(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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How the Billionaires Took Over America [1]
['Timothy Noah', 'Samuel Moyn', 'Grace Byron', 'Phillip Maciak', 'Abigail Disney', 'Illustration Nicolás Ortega']
Date: 2025-06-19
Olin was radicalized in 1972 when the Environmental Protection Agency, created just two years earlier, issued regulations tightening production of the pesticide DDT, of which the Olin Corporation controlled 20 percent of the American market. The Olin Corporation was also targeted for dumping mercury into the Niagara River and other waterways. “My greatest ambition now,” Olin said in a 1977 interview, “is to see free enterprise re-established in this country. Business and the public must be awakened to the creeping stranglehold that socialism has gained here since World War II.” That same year, Olin hired Ford’s bomb-throwing Treasury Secretary William Simon to be president of the Olin Foundation, where he worked to create a conservative “counter-intelligentsia.”
The billionaire counteroffensive was further torqued by a series of Supreme Court decisions loosening restrictions on campaign finance by equating money with speech. These began with Buckley v. Valeo (1976), which ruled that government-mandated restrictions on campaign spending, including by independent committees and a candidate’s own funds, violated the First Amendment. The culminating decision was Citizens United (2010). That ruling is remembered as eliminating a 117-year prohibition on political campaign spending by corporations. But publicly held corporations of the type that dominate the S&P 500, and with which we’re most familiar, don’t typically want to spend on campaigns (apart from company political action committees, where contributions are limited and come technically from individual employees). Public corporations shun such activity because they don’t want to rile stockholders.
What Citizens United really did was open the floodgates to campaign spending by private corporations, which is to say companies owned by oligarchs. It was the billionaires’ Magna Carta. The ruling eliminated virtually all restrictions on independent campaign expenditures, based on the presumption that these weren’t coordinated with political candidates. (That this presumption was wrong was plainly obvious to anybody who was paying attention.) The ruling begat Super PACs, which (unlike regular PACs) could accept and give unlimited amounts, and “dark money” 501(c)(4)s—ostensible “social welfare” nonprofits, which allowed billionaire “philanthropists” to spend unlimited funds directly on political campaigns, with only slightly more restrictions, without disclosing their source. Meanwhile, for unrelated reasons, the number of publicly held corporations—the type that, Citizens United be damned, didn’t like giving to political candidates—shrank during this period by nearly half, from about 7,000 in 1996 to about 4,000 in 2020. In that sense, capitalism itself was getting less democratic and more hostage to the whims of oligarchs and their privately held companies.
In 2024, Citizens United enabled Trump to treat his official campaign as an afterthought and to focus fundraising efforts on Super PACs that Citizens United presumed he wouldn’t control, but did. About 44 percent of all the funds that supported Trump in 2024 came from 10 individual donors. Although Kamala Harris outspent Trump overall (demonstrating that money isn’t everything), of the top 10 donors to either candidacy—the bulk of it to outside groups—seven supported Trump. Harris won the money race, but Trump won the billionaire oligarch race.
But now I’m getting ahead of our story.
VIII.
The Reagan Reversal
In retrospect, the oligarchs eliminated the New Deal consensus with astonishing speed. Setting Nixon’s 1968 election as the starting gun and Ronald Reagan’s 1980 election as the finish line, it was the work of a dozen years. This was all the more remarkable, given the major setback of Watergate, which gave Democrats enormous congressional gains in 1974 and the presidency in 1976.
Watergate was an oligarchic hiccup, given that the most plausible reason for the Nixon White House–directed break-in at the Democratic National Committee was to retrieve evidence Nixon believed (wrongly) to be there of a $100,000 cash bribe (or perhaps $50,000) that he’d accepted from the billionaire Howard Hughes. When Hughes gave the bribe, he was worried that the Justice Department’s antitrust division wouldn’t let him buy the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas, and also that the Atomic Energy Commission permitted nuclear testing in Nevada. “Howard Hughes wanted to own the president,” former Hughes deputy Robert Maheu explained in a 1973 deposition after Hughes fired him, “choose his successor, members of the Supreme Court, senators, congressmen, and politicians at all levels.”
Another oligarchical aspect of Watergate was its financing by slush funds solicited from corporations (illegally) and the rich, collected on occasion by Nixon’s oligarch best friend and factotum, the Florida multimillionaire Bebe Rebozo. Among Nixon’s most generous campaign donors was the oligarch W. Clement Stone (net worth: $500 million), a deeply eccentric self-made insurance tycoon who wore spats and began each day saying, “I feel happy! I feel healthy! I feel ter-r-r-ific!” Stone contributed nearly $5 million to Nixon’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 and later said he would have given $10 million if asked.
Richard Nixon with multimillionaire pal Bebe Rebozo in Key Biscayne, Florida, in 1971 CORBIS/GETTY
Stone preached a self-help gospel that he called PMA (for “positive mental attitude”) and claimed to have schooled Nixon in its precepts after his twin political defeats in the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial election (the latter was where Nixon famously told the press, “you don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore”). “I found this terrific change in this man,” Stone told an interviewer in 1973, “this drastic change, almost 180-degree turn from somewhat of a negative personality to a positive personality.” Stone also insisted sunnily that “not a dime” of his money funded any of the unethical activities exposed in the various Watergate scandals, which seems improbable but was never disproved.
Ronald Reagan’s closest friends were a group of deeply conservative West Coast businessmen, known collectively as the kitchen cabinet, who’d gotten wealthy during the postwar boom in Los Angeles. The billionaire in this crowd was Walter Annenberg (net worth at death: $8 billion), whose annual New Year’s Eve dinner at his Rancho Mirage estate, Sunnylands, Reagan attended regularly. As president, Reagan named Annenberg’s wife, Leonore, White House chief of protocol. (Annenberg had previously been ambassador to London during the Nixon and Ford administrations.)
Reagan’s wife, Nancy, absorbed most of the criticism for the couple’s taste for lavish living, with critics comparing her to Marie Antoinette. The former Hollywood actress punctured this image in 1982 by making fun of it at the annual Gridiron Club dinner, singing to the tune of “Second Hand Rose” that she gave her secondhand clothes “to museum collections and traveling shows.” But as the Reagans prepared to leave Washington six years later, Time reported that she’d received gifts of designer dresses worth tens of thousands of dollars, ostensibly borrowed, and not reported them on the couple’s tax returns, prompting the first lady to claim they had been returned.
In retrospect, Nancy’s hazing was a bit sexist, because Ronald Reagan loved the rich no less than his wife did, and the ramifications were considerably more profound. Some trimming back of taxes and regulations had already occurred under President Jimmy Carter, but Reagan greatly accelerated these, dropping, for instance, the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. Reagan’s Democratic successors would ameliorate these changes somewhat, but mostly they couldn’t stop the pendulum from swinging rightward (the top rate has never again reached 40 percent). Even President Biden, who moved economic policy the furthest leftward of any of them, never made much headway on taxes. By 2018, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman reported in their 2019 book, The Triumph of Injustice, effective tax rates on capital fell below effective tax rates on labor for the first time in at least 100 years. The proximate cause was Trump’s 2017 tax cut. Meanwhile, labor’s share of national income (relative to capital) fell from 67 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2024—its lowest level, the George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen calculated, since 1929. Human beings were losing ground to the almighty dollar.
Billionaires benefited the most. Last year, Zucman reported that although income taxes are progressive up to incomes of about $21 million, they reverse course and turn regressive after that, leaving billionaires with an effective tax of 8 percent. That’s less than half the effective tax paid by the “merely” rich. One reason was a growing reluctance to tax estates. The top marginal rate on estates dropped from 77 percent under Roosevelt and his successors to 70 percent under Carter to 55 percent under Reagan. President George W. Bush phased out the estate tax entirely in the early aughts, thereby enlarging the estates of billionaires John Kluge, Walter Shorenstein, and George Steinbrenner. President Obama revived the estate tax but didn’t dare raise the top threshold beyond 40 percent, where it remains today.
Ronald Reagan yukked it up in the White House in 1982 with, among others, Walter Annenberg (center). NATIONAL ARCHIVES
For the superrich, the Reagan Reversal didn’t happen solely at the federal level. States also started competing to eliminate the “rule against perpetuities,” which limited how many generations you could shield capital from taxation in a family trust. Before the 1980s, most states enforced the rule against perpetuities. But a wave of deregulation initiated by Congress in 1986 spread to the states, and today most states have repealed it. Even before Trump, it was the best time in at least a century to be a billionaire.
IX.
Trumpigarchy
Donald Trump has a troubled history with the Forbes 400. He first appeared in the 1982 tally with a net worth of $100 million, according to a 2018 Washington Post essay by former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg. Trump tried and failed to persuade Greenberg that his family’s real estate business was worth more than $900 million. He even got his lawyer, Roy Cohn, to pester Greenberg. But Forbes went with $100 million. Trump and Cohn performed this Mutt and Jeff routine again in 1983, with Cohn now trying to persuade Greenberg that Trump was worth $700 million. Against his better judgment, Greenberg wrote that Trump had $200 million. In 1984, Greenberg bumped Donald up to $400 million after receiving a phone call from a fictitious “Mr. Barron” who was really and quite obviously Trump. “Mr. Barron” claimed Donald owned 90 percent of the family business, but Greenberg later found out that during that period Trump “had zero equity in his father’s company,” and that he should never have appeared on the Forbes list at all.
Trump eventually became a real billionaire, but he fell off the Forbes 400 list from 1990–1995 and in 2021 and 2023—these last two times partly because there were by now so many billionaires in America that the Forbes 400 list couldn’t include them all.
Trump’s travails with the Forbes 400 (and with money generally) reflect two traits—prevarication and instability—that are also the hallmarks of his presidencies. He’s an oligarch, but a shaky one, with a $500 million fraud judgment hanging over his head (the case is still on appeal in New York) and more than half his net worth (now $5.2 billion, per Forbes) tied up in social media and crypto stakes (which he didn’t pay for) that monetize his presidency and blatantly violate the emoluments clauses of the Constitution. If Aristotle saw aristocracy degrading into oligarchy, Trump is oligarchy degrading into kleptocracy.
In his first term, Trump passed—with lobbying assistance from Fred Smith, the oligarch president of FedEx (net worth: $5 billion)—a tax cut that, according to the nonprofit Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, will this year deliver an average of more than $60,000 to the one percent and less than $500 to the bottom 60 percent. Trump also lowered the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. He now wants to lower it to 15 percent and to extend the first-term cut another 10 years.
Trump also harbors fantasies of displacing much of the progressive income tax with revenue raised from tariffs that, at least for now, he can impose without consulting Congress. “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries,” Trump said in his inaugural address, “we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.” Trump’s commitment to this fever dream explains why he keeps slapping tariffs everywhere, taking them off when they send the stock and/or bond markets into a tailspin, then later reimposing them. He really wants that revenue! Trump’s billionaire oligarch Commerce Secretary Lutnick is reportedly working to set up something called the External Revenue Service to collect the duties.
You would think that if a government of, by, and for billionaires could do nothing else, it could keep the stock and bond markets from tanking. After all, nobody has more to lose from a plunging market than a billionaire. But a gift for making money does not translate into a gift for understanding economic policy. If it did, Andrew Mellon would have reacted less foolishly to the 1929 crash.
More charitably, Trump’s billionaires had every reason to conclude, from Trump’s first term, that when the interests of the MAGA rabble conflicted with those of the oligarchs, Trump would choose the oligarchs. Save for a few tariffs (which helped some workers and hurt others), and a somewhat tougher trade agreement with Mexico and Canada, endorsed by the AFL-CIO, that Trump no longer honors, the working class got bupkes out of Trump’s first term. Trump appointed anti-union members to the National Labor Relations Board, which governs labor-management conflicts; he reduced the number of workplace safety inspectors at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration; he dismantled fiduciary protections for retirement funds established by Obama; he allowed poultry plants with records of severe injuries such as amputations to increase line speeds; he threatened to veto any legislation that raised the minimum wage to $15; and he tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
The billionaires were correct to presume Trump would continue to screw the working class in his second term and, because of his anti-immigration stance, pay no political price for it. Theoretically, Trump’s crackdown on immigration threatened oligarchs by eliminating cheap labor, but it never achieved sufficient scale to cause them economic harm, and likely never will. They were also correct to presume that Trump would once again throw a wrench into the regulatory machinery (this time through mass firings, often illegal) and extend and expand the 2017 tax law’s giveaways to the rich. These are so pricey (along with proposed tax exemptions for overtime pay and tips that may never come to pass) that congressional Republicans briefly floated a tax hike on the wealthy. But Trump shot that down, first by suggesting he’d pay a price in the next election (never mind that Trump is barred by the Constitution from running again) and then by saying “a lot of the millionaires would leave the country.” The real reason he couldn’t support this was that it would bleed the oligarchs.
So yes, the billionaires were mostly correct in believing Trump would pamper them. Where they went wrong was in presuming Trump would not destroy the economy. He didn’t during his first term, but there’s a decent chance he will in his second, and the billionaires in his Cabinet (and his half-billionaire Treasury Secretary Bessent) may be powerless to stop him. At least one of those billionaires, Commerce’s Lutnick, spends half his time publicly egging Trump on to keep tariffs high (while privately saying he shouldn’t). The fact that Democrats always manage the economy better than Republicans, by any metric you can name, and have done so for the better part of a century, has never penetrated the billionaire oligarch’s skull, because that would require him to recognize that a.) lowering taxes does very little to stimulate economic growth and (as the bond market will tell you) quite a bit to undermine it; and b.) reducing regulation, especially in the financial realm, is profoundly destabilizing, as witnessed in the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and the subprime mortgage crisis of two decades ago.
Neither truth is anything a billionaire oligarch wishes to believe. This is compounded by the fact that the more money you possess, the less likely it is that anybody will ever want to tell you that you’re wrong about anything.
Add all this up and it’s difficult to know who in the Trumpigarchy is servant and who is master. On the one hand, Trump’s political fortunes and personal solvency depend on the goodwill of billionaires. Shortly after the inauguration, the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis reported that 94 percent of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA memecoins (satire is dead) were owned by a mere 40 crypto “whales” in amounts worth $10 million or more. Their value subsequently fell steeply, prompting Trump to offer the top 220 memecoin holders an “intimate private dinner” with the president where they could “Hear close up, from President Trump, about the future of Crypto!” Everything is for sale.
On the other hand, the crazy Liberation Day tariffs and Trump’s idle threat to renege on some of the $36 trillion national debt, which was so potentially catastrophic that many news outlets pretended he didn’t say it, are a mentally unstable old man’s way of saying nobody, not even a billionaire oligarch, will tell him what to do. Nixon cultivated a “madman theory” to win concessions by frightening North Vietnam and the Soviet Union into believing he might otherwise vaporize them with nuclear bombs. With Nixon, it was an act. With Trump, it isn’t. He’s genuinely unwell, and though he doesn’t seem keen on dropping nuclear bombs, he does like to flirt with creating a global depression. In which case it might finally dawn on billionaires that they chose the wrong horse. Until then, the balance of power between Trump and his billionaires will shift back and forth.
X.
The Road From Here
Aristotle, who was no great fan of democracy, nonetheless concluded that it
appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people…. We may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government.
Amen. But Aristotle offered no guidance on what to do about an oligarchy that acquires power by democratic means. Nor did he reckon that the middle class would dwindle—from 61 percent in 1971, according to a Pew Research Center study, to 51 percent in 2023.
In 1976, J. Paul Getty died the world’s richest man, with $6 billion. Elon Musk has $431 billion. Correcting for inflation, he’s more than 10 times wealthier than the richest man in the world half a century ago.
Aristotle could not possibly conceive the proliferation and growing wealth of the American billionaire. In 1976, Getty died the world’s richest man, with $6 billion. Musk has $431 billion. Correcting for inflation, the richest man in the world today is more than 10 times wealthier than the richest man in the world half a century ago. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are each six times wealthier than Getty was. Larry Ellison and Warren Buffett are five times wealthier. Even the Walmart heiress Alice Walton is three times wealthier than Getty, and that’s after she spent hundreds of millions to build Crystal Bridges, a world-class art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas.
When you possess this much money, buying political influence looks like a bargain. Warren Stephens spent a combined $7 million to purchase his ambassadorship. But that’s nothing compared to the $31 million he paid a decade ago to buy a mansion in Carmel, California. Jeff Bezos spent $250 million to buy The Washington Post a dozen years ago. But he paid twice that to purchase the world’s largest sailing yacht, which clocks in at 417 feet and plies the seven seas with a support vessel that’s 246 feet long and carries additional crew.
The oligarch Donald Trump, in auctioning himself and American government to the highest bidder, may well match or surpass the stew of corruption that Washington created during the Gilded Age. That’s on him. But it’s on the rest of us that over 50 years, through economic policies that coddled the rich under both Democrats and Republicans, American wealth concentrated to such a degree that a Trump presidency—make that two Trump presidencies—was not only possible, but perhaps inevitable.
We have the power to stop, through more sensible tax and regulatory policies and a resurgence of union organizing, the torrent of wealth flowing upward to billionaires. I worry a lot about what will happen if we don’t act soon. Many people fear an abrupt end to democracy under Trump. I don’t, especially. What I do fear, though, is that unless we find a way to correct the wealth-based power imbalance that gave us Trump in the first place, our democracy will flicker out more gradually. To paraphrase Louis Brandeis: We can keep our democracy, or we can hatch our first trillionaire. We really can’t do both.
All figures in this piece are accurate as of May 28, 2025. The values shown are subject to market fluctuations.
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