One of the differences between President Donald Trump’s second term and his first has been a full-blown attack on the expert class. Vice President JD Vance urges that we trust our common sense over the ideas of “the experts.” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is overruling the views of the medical establishment on issues like vaccines. Attorney General Pam Bondi forces out Justice Department officials who prize professionalism over personal loyalty. Stephen Miller has declared war on nongovernmental organizations. It is part of an American Cultural Revolution, designed to discredit the credentialed elites who, in their view, run America.
It is true that over the past few decades, America has spawned a meritocracy — armed with Ivy League degrees and specific skills and training — that has come to dominate business, government, media and culture. And it is also true that a meritocracy can morph into a group of smug technocrats who lose touch with the society they come from.
But before we join the pile-on, let’s keep in mind that the rise of a merit-based elite is a historic shift in the right direction. What did we have before? An old-boys network in which the right family name, religion, prep school and club assured your passage to the top. Meritocracy — however imperfect — opened doors. It promoted people on the basis of their aptitude and academic excellence, bringing Catholics, Jews, Asians and African Americans into the establishment. It placed a premium on competence over lineage, on work over patrimony.
The problems of meritocracy are best addressed by creating better access to high-quality education, fewer non-merit mechanisms like legacy admissions and racial quotas, more rigorous grading and a renewed respect for nonprofessional work skills. In other words, more emphasis on genuine merit and real efforts to make sure everyone has access to opportunity.
But as the populist right trashes meritocracy, it is replacing it with something older, cruder and more corrosive: a naked plutocracy — rule by the very rich.
We have the wealthiest Cabinet in history, stocked with billionaires and centimillionaires. Immense wealth is now seen as the single best qualification to run anything. Since Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, he must be qualified to tackle cutting waste across the entire federal government. Okay, he overruled a bunch of experts who spent decades understanding how to stop the spread of AIDS in Africa. But the thinking these days is “If they were so smart, how come they aren’t rich?” Billionaires are today regarded as fonts of wisdom on everything. Some even dispense oracular advice on dating.
Outside of the hubris behind such thinking is the genuine problem of conflicts of interest. In May, a cryptocurrency company created by Steve Witkoff, Trump and their sons announced that it received a $2 billion investment from a firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the national security adviser of the United Arab Emirates. Just two weeks later, the White House agreed to a plan to give the UAE access to the highest-end American AI chips, a plan negotiated by Tahnoon and advocated by Witkoff within the White House. We are asked to believe that there is no connection between these two decisions.
One number surely says it all. Reuters calculates that the Trump Organization’s income for the first half of 2024 was about $51 million — and about $864 million in the first half of 2025. That is a leap of roughly 1,600 percent. To give you a rough sense of how steep that rise is, Nvidia’s net income rose about 44 percent in that time frame.
Take one almost parodic example of plutocratic politics: the planned $300 million White House ballroom, funded by private donors — many of whose fortunes depend on federal contracts, regulatory decisions, antitrust enforcement, tariffs and export licenses. Trump says this is a great idea because it comes “with zero cost to the American Taxpayer.” But history tells us that when government asks Big Business for favors, in return it dispenses special treatment, tax breaks and regulatory advantages to its favorites — and taxpayers are the ones who foot the bill. Taxpayer funding of the ballroom would be cheap by comparison.
The current crowd of tech billionaires delight in the access they have to the White House. But surely they understand that the key to America’s innovation is that they were able to build their companies without any special access, without having to curry favor with the government and without having to bankroll the president’s personal vanities. The price of their access will be paid for by those young entrepreneurs toiling in their garages right now who lack the money and connections to join the White House Billionaires Club.
With a tax code that already heavily favors the super-rich, today’s plutocracy will inevitably turn into a new inherited elite, with families maintaining power and privilege for generations.
This is the opposite of the American idea. For Thomas Jefferson, nature’s “most precious” lesson in setting up a society was that it should be run by a “natural aristocracy,” based on “virtue and talents.” The best governments, he explained, choose leaders who meet these criteria. The wrong model was the “artificial aristocracy” based on “wealth and birth.” Provision should be made, he concluded, to prevent such a system from rising in America.
Oh well.
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