President Trump is distributing executive patronage — from pardons to favorable regulatory decisions — to privileged groups, including those willing to contribute to his preferred committees and causes and those who invest in the Trump family’s crypto businesses.
Determined to get a piece of the action, the very wealthy are lining up in droves.
Despite Trump’s having lost ground in almost every demographic during his second term, one group stands firmly in the president’s camp: the superrich who have their wallets open.
In his bid to stave off a Democratic takeover of the House and perhaps the Senate, the money from these billionaires and megamillionaires is Trump’s ace in the hole, as voters across most of the political spectrum express increasing dissatisfaction with his administration.
In the process, Trump and the Republican Party have effectively become subsidiaries of the nation’s billionaire class, producing an American presidency setting new standards in oligarchy and kleptocracy.
Evidence of the pervasive corruption is endemic, in the presidential pardons to donors and the well connected, in the regulatory favoritism found at key agencies, in the flow of special interest and foreign investments into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency businesses.
While Trump’s megacontributors would prefer to keep the House and Senate under Republican control, their main concern is Trump himself. Regardless of the outcome in November, he will continue to control the federal regulatory apparatus, the commutation powers, the ability to issue executive orders and the use of foreign policy to provide investment opportunities for the favored few.
While the incomes of Trump’s working-class MAGA supporters stagnate, the wealthy have seen geometric returns on their investment in Trump.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated in July that the top 1 percent would see their taxes reduced by $1 trillion over 10 years as a result of Trump’s “big, beautiful” domestic policy law.
Using a year-by-year distributional analysis, the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that in 2033, for example, the top 1 percent would see a tax cut of $92.2 billion, including a cut of $43.2 billion for the top 0.1 percent.
Compare that with a $43.3 billion cut for the entire third quintile of the income distribution (from the 40th to 60th percentiles).
In addition to income, Trump’s big-dollar supporters have done well on another measure: wealth. From the fourth quarter of 2024 to the third quarter of 2025, the most recent data, the Federal Reserve found that the share of wealth owned by the top 1 percent grew to 31.7 percent from 31.0.
That may seem trivial, but when total wealth amounted, on the lower estimates of the scale, to $172.92 trillion in late 2025, a 0.7 percentage-point increase translates to $1.21 trillion — more than pocket change, even for billionaires.
From a long-term perspective, Trump administration policies have reinforced and, in some cases, intensified trends toward the increasing concentration of wealth and income at the highest levels.
The Federal Reserve, for example, found that by the third quarter of 2025, the share of total wealth held by the top 0.1 percent had grown to 14.4 percent from 8.6 percent in 1989. The share owned by those in the remaining part of the 1 percent, grew to 17.3 from 14.2 percent.
This is not about the proverbial pie getting much bigger. Those gains at the top have been at the expense of everyone below.
Over the same 36 years, the bottom half has seen its share of the nation’s wealth fall to 2.5 percent from 3.5 percent. The middle to upper middle class has not fared well, either. Those in the 50th to 90th percentiles saw their share fall to 29.4 percent in 2025 from 35.7 percent in 1989.
The growing concentration of wealth is most striking at the highest concentrations.
Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the Paris School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, described changes taking place in the highest stratosphere of wealth, the top 0.00001 percent, in an interview posted Jan. 24 on Paul Krugman’s Substack:
One way that I find particularly interesting these days is to focus on the really narrow, very, very top of the distribution, the top 0.00001 percent. Why? You might say it’s really a tiny number of individuals. That’s about 19 households today. It was four households in 1913. But this is where a lot of the action is taking place today.
In the early 1980s, Zucman told Krugman,
the superrich owned wealth the equivalent of 0.3 percent of the total income of all Americans. Today it’s 12 percent. So it has increased by a factor of almost 40.
So what it means, essentially, is that if the 19 wealthiest people in the US spent all their wealth, they could buy the equivalent of 10 percent of the value of all the goods and services that are produced in a given year in the U.S.
And of course, they don’t do that, right? They’re not spending down their wealth like that. But it’s just an illustration of the overwhelming economic power that they have and the power that they have to buy elections, to buy media, to buy influence, to buy competitors.
How about those with little or no wealth?
A measure of the financial condition of the working and middle classes is what’s known as the labor share, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics defines as “the fraction of economic output that accrues to workers as compensation in exchange for their labor.”
Greg Ip described labor share trends in a Feb. 9 Wall Street Journal column, “The Big Money in Today’s Economy Is Going to Capital, Not Labor”:
Declining labor share is sometimes attributed to businesses underpaying workers. In fact, it is more due to a shift in the sorts of businesses that dominate the economy. Today’s fastest-growing superstar companies pay well but don’t have many workers. In the past three years Google parent Alphabet’s revenue has grown 43 percent, while head count has remained flat. Amazon is a major employer because of its fulfillment centers, but even it is eliminating jobs.
The result, according to graphics in Ip’s column: From 1980 to 2025, corporate profits have grown to nearly 12 percent of gross domestic income, up from 7 percent, while labor’s share has fallen to less than 52 percent in 2025 from about 58 percent in 1980.
In other words, the combination of economic forces and public policy, including tax laws, has enriched a tiny slice of those at the top, equipping them to become increasingly dominant in the universe of campaign finance and government influence.
The 2024 election marked a virtual realignment in the partisanship of the nation’s richest men and women.
A Nov. 21, 2025, Washington Post analysis, “How Billionaires Took Over American Politics,” by Beth Reinhard, Naftali Bendavid, Clara Ence Morse and Aaron Schaffer, described the surge in federal election contributions from the 100 richest Americans, from an “average $21 million in federal elections between 2000 and 2010” to “crossing the $1 billion threshold” in 2024.
The Post calculated the Republican-Democratic split in federal election donations from the 100 wealthiest Americans from 2000 to 2024. From 2000 to 2022, Republicans often held a modest advantage, with Democrats not far behind.
Then that pattern abruptly shifted. Contributions by the very rich to Republicans grew from roughly $300 million in 2022 to just under a billion in 2024, while donations to Democrats fell from roughly $300 million to less than $200 million.
Overall, the Post reporters wrote, “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.”
MAGA Inc., a moribund super PAC that Trump revived and turned into a fund-raising powerhouse after he was elected again, provides some of the clearest evidence of the commitment of the affluent to Trump.
Since then, despite the fact that Trump has no legal or constitutional path to a third term, MAGA Inc. has a total of $310.8 million in cash on hand. Significantly, 96 percent of the money raised was in contributions over $1 million.
The result: MAGA Inc. began 2026 with far more money than any other political committee, including special-interest PACs and the total of the three major Republican committees: national, Senate and House.
The wealthy have created what amounts to a Republican financial juggernaut.
“Republicans,” my Times colleagues Shane Goldmacher and Theodore Schleifer wrote in their Feb. 10 article, “Republican Cash Edge Threatens to Swamp Democrats in the Midterms,”
began the year with an unheard-of edge of more than $550 million. Interviews with more than two dozen strategists and officials in both parties reveal that money — which has been a strength for Democrats throughout most of the Trump era — could suddenly be a liability for the party.
All told, they wrote,
new federal records show that the three leading arms of the national Republican Party and the two super PACs aligned with House and Senate Republicans entered this year with more than double the cash of the equivalent Democratic groups. The Republican groups had a combined $320 million, compared with roughly $137.2 million for the Democrats after accounting for debts.
The considerable Republican advantage at the party and super PAC levels stands in contrast to the fund-raising success of individual Democratic candidates, who in many cases have much more cash on hand than their Republican opponents.
On Feb. 1, Roll Call reported in “Democrats Continue to Outraise Republicans in Key Senate Races” that “Democrats face a tough map in their quest to flip the Senate this year, but their candidates — both incumbents and challengers — continue to outraise their Republican opponents in several battleground races, new federal filings show.”
Roll Call cited the re-election bid of Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia:
The chamber’s most vulnerable Democrat reported taking in $9.9 million during the final three months of 2025 and started the year with more than $25.5 million in the bank.
None of his leading Republican opponents raised more than $1.8 million during the fourth quarter, the federal filings show. Representative Mike Collins brought in $825,000 and began 2026 with $2.3 million in the bank. Former football coach and first-time candidate Derek Dooley hauled in $1.1 million, finishing December with $2.1 million on hand. And Representative Earl L. “Buddy” Carter reported raising $1.7 million, which included a $1 million loan, bringing the total personal investment to his campaign to $3 million. He finished the fourth quarter with around $4.2 million banked.
There is, however, a case before the Supreme Court, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. F.E.C., that if the plaintiffs win, will eliminate caps on coordinated party expenditures in direct support of political candidates. The current caps in the Senate “range from $127,200 to $3,946,100 for Senate candidates and from $63,600 to $127,200 for House candidates,” according to a court brief.
A ruling eliminating the caps, which is probable, given the recent history of Supreme Court campaign finance decisions, would allow the Republican Party to use its vast resources to gain parity if not superiority in individual campaigns. Lifting the caps would be of much less use to the Democratic Party and its allied super PACs, which are struggling financially.
Another factor in favor of the Republican Party is the recent emergence of the cybercurrency industry as a major player in campaign finance and the even more recent emergence of the artificial intelligence industry as another source of financial support.
Taylor Giorno wrote in a Feb. 19 article at NOTUS, “A New Generation of MAGA Megadonors Is Emerging — And They’re Swamping Democrats”:
Artificial intelligence executives, cryptocurrency moguls and other donors who have little or no history of federal political contributions are pumping millions of dollars into President Donald Trump’s flagship super PAC.
While Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has been the public face of the company in Washington, Giorno noted,
another OpenAI executive — company president Greg Brockman — has exploded onto the political megadonor scene since Trump took office.
Brockman and his wife, Anna, gave a total of $50 million last fall: $25 million to MAGA Inc. and $25 million to Leading the Future, a new super PAC funded by artificial intelligence industry players.
The new megadonors’ financial largess, Giorno continued,
has helped establish MAGA Inc. as an unprecedented and unrivaled money machine. Super PACs, by law, may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, including from corporate and union sources, to advocate for and against political candidates.
An OpenSecrets accounting of major donors in 2024 found that 17 of the top 25 gave to Republicans, including the seven top individual donors:
1) Elon Musk of SpaceX and X, $291.5 million
2) Timothy Mellon, Andrew Mellon’s grandson and a retired railroad owner, $197 million
3) Miriam Adelson of the Las Vegas Sands and the Adelson Drug Clinic, $148.3 million
4) Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein of Uline, $143.5 million
5) Kenneth Griffin of Citadel, $108.4 million
6) Jeffrey Yass of Susquehanna International Group and Janine Yass, $101.1 million
7) Paul Singer of Elliott Management, $66.8 million
All of this raises some larger issues.
While Trump and his allies have put American democracy under extreme stress, the system of free elections has not broken. But what about the Trump administration and the Republican Party? Have they crossed the line into oligarchy and kleptocracy?
Democratic politicians such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been criticized for using the word “oligarchy” with abandon. But the reality is that Trump and his Republican minions in Congress fill the bill to an extraordinary degree.
America may not yet be an oligarchic kleptocracy, but if the Trump administration and the Republican Party have their way, it will be one soon enough.
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