Trump is Dividing America’s Oligarchs
The shot heard around the world may have been aimed at Donald Trump’s head, but it could also put extra cash in his pocket. In the aftermath of last weekend’s assassination attempt, two prominent billionaires – Elon Musk and investor Bill Ackman – announced their support for the former president. Two other formerly Trump-sceptical billionaires, Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, are also reportedly considering joining them.
The importance of these endorsements, as well as others from both Wall Street and Silicon Valley, reflect America’s increasingly oligarch-dominated political system. Traditionally, populist Democrats would have made much more of the announcements. In 2018, Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse claimed Trump was in the ‘back pocket’ of billionaires, but the attack didn’t quite land – not least because Whitehouse himself and his Democratic allies have become major recipients of oligarchic funds. Democrats received far more ‘dark money’ than the GOP in 2020.
Even recently, a spokesman suggested that Joe Biden was sending the message that ‘America is not for sale’. That is despite the fact that in 2020 Biden easily outraised Trump with a major advantage from donors in Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, just as Hillary Clinton had done in 2016. While some Democrats posture about seeking to reduce oligarchic power, they equally want to ensure that it’s their oligarchs who thrive.
None of this is to say that Trump was previously lacking his own reliable trove of right-wing donors. Investors like Jeff Yass and Timothy Mellon have given tens of millions to his campaigns. Trump donors tend to be rich investors who are in control of their own funds and less beholden to shareholders or a board of directors. In contrast, big corporate elites have, at least until now, favoured the Democrats and Biden. They have done this through contributions not only to Democratic candidates, but also to left-leaning nonprofits.
Indeed, look at Biden’s top donors this year and you see a host of tech luminaries. His top-10 supporters are either tech executives or financial moguls, led by Michael Bloomberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. The impact of tech companies is amplified by their employees, including at Netflix, Nvidia, Adobe, IBM, Google, Facebook and Amazon. Workers at these companies all overwhelmingly backed the Democrats in 2020. Amazon employees gave 77 per cent of their donations to Biden. At Google it was 88 per cent. At Netflix and Nvidia it was over 90 per cent.
These same tech oligarchs also increasingly dominate the media, providing greatly needed lucre to the new progressive Pravdas of the modern world. Some of the most influential party organs include the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Time and the New Republic – the latter of which recently published a new cover story painting Trump as Hitler. So extreme is some tech moguls’ hatred of Trump that an adviser to Hoffman suggested that the shooting may have been a false-flag operation.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
