In 2016, and even to some degree 2020, hardly any high-profile oligarchs beyond Peter Thiel seemed comfortable associating themselves publicly with the Republican standard-bearer. Many of the country’s richest appeared more comfortable describing Donald Trump as a national threat than signing up as campaign co-chairs or hitting the road as surrogates.
These days, when it comes to the country’s wealthiest, the vibes have shifted. In many ways, the country’s politics can feel quite stuck: Presidential polls have been steady, generic congressional ballots haven’t moved much, governors of both parties boast consistently high approval ratings, and since 2020, polling and election results haven’t shown signs of strong backlash to progressive policy.
But in the midst of an otherwise maddeningly static landscape, a cohort of extremely wealthy influencers and power brokers appear to have moved quite a bit, while dropping their mask of gentility and embracing a dog-eat-dog kind of politics. One result is what I called last week the most sociologically interesting development of the entire election cycle: the drift of a certain kind of high-profile “billionaire brain” toward Trump and Trumpism, which has helped change the face of the MAGA brand and make the former president’s third run for the White House seem, even on the surface, considerably less populist and considerably more plutocratic than the first two.
Of the 20 largest individual donors this election cycle, nine have predominantly given to Republicans. Only one is backing Harris and the Democrats — a major shift from 2020, when two of the top three supported Democrats, and 2016, when four of the top six did. At the same time, small-donor donations to the former president, which once formed the foundation of his monster fund-raising hauls, have collapsed. About one-third of all 2024 contributions to the Trump campaign and associated groups have come from billionaires, compared with just 6 percent for Harris.
In his previous races, Trump pitched himself as an anti-establishment force, an insurgent tribune for an army of low-trust MAGA voters. The pitch was always a bad-faith fiction, but this time, he’s surrounded by enough faces of the American plutocracy to make Trumpworld look not anti-establishment so much as counter-establishment — and make the campaign as a whole more like an intramural squabble between rival tribes of moneyed elites. Broadly speaking, one group wants to defend the system that enabled its success; the other wants to go to war with it.
The trend is embodied most obviously by Elon Musk, who in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign has begun personally using $100 payments to encourage Pennsylvanians to register to vote and — perhaps illegally — promising million-dollar giant checks to one of them every day as an extra enticement. He’s stationed himself in the state to campaign, becoming as ubiquitous a campaign surrogate as JD Vance, and continues to flood social media with his own election-fraud conspiracy theories and rants against regulation.
One journalist recently calculated that given the uniquely wide reach reportedly engineered specifically for Musk by X engineers and the going price of advertising on the platform, Musk’s posts amounted to another $100 million campaign contribution. He has also donated at least $118 million to his pro-Trump America PAC, which recently created an ad, shared on Musk’s own platform, calling the vice president a “C-word.”
Even more notably, Musk has also pitched in to run Trump’s outsourced get-out-the-vote operation and has been eying all the while the expansive and somewhat ill-defined job of “government efficiency” czar Trump has customized for him. Some are hyping the role as the equivalent of a shadow presidency, though perhaps a MAGA Robert Moses is a better model. (He has claimed that he would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, a goal that could not be achieved even by zeroing out all discretionary government spending.) On the left, there have been reasonable screams about naked oligarchy, though it’s also not yet clear exactly how active Musk’s role would really be after inauguration (or how long any partnership between these two titanic egos could last).
In the meantime, Musk has reportedly been tending his own diplomatic backchannel with Vladimir Putin and musing openly about the chances he might be arrested or assassinated for his commitment to Trump. In the campaign’s closing days, he’s begun acknowledging that a Trump victory would probably produce an economic crisis and that it would be worth it for the opportunity to rebuild the country.
But this is not just the story of a single MAGA billionaire, however megalomaniacal. Bill Ackman, Stephen Schwarzman, Marc Andreessen are among the others to not just throw support behind the former president but also frequently talk about the election and the stakes of cultural conflict it represents to them in Manichaean terms. Last year, Andreessen wrote that “our present society has been subjected to a mass demoralization campaign for six decades — against technology and against life — under varying names like ‘existential risk,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘ESG,’ ‘Sustainable Development Goals,’ ‘social responsibility,’ ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ ‘Precautionary Principle’” and “risk management,” among others. The entire cultural status quo, through which he and his tech company had emerged, looked to him to be reaching a terminal stage. “Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness,” he wrote.
Not all of Trump’s new billionaire supporters are quite so eager for the spotlight, though, as Susan Glasser documented for The New Yorker, and Jonathan Mahler, Ryan Mac, and Theodore Schleifer for The New York Times Magazine. The single largest donor to Trump’s campaign has been the reclusive banking heir Timothy Mellon, who in an autobiography called the U.S. social safety net “slavery redux.” He has donated at least $125 million to PACs supporting Trump, thousands of times as much as he contributed in 2016.
But the rise of the MAGA billionaire is not the only story of money and politics in the Trump years, since there is still plenty of wealth to be found on the Democratic side. In recent weeks, Bill Gates broke a longstanding policy of impartiality to donate $50 million in support of Kamala Harris, and the Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Jamie Dimon has become a supporter — though each did so privately, possibly out of fear of retribution if Trump is re-elected. Mark Cuban has been less nervous, becoming an almost ubiquitous surrogate for Harris on cable news; the longtime conservatives’ boogeymen George and Alexander Soros continue to support Democratic candidates and causes; and Michael Bloomberg (the only Harris supporter on that top-10 list) has donated about $50 million.
Overall, this suggests not a uniform rightward lurch but a kind of two-step polarization among the country’s richest. In fact, more billionaires are supporting Harris this cycle than Trump, Forbes recently calculated, and as new research by Reilly Steel of Columbia Law School suggests, corporate executives have moved significantly left over the past two decades, producing what is, overall, a far more progressive national leadership class — but also a high-visibility backlash, perhaps most notable in Silicon Valley.
Two decades ago, as John Burn-Murdoch recently detailed in the Financial Times, most tech executives were moderates or conservatives, clustered together on the center-right of the political spectrum; today there are two distinct humps, one more liberal and one more conservative than before. Perhaps as significant: The C.E.O.’s are still more right-wing than their wealthy lieutenants, with the “professional managerial class” still pretty invested in what my colleague Ross Douthat has called “woke capitalism” and what their bosses are more likely to describe instead as a “woke mind virus.” Even inside Musk’s X, for instance, 90 percent of employee donations to all federal candidates in the 2024 cycle were to Democrats, according to OpenSecrets. But the C.E.O. himself has donated more than 1,000 times as much to Trump.
What changed? To some extent, this is just bandwagon politics, with big donors viewing Trump as a stronger candidate and both less toxic and less threatening than he was eight years ago. In some cases, even more recently, Ackman, for instance, publicly called on Trump to resign and apologize to the country on Jan. 6, 2021; Musk himself argued Trump was too old for another campaign and presidential term as recently as 2022, when he was supporting Ron DeSantis for president. It’s also to some extent a thermostatic effect, with many of the country’s richest radicalized rightward by what they saw as the leftward jump of the Democrats in recent years. In Glasser’s telling, one turning point came when the former president was handed a conviction in criminal court, a proceeding that looked to billionaires sympathetic to Trump like a politically motivated attack and a sign, perhaps, of “lawfare” against them to come. The assassination attempt in July appeared to similarly move the hearts and minds of some billionaires.
There is, of course, actual policy at stake in the election, too, including in areas of particular interest to billionaires: the fate of Trump’s tax cuts and Musk’s many government contracts, for instance, not to mention the antimonopoly F.T.C. chair Lina Khan and S.E.C. chair Gary Gensler. Many donors are making “bets” on Trump, calculating that opportunities for influence abound in a future Trump administration — and that Trump himself would be more fully accommodating to his wealthy supporters than presidents tend to be.
And partly, what we are seeing is simply the return of real money to its natural home on the right of American politics, after a brief period when the country’s very richest were alienated by the burn-it-all-down toxicity of the Trump brand, including its explicit hostility toward elites. Now we get Mark Zuckerberg promising to steer Meta in a more politically neutral direction and praising Trump as a “bad ass” (and getting thanks from Trump in the form of a threat to throw him in jail for the rest of his life).
But there is also simply a much harder edge to the rhetoric of Trump’s plutocrats this cycle as there has been for years from his down-market voters. This, despite the fact that the country’s economy is routinely now described as the envy of the world, that productivity has grown faster here than in many other wealthy countries and that economists are overwhelmingly saying that the economic policy of Kamala Harris — who is running to the right of Joe Biden, not to mention Bernie Sanders — would be preferable. This all makes the conversion of plutocrats look less like a self-interested shift in partisanship or a targeted policy play than a kind of propaganda campaign against the status quo, on behalf of unencumbered entrepreneurialism and corporate ambition — which is to say, on behalf of a comic-book vision of their heroic role in the world.
Most Americans believe the playing field is already tilted too much toward the very rich; by contrast, Trump’s billionaires believe they are surrounded by haters and doubters, fighting for “greatness” but besieged on all sides by socialists and safety-ists in a tribal war of all against all.
Nearly a decade ago, when Trump first took over the Republican Party and then the presidency, among the books widely heralded as a guide to the populist insurgency was the former C.I.A. analyst Martin Gurri’s “Revolt of the Public.” A similar book written today might be called “Revolt of the Elites.”
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The post The Election Looks Like an Intramural Squabble Between Billionaires appeared first on New York Times.
