The Trump loving Billionaires confirm we now live in a plutocracy

These are the Robber Barons of our time

An oligarchy is “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” It’s the idea of a “government by the few,” to benefit the few. That is the polar opposite of the idea that our Republic was intended to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”--as Abraham Lincoln famously proclaimed in “The Gettysburg Address”.

But what we see in the United States with the coming Trump administration is more correctly defined as a plutocracy. That is “a government controlled exclusively by the wealthy.” An oligarchy does not require wealthy people running it, a plutocracy does--and that is what Trump and his fellow plutocrats are building in front of our eyes.

That is why billionaires and wealthy corporate executives are making it rain with large amounts of money being thrown at Trump, heading to Mar-al-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring and even silencing Trump critics--as we saw again last week with Jeff Bezos barring a cartoon to be published in his Washington Post critical of Trump and his fellow oligarchs.

Trump is obviously very pleased with this as we heard two weeks ago at a press conference when he declared: "In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend." And a short time after dining with billionaire Bezos, he even posted on social media in all caps, “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”

In reality, the plutocrats from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg are not concerned with being Trump’s “friend.” Their only priority is making even more money under Trump administration.

That is why we are seeing Trump raise a record destroying amount of money for his inaugural committee of at least $150 million. For context, Biden’s inaugural committee raised about $62 million from donations. The fundraising record before Trump’s coming inauguration was actually set by Trump in 2017 when he raised a little over $100 million.

But this time, Trump will eclipse that record by more than 50% as the money is pouring in unlike ever seen before! Apple CEO Tim Cook along with Meta and Amazon are donating $1 million each to Trump’s slush fund. (Meta donated zero to Biden’s inaugural while Amazon donated $267,000 and Apple donated $43,200.) Ford is reportedly coupling its own $1 million donation with a fleet of vehicles. Other big donors include $1 million from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, $1 million each from Uber and its CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi and a whopping $2 million from Robinhood Markets.

Donors who give at least $1 million are promised high-level access to the Trump and his inner circle including an “elegant and intimate dinner with President Donald J. Trump and Mrs. Melania Trump” on Jan. 19. Ahh, the plutocrats at play!

The worst part is that these donations are all legal. Presidential Inaugural committees can accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations. The only bar is donations from foreign nationals. This is like betting on the Super Bowl after the game is over—you can’t lose. This is obviously legalized bribery.

And with Trump-- as we saw during his first term--the corruption is obscenely brazen as he is not shy about rewarding big donors with sweet deals. Examples include Trump granting waivers from his tariffs to corporations that made big donations to the GOP. That means higher profits for these companies. Given’s Trump pledge to impose sweeping tariffs in his second term, you can understand the rush for many corporations to throw money at Trump.

Another industry that made big donations to Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee that also saw a nice return on their investment was private prison companies. In return for their money, Trump reversed the Obama era ban on the federal government housing federal inmates in private prisons. In 2024, these same private prison companies upped their donations to over a million dollars and are expecting an even bigger windfall as Trump is poised to give them a big, fat contract to temporarily hold the people he is intending to deport.

The sucking up to Trump, though, is not just limited to direct donations. On Monday, Meta announced they had tapped Trump’s close supporter/friend Dana White, the head of Ultimate Fighting Championship, to join the board of Meta. And another Meta official, Joel Kaplan, was on Fox News Tuesday repeatedly praising Trump as a “big defender of free expression.”

On Tuesday, we also learned Jeff Bezos’s Amazon will pay $40 million for the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump that she stars in and serves as co-executive producer. And there was also ABC News—via Disney—recently paying Trump $15 million to settle a bogus defamation case and apologizing to Trump. These plutocrats are like contestants on a reality show titled, “Project Plutocracy” or on an even elitist version of Shark Tank.

And in case anyone needed more proof the Trump administration will usher in a true plutocracy where the wealthy control our collective destinies, just look at the people Trump has picked for key positions in his new administration. They range from Elon Musk on down to just plain old billionaires. Indeed, the total net worth of the billionaires in the Trump administration equals at least $382.2 billion. That is literally more than the GDP of 172 different countries.

In contrast, Biden’s cabinet total net worth was about $118 million. Yes, $118 million—not billion. Even Trump’s first cabinet net worth was about $6.2 billion. But we are now in the unapologetic plutocrat stage of the United States of America.

As I go through this, I hope it makes your blood boil. This may seem odd, but my hope is that Trump and his fellow plutocrats like Elon Musk and others are so arrogant and brazen that it causes a backlash that joins the right and the left to demand real reforms in terms of reducing the influence of big money in politics. And before you dismiss me as being naïve, this happened before in our nation in response to “the extreme concentration of wealth among the elite and the enormous economic and political power of big business” in what was known as the Gilded Age of the late 1800’s.

The same type of open corruption, income inequality and the flaunting of power to prop up the wealthy at the expense of the rest of Americans is what prompted real reforms of the Progressive Era in the early 1900’s. The goal was to end the “government by the few” to benefit the few and return it to a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” And that is exactly what we must demand now.

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