Our Democracy Of The People Is Quickly Becoming An Oligarchy Of The Rich

 

The following post is just a small part of an excellent article by Beth Reinhard, Naftali Bendavid, Clara Once Morse, and Aaron Schaffer in The Washington Post:

Over the past quarter-century, political, legal and economic changes have reshaped the relationship between wealth and political power in America. Economists say wealth is now more concentrated at the very top than at any time since the Gilded Age. The tech and market revolutions of recent decades have created riches on an unprecedented scale. Changing norms on executive compensation and lower-tax policies under Republican and Democratic administrations have helped insulate those fortunes. And in three landmark decisions, starting with 2010’s Citizens United vs. FEC, federal courts gutted post-Watergate campaign finance restrictions, clearing the way for donors to contribute unlimited money to elections.

As a result, U.S. politicians are more dependent on the largesse of the billionaire class than ever before, giving one-four-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans extraordinary influence over which politicians and policies succeed. Political scientists and campaign finance watchdogs also say big money is driving up campaign costs and eroding public confidence in American democracy. . . .

Donations are not the only path to power for the ultra-wealthy; following Trump’s lead, some billionaires are parlaying their financial clout into public office. At least 44 of the 902 U.S. billionaires on Forbes magazine’s 2025 list, or their spouses, have been elected or appointed to state or federal office in the past 10 years, from high-level Cabinet posts to more obscure advisory board seats, a review by The Post found.

This powerful clique includes Howard Lutnick, a former investment banker who now serves as Trump’s commerce secretary; JB Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel empire and the Democratic governor of Illinois; and Paul Atkins, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who is married to a roofing heiress.

America’s 902 billionaires are collectively worth more than $6.7 trillion, the most wealth ever amassed by the nation’s ultra-rich, according to Forbes. A little more than a decade ago, there were half as many billionaires in the U.S., with a total worth estimated at $2.6 trillion when adjusted for inflation. Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man, recently secured an incentive-heavy $1 trillion pay package, which Tesla shareholders approved to keep him at the company for the next decade.

Overall, billionaires have rallied behind Trump’s Republican Party. More than 80 percent of the federal campaign spending by the 100 wealthiest Americans in 2024 went to Republicans, The Post found. Trump himself raised 15 times as much from the 100 richest Americans in 2024 than he did during his first presidential campaign, in 2016. By comparison, Democrat Kamala Harris raised three times as much from the wealthiest in 2024 as Hillary Clinton did in 2016.

What changed? Republicans long characterized Silicon Valley as a bastion of liberalism. But over the past half-decade, many of tech’s wealthiest titans rebelled against the Biden administration’s criticism and policing of their industry. Last year, many tech barons threw their support behind the GOP, which they saw as more aligned with their often-libertarian ideals and their companies’ economic interests. Trump and his party actively wooed influential tech leaders, embracing cryptocurrency and promising to limit AI regulation. His vice president, JD Vance, formerly worked as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, forging ties to Thiel, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Musk is the starkest example of the shift. He accounted for a sizable portion of the uptick in political spending in 2024, doling out $294 million to help elect Trump and other Republicans in federal and state elections. Dozens of other tech or finance billionaires joined him, collectively giving about $509 million more to Republicans than to Democrats. . . .

When Trump first ran for office in 2016, he pitched himself as someone whose personal fortune made him uncorruptible, and he promised to break the power of elites in Washington and “drain the swamp.” A decade later, many Americans on both sides of the political aisle tell pollsters they fear that the country has spun away from a healthy balance between political power and economic might, between the vote and the dollar. A Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted in September found that a majority of Americans have a negative view of billionaires spending more money on elections, including about a third who said it is “very bad.”. . .

Under Trump, the first billionaire president, the ultra-wealthy have set up shop inside the corridors of government more openly than ever before.

The president installed about a dozen billionaires in his current administration and tapped Musk, his biggest donor, to oversee massive layoffs of civil service employees. Trump’s Cabinet is the wealthiest in U.S. history, with a combined net worth of $7.5 billion, according to Forbes. That’s more than double the $3.2 billion net worth of Trump’s first Cabinet and 64 times the combined wealth held by Biden’s Cabinet.

You can go here to see the top 20 super-rich who donate the most money.