Trump tends to attract oligarchs Harrington argues there have always been American oligarchs. But why are they getting attention now? Trump has a lot to do with it, say good-governance experts. Many in the business community view him as a transactional president, in that you get what you give, and so oligarchs and potential oligarchs are growing in influence and number. And as he prepares to again take office, several tech titans are making an almost dizzying amount of business moves that could easily be perceived as for Trump: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg ending fact-checking on his social media platforms; Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post, spiking a Kamala Harris endorsement from The Post’s opinion section. TikTok’s CEO will be at Trump’s inauguration Monday, a day after the platform is expected to be banned in the United States. Actually, they’ll all be at Trump’s inauguration — including the heads of Google and Apple — and have donated millions to it. “We’re witnessing tech CEOs scrambling to curry favor, and the Trump administration has not even begun,” Maximillian Potter, a journalist with the anti-authoritarian group Protect Democracy, said in a recent interview with The 5-Minute Fix about the state of media and democracy. Trump also appears to be integrating his wealthy allies into government, not unlike his first term, when many of his Cabinet members were millionaires or billionaires. Musk and billionaire biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will lead an initiative tasked with cutting government spending and waste, with Republicans in Congress following their lead. The Post reported that Trump wants Ramaswamy to serve in the Senate. An oligarchy can be hard to stop once it’s in motion It has long been the case that big money controls politicians, said Meredith McGehee, a governmental-ethics expert who used to head Issue One, a nonprofit that focuses on fixing what’s broken in the government, particularly money in politics. But Musk and other billionaires’ growing influence on the system could be a product of Americans’ dissatisfaction with how responsive government is to their concerns, she said. Trump and the billionaires with whom he’s aligned himself are seen among his supporters as the outsiders who will disrupt the status quo in Washington. “Democrats became associated with the elite, with political correctness,” McGehee said, explaining that the party came across during the campaign as more interested in the causes of higher-educated, urban communities than with the rest of America. “Nobody in the establishment was able to capture that dissatisfaction with the system — except Trump.” Russia is the poster country for oligarchs, said Harrington, the oligarchy expert at Dartmouth University. There, oligarchs are “full embedded” in politics and culture, serving in high-profile government jobs, for example. Harrington previously argued this concentration of wealth and power in the United States could get worse before it gets better, because there aren’t many guardrails for something like this. “There are no laws against a president and his super-wealthy Cabinet using their power to benefit their own class,” she wrote at the beginning of Trump’s first administration. “There is nothing that compels them to look beyond their privilege to address the needs of the citizenry.” In other words, it’s up to voters to hold leaders accountable for putting the rich first. | 
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