Donald Trump’s Billionaire Boys Club

Wylde has a more accurate sense of where the business elite is than Cuban does. Tellingly, the wealthy supporters of Trump aren’t at all blind to his threat to democracy. Many of them condemned his incitement of the January 6 attack on the Capitol. But at the end of the day, Trump’s being an autocrat is less important than the fact that it is in their self-interest to support him—for reasons both of greed (Trump will renew the tax cuts of 2017, which will mean trillions more in the coffers of the wealthiest Americans) and fear (Trump will use the power of the presidency to exact vengeance on his enemies). The greed motive is furthered by the fact that, even if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are far short of being socialists, they have supported more government activism than the United States has seen in a generation.

In other words, if the choice is between democracy or self-interest, the rich will choose self-interest. In June, Politico reported:

Republican business titans from hedge fund executive Nelson Peltz to hotel mogul Robert Bigelow have come out in favor of the presumptive GOP nominee. Even those who loudly denounced Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are backing his bid to return to the White House.

Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman—who once labeled the U.S. Capitol insurrection that followed a Trump speech on Jan. 6, 2021, “an affront to the democratic values” of the country—is once again one of the former president’s most important allies on Wall Street. Top financiers like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who NeW">called on the then-president to resign over the riot, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin, who dubbed Trump a “three-time loser” in elections, are considering offering their support.

Since that report, Ackman has come out as a major Trump supporter; Griffin continues to keep his distance from the former president while financing downballot conservative candidates. But even Griffin is hardly a member of the anti-Trump coalition.

In addition to the traditional Republican rich, even more-moderate magnates are making peace with a possible Trump restoration. It’s notable that in the last week two billionaires who own major newspapers —Jeff Bezos (The Washington Post) and Patrick Soon-Shiong (the Los Angeles Times)—both reportedly overrode the decision of editorial boards and quashed endorsements of Harris. Bezos’s reported role in the decision has been disputed by publisher William Lewis, who claims it was his own decision. Patrick’s daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, claimed that the family rejected the endorsement because of the Biden-Harris government’s support of Israel’s war in Gaza—a contention later disputed by her father in an interview with his newspaper.

Surely, the most plausible explanation is that Bezos and Soon-Shiong are acting out of naked self-interest. There is, after all, scant reason to trust Lewis—a man known for his journalistic dirty tricks and servility toward his employers. Besides, Trump has repeatedly promised to use the state to punish his political enemies; Harris has made no such threats. Given a tight election, simple prudence would dictate that it’s better not to anger Trump—even if that means annoying Harris.

Trump is a genuine believer in plutocracy: He thinks the best society is one where the rich are in charge. In his term as president, the upper echelon of government resembled Mar-a-Lago: government of the country club set, by the country club set, for the country club set. As Politico reported in 2017, “Trump has amassed a Cabinet of unheard-of wealth, filled with business executives and CEOs. But he has also quietly appointed a number of his richest friends and allies to unpaid jobs of importance, where their responsibilities are blurry but their power could prove immense.” Trump cronies in power included Rudy Giuliani, Carl Icahn, Richard LeFrak, and Steven Roth.

Susan B. Glaser, in an extensive report in The New Yorker on Trump’s alliance with billionaires, documents that figures like Elon Musk, who has emerged as a top Trump surrogate, expect similar arrangements during a second term, when the government will become their playground. To a degree that is unusual even in the United States—which has long had a political system where corporations hold considerable sway over government—Trump has openly tailored his platform to suit the policy preferences of his donors on issues ranging from TikTok and cryptocurrency to fossil fuels and foreign policy. Trump’s true motto is not Make America Great Again but Quid Pro Quo.

Unfortunately, the Democrats, while not quite so openly for sale, are also reliant on rich donors, which makes it hard for them to make an issue of Trump’s brazen corruption.

Glaser lays out the contradictions of the Democratic Party’s position:

Trump’s courting of billionaires has been an explicit part of the Democrats’ campaign against him. At the Democratic National Convention, in August, Harris said that the ex-President’s populist rhetoric did not match the reality of a man who “fights for himself and his billionaire friends.” But the talking points miss an uncomfortable fact for both parties: during the Trump era, it’s the Democrats who have enjoyed a clear advantage with the nation’s wealthiest political donors. According to OpenSecrets, big donors—those who gave $100,000 or more to just one party—contributed $5.2 billion to Democratic causes and candidates in the last election cycle, and $3.3 billion to Republican ones. Despite Trump’s cultivation of the crypto bros and Wall Street money, his online chats with Musk and his Mar-a-Lago fund-raisers with Big Oil executives, that trend is on track to continue this year. A recent Bloomberg survey of billionaires showed Harris receiving support from twenty-one of the country’s richest people, compared with fourteen who were backing Trump. The difference, though, is that Trump had taken in millions more from these supporters. His campaign is far more dependent on its shrinking segment of the ultra-rich.

Yet, despite the exposed position of the Democrats, they could still make an issue of the fact that Trump has taken traditional graft to a new and dangerous level. This is especially pertinent because the actual agenda of the rich to dismantle the regulatory state—as outlined in Project 2025—is hugely unpopular. In a recent town hall, Musk said that Trump’s policies would result in “temporary hardship.” This is surely a fact worth advertising.

In a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, last Wednesday, the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee, Tim Walz, said:

They’re saying the quiet parts out loud now, because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon runs. In other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the American public, is promising corruption. That’s what he’s promising you.

Unfortunately, Walz’s populism is only a minor key in the Democratic Party’s campaign, easily missed amid the elevation of figures like Mark Cuban and Liz Cheney. In this final week of the campaign, Democrats would do well to repeat Walz’s critique as loudly as possible.