Chapter 5: Powered by Plutocrats

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Chapter 5: Powered by Plutocrats

There is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a
plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain
lines and gifted with “the money touch,” but with ideals which
in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1913 letter to Sir Edward Grey

Make no mistake: Trump wasn’t president because of his policies, his qualifications, or even primarily because of his base. He was president because America’s wealthiest class funded his rise, protected his power, and enabled his worst instincts, at least so long as he delivered the goods.

Reporter Kayla Kitson documents, for example, how the Koch brothers invested roughly $40 million in promoting the 2017 Trump tax cut for billionaires and reaped a $500 million-a-year tax cut for themselves and over a billion dollars for their company. She notes, “The propaganda for the Republican Tax Act portrays it as good for investment. It’s hard to find an investment in the real economy that paid off as handsomely as the Koch brothers’ political spending.”1

The billionaires funding Trump generally weren’t concerned with his character, his corruption, or his contempt for constitutional governance. They saw in him a uniquely useful tool, a president with no fixed principles beyond self-enrichment, willing to hand over the mechanics of government to those who had paid for his ascent, as we see now with his implementation of Project 2025.

And deliver he did. The tax legislation that prompted Kochs’ windfall during his first term provided the largest corporate tax cut in American history, slashing rates from 35 percent to 21 percent permanently, while offering temporary crumbs to the middle class that would quickly expire. For the ultra-wealthy and corporations, it was the fulfillment of decades-long dreams.2

That wasn’t policy; it was plunder. An upward wealth transfer of unprecedented scale was disguised—as Reagan and Bush had done before him, driving our nation’s debt above $34 trillion—as economic stimulus.

And this grand theft happened right in front of the American people, who were too distracted by the daily spectacle of Trump’s outrages to notice that it was as if the Treasury was being looted by billionaires in broad daylight.

To understand how America’s democracy became vulnerable to such brazen capture—how Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” could be so thoroughly transformed into a vehicle for plutocratic enrichment—you must first understand not just Trump himself but the sophisticated system that elevated him to power, directed his administration’s actions, and profited from the chaos he created.

Citizens United: The Corporate Coup by a Corrupt Supreme Court

The groundwork for the GOP’s plutocratic takeover of American politics was laid on January 21, 2010, when the Supreme Court issued a ruling that fundamentally transformed American politics. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court’s 5–4 Republican majority struck down key provisions of campaign finance laws dating all the way back to the late nineteenth century, ruling that corporations and outside groups could spend functionally unlimited sums on elections through the Super PACs the decision invented.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, made the extraordinary claim that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.”3 This statement would soon be revealed as one of the most naïve or cynical pronouncements in Supreme Court history.

This wasn’t merely a legal technicality: it was the culmination of a century-long corporate campaign to claim the Constitutional rights of persons while avoiding the responsibilities of citizenship. As I’ve documented extensively in my books Unequal Protection and The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, corporations had methodically pursued personhood since the 1886 Santa Clara County Supreme Court case, gradually acquiring First Amendment protections, Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches, Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination, and Fourteenth Amendment equal protection claims.

Citizens United represented their ultimate victory, handing them the power to flood our democratic processes with unlimited cash while remaining legally obligated solely to maximize shareholder returns. American democracy was being transformed into what Franklin Roosevelt once called “economic royalism,” aka rule by the economic elite rather than we the people.

Unlike the First Gilded Age, when robber barons like J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller primarily purchased individual politicians, this Second Gilded Age enabled the wholesale capture of our political system itself. The American experiment in self-governance—unique in its founding premise that all political power originates from the people themselves—­was being fundamentally rewired to ensure that political power originated from those holding or controlling great wealth. And Trump, himself a product of inherited wealth with an instinctive deference to monied interests despite his populist rhetoric, was the perfect vehicle for this transformation.

The practical effects were immediate and profound. Political spending by outside groups exploded, jumping from $750 million in the 2008 presidential election to over $4.5 billion in 2016.4 But more significant than the amount was the source: just 150 billionaire families put up more than 60 percent of all Super PAC money raised in the years following Citizens United.5

It was no longer one person, one vote. It was one billionaire, one megaphone, with the volume turned up to deafening levels.

Into this system stepped the new American oligarchs, whose names would become synonymous with the corruption of American democracy: the Koch brothers, Charles and David, whose combined fortune from their fossil fuel and industrial conglomerate exceeded $100 billion, built a political machine larger than the Republican National Committee itself, with tentacles extending into every aspect of conservative politics.

Robert Mercer, a reclusive hedge fund billionaire whose algorithmic trading firm, Renaissance Technologies, generated billions through high-frequency trading while reportedly trying to avoid billions in taxes through complex financial engineering.6

Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate who once suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on Iran as a negotiating tactic, poured more than $100 million into Trump’s presidential campaigns.7

These men and their billionaire colleagues didn’t, in my opinion, want democracy; they wanted control. Control over a government that might otherwise regulate their industries, tax their enormous wealth, or hold them accountable for environmental and social damage their businesses caused.

Citizens United gave them the tools to seize that control. And in Donald Trump, they found the perfect front man for their operation.

The Trump-Mercer Alliance

By August 2016, just four critical months short of that year’s election, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was floundering. After a disastrous convention peppered with an absurd assortment of weirdos and freaks, along with weeks of self-inflicted wounds, he was trailing Hillary Clinton in every swing state.

His campaign organization—run by Putin’s oligarchs’ man Paul Manafort who’d earlier helped Putin take control of Ukraine’s politics—was skeletal, and most political observers agreed that it lacked the basic infrastructure needed to win. Traditional Republican donors were keeping their distance as rumors of Russian influence swirled, and President Hillary seemed a fait accompli. The nation’s political observers were preparing to write the obituary for an unconventional (and deeply racist) campaign that had captured attention but failed to build the type of traditional boots-on-the-ground machinery necessary to win.8

Then, in August, everything changed. Trump welcomed two oligarchs who would transform his campaign and ultimately the country: Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah.

Few Americans knew who the Mercers were. Robert, a former IBM computer scientist turned hedge fund billionaire, was so reclusive that many of his own employees had never heard him speak. Rebekah, his politically ambitious daughter, operated largely behind the scenes, leveraging her father’s fortune to gain influence in conservative politics.

As reporter Jane Mayer wrote, “Last summer, Bannon and some other activists whom the Mercers have supported—including David Bossie, who initiated the Citizens United lawsuit—came together to rescue Trump’s wobbly campaign. Sam Nunberg, an early Trump adviser who watched Mercer’s group take over, said, ‘Mercer was smart. He invested in the right people.’ ”

That August meeting appears to have resulted in an immediate campaign shakeup. Out went campaign chairman Paul Manafort. In came two Mercer loyalists: Steve Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News (which the Mercers had funded with $10 million), and Kellyanne Conway, who had previously run a Mercer-backed Super PAC for Ted Cruz.9

This wasn’t just a change in personnel. It was a complete takeover of the Trump campaign by the Mercer political machine. With this takeover came the resources that would prove decisive: Cambridge Analytica, a data firm in which the Mercers were principal investors, had harvested personal data from more than 50 million Facebook users without their consent. This treasure trove of psychological profiles allowed the Trump campaign to micro-target voters with messages precisely calibrated to their fears, resentments, and personal vulnerabilities.10

Breitbart News was the far-right website that had become a key platform for white nationalism and conspiracy theories. Under Bannon’s leadership and with Mercer funding, Breitbart had grown from an obscure blog to a powerful media force driving the Republican Party rightward.

The Mercers apparently didn’t back Trump because they personally admired him or thought he would make a good president. Rebekah Mercer had initially supported Ted Cruz, considering Trump a showman lacking serious conservative credentials.

Instead, they appear to have backed him because they recognized in him a vessel; someone whose personal characteristics (his celebrity status, shamelessness, and instinctive understanding of mass psychology) made him uniquely positioned to advance their ideological agenda. That agenda included dismantling the administrative state, slashing taxes on the wealthy, eliminating environmental regulations, and transforming the judiciary through far-right appointments.

“The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution,” Steve Bannon would later acknowledge. “Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.”11

The alliance proved remarkably successful. Within weeks, Trump’s poll numbers rebounded. His messaging became more disciplined (if no less extreme). The campaign’s digital operation began outperforming Clinton’s vaunted data team. And on election night, against all traditional polling predictions, Trump secured narrow victories in key swing states.

The Mercers had made their bet. And it was about to pay off spectacularly.

The Tax Cuts and the GOP’s Greatest Heist

I’ve been writing about economic policy in America for over thirty years, and I’ve never seen a more brazen transfer of wealth from the working class to the morbidly rich than the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

On December 22, 2017, Donald Trump signed this legislation into law; it was the most significant achievement of his first-term presidency (outside of letting 400,000 Americans die unnecessarily of COVID). Standing in the Oval Office, surrounded by gleeful Republican lawmakers with sugarplums of giant campaign donations dancing in their eyes, Trump boasted that the bill would bring “tremendous relief for the middle class and small businesses.”12

It was a claim that bore little relation to reality. Though marketed as middle-class tax relief, the legislation was, in fact, a $1.9 trillion giveaway to corporations and the ultra-wealthy, precisely the outcome that Trump’s billionaire backers had been seeking.

The centerpiece was a permanent reduction in the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent, a change that delivered hundreds of billions to America’s largest companies. While workers were promised higher wages through trickle-down effects, corporations primarily used their windfall for stock buybacks, a practice Reagan legalized that enriches shareholders and executives while doing nothing for employees or long-term investment.

In the first year after the tax cut, US corporations announced over $1 trillion in stock buybacks, setting an all-time record.13 Meanwhile, the “wage boom” promised to workers failed to materialize, just as when Reagan and Bush had made similar promises after their massive tax cuts. A Congressional Research Service analysis found “no indication of a surge in wages” attributable to the tax cuts.14

Beyond the corporate rate reduction, the bill contained provisions carefully tailored to benefit the wealthiest Americans:

· A 20 percent deduction for “pass-through” business income, which particularly benefited real estate developers (including Trump himself) and wealthy business owners who structure their income through LLCs rather than as traditional wage income

· Gutting of the estate tax by doubling the exemption to $22 million for married couples, ensuring that only the wealthiest 0.1 percent of estates would face the tax

The benefits flowed directly to those who had funded Trump’s rise. Charles Koch estimated the bill would save his empire $1.4 billion annually. Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation saw its effective tax rate drop from 34 percent to 20.6 percent. The Mercers’ Renaissance Technologies benefited enormously from both corporate rate reductions and the preferential treatment of pass-through income.

Even Trump himself stood to gain tens of millions through the real estate provisions and pass-through deductions, though we can’t know the exact amount since he broke with decades of presidential precedent by refusing to release his tax returns.

“Our [wealthy/corporate] donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Republican Congressman Chris Collins admitted, referring to the tax bill.15

This wasn’t policy in any traditional sense. It wasn’t designed to address national challenges, strengthen the economy’s foundations, or improve the lives of most Americans. It was plunder, pure and simple: a massive upward redistribution of wealth to the GOP’s donor class that had purchased the presidency with the blessing of five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court.

And the politicians who passed it? They were rewarded handsomely with campaign cash, dark money advertising support, and the promise of lucrative post-legislative lobbying jobs. In the three months after the tax bill passed, the Koch network announced plans to spend $20 million promoting the legislation and $400 million on the 2018 midterm elections to protect the lawmakers who had voted for it.16

The cycle was now complete: billionaires funded politicians who passed laws benefiting billionaires who then provided more funding to those same politicians. Democracy as perpetual motion machine, if your definition of democracy is government of, by, and exclusively for the wealthiest Americans.

The Distraction Presidency

While most Americans focused on Trump’s latest tweets, his attacks on celebrities, his feuds with NFL players kneeling during the national anthem, or his dark warnings about immigrant caravans, his billionaire backers were quietly reshaping the country’s institutional architecture in ways that would long outlast his presidency.

Trump was the perfect vehicle for this strategy. His ability to dominate media attention—to ensure that every news cycle revolved around his latest outrage—created the ideal cover for the systematic dismantling of regulatory protections and installation of corporate allies throughout government.

Behind this all-consuming spectacle, the real work of the plutocratic agenda proceeded:

Judicial appointments: The Federalist Society, heavily funded by the Koch network, the Mercers, and other right-wing billionaires, effectively outsourced the selection of federal judges to Trump. Leonard Leo, the society’s cochairman, reportedly developed the list of Supreme Court candidates from which Trump selected Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, cementing a 6–3 conservative majority likely to last for a generation.

Beyond the Supreme Court, as mentioned earlier, Trump appointed 234 federal judges—nearly 30 percent of the entire federal judiciary—many of them young, ideologically extreme, and handpicked by the Federalist Society to advance corporate interests and limit government regulatory power to protect consumers, the environment, and democracy itself.17

Environmental deregulation: Koch-funded pro-fossil fuel groups like the American Energy Alliance and the Competitive Enterprise Institute helped advise the administration in how to dismantle over one hundred environmental protections, including Obama-era regulations on clean water, methane emissions, and fuel efficiency. These changes handed billions in additional profits to fossil fuel companies while increasing cancer and climate change risks for the rest of us. Scott Pruitt, who had previously sued the EPA fourteen times, was appointed by Trump to head that same agency.18

Financial deregulation: Wall Street billionaires who’d backed Trump saw their agenda executed by weakening Elizabeth Warren’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the gutting of banking regulations implemented after the 2008 financial crisis, and the appointment of industry allies up and down the government to key regulatory posts. In 2025, Trump and Musk tried to cripple or even shut down the CFPB and, as of this writing, it’s before the courts.19

As with his second administration but without the preparation of Project 2025, Trump was the show throughout his first. The billionaires were the directors: setting the agenda, writing the script, and reaping the profits while the American public remained captivated by the daily drama, “The Trump Show,” emanating from the White House.

Selling Out the Planet

Perhaps nowhere was the influence of plutocratic donors more evident—or more destructive—than in the Trump administration’s environmental policies. On June 1, 2017, Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, fulfilling a campaign promise to his fossil fuel patrons and making America one of only four nations on Earth to reject this landmark accord to combat climate change.

Standing in the Rose Garden, Trump claimed he was putting “American workers first.” The reality was that he was putting fossil fuel executives and their shareholders first, at the expense of not just workers but the habitability of our planet itself.

This decision didn’t emerge from a thoughtful review of evidence or a careful weighing of national interests. It emerged directly from the fossil fuel industry’s wish list, delivered to the White House through a network of industry-­funded think tanks, lobbyists, and political donors.

In the weeks leading up to the announcement, Trump heard from a parade of fossil fuel advocates:

· The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s main lobbying group, which had contributed millions to Republican campaigns

· Coal company executives like Robert Murray of Murray Energy, a major Trump donor who had provided the administration with an “action plan” calling for rollbacks of environmental regulations

· The Heritage Foundation, which received significant funding from oil companies and the Koch network and would largely produce Project 2025 for his second attempt at deconstructing the American government

These voices drowned out others within the administration who argued that withdrawal would damage US interests. Even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, reportedly advised staying in the agreement.

But they couldn’t compete with the donors. The Koch network alone had spent over $88 million funding climate change denial, according to a Drexel University study.20 Now they were calling in their investment.

The Paris withdrawal was just the beginning. Over the next four years, the Trump administration would roll back Obama’s Clean Power Plan, weaken fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, open previously protected public lands to drilling, eliminate regulations on methane leaks from oil and gas operations, and appoint former coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to lead the Environmental Protection Agency after Scott Pruitt resigned amid multiple ethics scandals.

Each of these decisions could be traced back to fossil fuel industry requests, often delivered through the same network of donors, think tanks, and lobbying groups that had funded Trump’s rise to power.

The possibility of climate collapse wasn’t a bug of the Trump presidency: it was a feature, an outcome of a system captured by fossil fuel interests willing to sacrifice the planet’s future for short-term profits.

January 6: They Funded That Too

When a violent mob stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, many of America’s corporate leaders and billionaire donors issued statements expressing shock and dismay. They condemned the violence, called for a peaceful transition of power, and presented themselves as defenders of democratic norms against extremism.

But this performative outrage couldn’t obscure a fundamental reality: many of the same donors who had funded Trump’s rise, who had tolerated his attacks on democratic norms, who had profited from his policies, had helped create the conditions that made the insurrection possible.

The connections were often direct: the Republican Attorneys General Association, funded by corporate donors, including Koch Industries, Altria, Comcast, and Walmart, had helped organize the January 6 “March to Save America” rally that preceded the Capitol riot. The group’s fundraising arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, sent robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to come to Washington and “fight to protect the integrity of our elections.”21

Major GOP donors including Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell bankrolled organizations and campaigns that spread the “Big Lie” about election fraud, creating the grievance that fueled the insurrection.22 Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, heavily funded by Republican megadonors, boasted that it had sent “80+ buses of patriots to DC to fight for the president” on January 6.

Even after the violence, the donor class quickly returned to business as usual. A Reuters analysis found that most major corporations resumed political donations to Republican lawmakers who had voted against certifying the election results, after briefly pausing contributions in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection.23

The American oligarchy wasn’t shocked by what happened on January 6. Many of them were right in the middle of the process of creating the conditions that made it possible. They had funded the politicians who spread the Big Lie, owned or sponsored the media outlets that amplified it, and helped the organizations that mobilized the mob.

Why would America’s billionaire class tolerate, and in some cases actively support, an assault on democracy itself? Because Trump’s chaos had served them well, distracting the public while they consolidated their power through deregulation, tax cuts, and judicial appointments. Because many of them had come to see democracy itself—with its potential for majority rule, progressive taxation, and regulation in the public interest—^­­as an obstacle to their agenda rather than a system to be preserved.

Why It Matters

Trump was never the architect of the transformation of American governance during his first presidency. He was the wrecking ball funded by the architects: the billionaire class that had identified him as the perfect vehicle for their agenda of deregulation, tax cuts, and judicial capture.

Five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, several famously the beneficiaries of billionaire largesse, created a system that allows billionaires to buy judges and elections, write policy, and silence opposition. This isn’t democracy in, as Roosevelt would say, any meaningful sense of the word. It’s oligarchy, as Jimmy Carter told me in 2010 when he said on my radio program: “[Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. . . . So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”24

And Donald Trump—loud, crude, constantly demanding attention while lacking any coherent ideology beyond self-promotion—was the perfect pitchman for this oligarchic operation. He provided the spectacle, the outrage, the endless drama that kept Americans divided and distracted while the real work of plutocratic entrenchment proceeded behind the scenes.

His first term wasn’t just a presidency: it was a heist. And now this same sophisticated operation to transfer wealth and power upward on an unprecedented scale, using cultural grievance and racial resentment as cover for economic plunder, has again been inflicted on us.

With all the focus on Trump’s excesses, it’s important to remember that the most dangerous threat to American democracy isn’t a single authoritarian leader. He can be impeached or stopped by the courts or Congress, should they rise to the occasion.

Instead, it’s the system that produces such leaders and keeps them from being challenged because members of their own party are terrified of millions of dollars being spent to politically destroy them if they stray. This system, in which unimaginable concentrations of wealth translate directly into unaccountable political power, in which elections are bought and policies are purchased, in which government of, by, and for the people has been replaced by government of, by, and for the donor class, is what keeps Trump in office and the crisis of democracy boiling.

Until we confront this system—until we recognize that the problem isn’t just Trump but the machinery that created him—we will remain vulnerable to the damage he’s doing right now, as well as the possibility of a future charismatic demagogue willing to serve as the battering ram for plutocratic power.

Because the billionaires are still there, still funding, still planning. And, like Fritz Thyssen in 1930s Germany, they’ve learned that investing in authoritarianism pays extraordinary dividends, at least over the short term. (Thyssen eventually had to flee for his life.)