. Google has swallowed up over 200 companies and now controls over 80% of Europe’s search market. In anti-liberal states from Russia to Hungary, oligarchs, handed the economic commanding heights, are there through presidential patronage.
In the 1930s, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Sr described America “in an ironical perversion of [President] Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg” as “government of the corporations, by the corporations and for the corporations.” The weakening of fusion of money and power from 1945, was short-lived. George W Bush once joked about “the haves and the have-mores” at a white-tie dinner of his wealthy supporters. “Some people call you the elite,” he added. “I call you my base.”
Before Trump’s first Presidency, the American economist, Jeffrey Sachs, declared that even if government were turned over to “the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Bechtel and the Health Corporation of America, they would have very little to change of current policies which already cater to the four mega-lobbies, Big Oil, Wall Street, defence contractors and medical giants.”
Far from the utopia of free and competitive markets and economic dynamism promised by the neoliberal counter-revolution, global capitalism has been turned, under a veneer of democracy, into a model that is less addicted to markets and competition than to monopolisation. Today’s plutocratic class are only too happy with their freedom to crush competitors, and ignore or change regulations. A growing number of the world’s mega corporations, from oil and health conglomerates to Amazon and Google, have been turned into private fiefdoms for their owners.
In a speech to the Oxford Union in 1975, the leading Conservative politician Keith Joseph described the post-war social settlement as “an ephemeral political compromise”. With liberal democracy on its knees, the world is at another ephemeral moment, one in the hands of this new political nexus, a shotgun marriage of convenience between the world’s most powerful politician, and a group of ‘have-mores’ with front door keys to the White House.
While the veteran political activist and senator, Bernie Sanders, is taking his ‘Tour against Oligarchy’ to big crowds in Nebraska, Trump has issued a long list of executive orders, many of breathtaking audacity. The catalogue of upheaval, often bypassing the usual democratic processes, includes the withdrawal of the US from both the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate agreement and closing of USAID aid programmes across the globe.
Trump’s contradictory mix of anarcho-liberalism and absolute sovereignty is being delivered through Mark Zuckerberg’s early in-house motto, “move fast and break things”. Most of his Presidential edicts will benefit American and global oligarchs. They include the commitment to ‘unleash’ the oil and gas industry, the promise of lucrative state contracts for Big Tech, the opposition to the OECD’s attempt for a global minimum tax rate on corporations, the promise of top tax rate cuts, and the axing of state climate and employment regulations and anti-trust powers. Here is a charter of further empowerment for corporate extractors, monopolists and crypto-currency speculators alike. Musk’s personal fortune has boomed since last November, with his $250 billion contribution to his new boss’s election campaign proving a lucrative investment.
Trump is dismantling, by diktat, those state institutions he sees as obstacles to change. Internationally he is aligning with other strong and anti-liberal leaders from Putin to Netanyahu. His goal seems to be that of an absolute ruler. He jokes about being ‘King’, but resembles a modern day Caesar, with a gang of corporate barons his centurions. One of Trump’s appointees, as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, is Michael Anton, a conservative thinker long admired by the new President and his associates. In his 2021 book, The Stakes, Anton argued that America needed ‘Red Caesarism’, a form of “one-man rule, halfway between monarchy and democracy.”
At work is a bigger shake-up in governing politics than initiated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The global populist right will be emboldened, as will the growing number demanding the shrinking of the essential functions of government. The forward march of the super-rich is being accelerated.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, the political pendulum swung against the corporate barons. High profile figures, such as the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, promoted a new vision of an America free of plutocracy and of poverty, and the corrupt politicians supporting the robber barons. The decade long ‘progressive era’ was fuelled when Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, and launched the first break-up of some corporate monopolies. A progressive Republican, ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt was the first to take on, as he put it, “the malefactors of great wealth.” Despite his patrician background, he questioned the prevailing idea that making money was American’s primary goal. His government marked the first concerted attempt at state interference in markets. Private interests, he insisted, should be not be allowed to override the public good.
The robber barons overplayed their hand, and gave way to an age of populist revolt, anti-monopoly legislation, social reform and, eventually, the New Deal of the 1930s. Trump’s scattergun revolution may yet falter. Not all of America’s billionaire class are fans. His new lieutenants may not all stay in line. Then there are the many millions of likely losers, from jobless state officials to workers in clean energy and those industries hit by his resurrection of mercantilist doctrines. Without a similar progressive challenge, this unholy alliance is taking America and much of the world along a very uncertain, unforgiving and possibly irreversible path.
Stewart Lansley is a visiting fellow at the School of Policy Studies, the University of Bristol. He is the author of many books, most recently, The Richer, The Poorer, How Britain Enriched the few and Failed the Poor, a 200-year history.
Image: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/business/2024/03/05/bezos-dethrones-musk-to-reclaim-title-of-worlds-richest-man/. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 Deed
Trump’s first month
FEBRUARY 23, 2025
President Donald Trump’s actions have dominated the headlines over the last four weeks. Aside from his pardoning of the Capitol Hill rioters, crackdown on migrants, attacks on the federal civil service and agencies like USAID and foreign policy outbursts, here are some of the less noticed things he has done.
January 21st – He instructed all federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, to pause external communications, including scientific reports, updates to websites, health advisories, and social media posts.
January 22nd – The DOJ halted agreements for police reform in cases where prosecutors had found patterns of misconduct and issued a “full and unconditional pardon” to two DC police officers involved in the death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown.
January 27th – He signed an executive order banning transgender individuals from enlisting and serving in the military and signed another executive order ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in the military. His deputy director for global health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered CDC staff to stop communicating with the World Health Organization.
January 28th – The Defense Intelligence Agency issued a memo suspending the observance of several holidays, including MLK Day, Holocaust Day, Juneteenth and Pride.
January 29th – He signed an executive order that seeks to deport international students who participated in pro-Palestinian campus protests.
February 4th – The Department of Homeland Security sent its first military flight with migrants to Guantanamo Bay.
February 5th – Trump signed an executive order banning trans women and girls from competing in female sports. He also called on Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to reject the visa applications of trans women athletes.
February 6th – Trump called for CBS to cancel ‘60 Minutes’ and said the network should lose its broadcasting license in a post on Truth Social.
February 8th – The Washington Post reported that candidates for top national security jobs have been asked questions about whether the 2020 election was stolen and if Jan. 6 was an “inside job.” Those who answered “no” were not selected for the positions. Russell Vought, the acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), cut off new funding for the agency, saying it’s not necessary.
February 10th – Trump signed an executive order pausing the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits US companies and foreign firms from paying bribes to officials of foreign governments to obtain or retain business.
February 11th – An AP reporter was prohibited from covering an Oval Office event because the news organization’s stylebook uses the Gulf of Mexico rather than the Gulf of America.
February 19th – The Trump administration said the Transportation Department would move to end federal approval for New York City’s congestion pricing program.
February 20th – The Senate narrowly confirmed election denier, Trump sycophant, and right-wing extremist Kash Patel for a 10-year term as FBI director. Patel has pledged to “come after” US media organizations.
February 21st – Trump fired Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as the head of the Navy, the vice chief of the Air Force, and the top lawyers for the Army, Navy, and Air Force, in what the NY Times called “an extraordinary Friday night purge at the Pentagon.”
This digest has been compiled from Zeteo’s excellent This Week in Democracy series, documenting the Trump administration’s attacks on the American democratic and constitutional order, with thanks. The full series can be found here.
Image: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/world/2024/02/10/trump-vows-to-undo-bidens-gun-restrictions-if-re-elected/ Creator: Matt Rourke | Credit: AP Copyright: Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Licence: Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0
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