In his second administration, Donald Trump is surrounding himself with billionaires. By one estimate, he is assembling the richest set of advisers and Cabinet members in American history, worth a collective $450 billion. Most notable is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, who is prominently at Trump’s side. Is America becoming an oligarchy, governed by and for its richest citizens?
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) thinks so. The United States is “moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “Never before” have billionaires in America “had so much wealth and so much power.” In the 2024 presidential election, billionaires like Musk “spent huge amounts of money to elect their candidates.” Other liberal critics are making the same argument. Oligarchs are often thought of as “Eastern European businessmen with considerable sway over government,” Scott Nover said at Slate. No longer. It’s time to expand the definition of “oligarch” and start “applying the label not only to Musk but to many of America’s ultra-wealthy.”
Billionaire influence ‘more limited than it appears’
“No, billionaires like Elon Musk don’t run American politics,” Tyler O’Neil said at The Daily Signal. They do play a role in American politics, but that role is “far more limited than it appears.” Money can’t buy an election — Vice President Kamala Harris raised more than a billion dollars during the presidential campaign, and outside groups raised hundreds of millions of dollars more to support her cause. It didn’t work. “If money really did talk in American politics,” O’Neil said, “Musk’s voice would be drowned out by the mega-billions of the Left.”
Mega-rich billionaires are “no longer just influencing policy from behind the scenes,” Ali Velshi said at MSNBC. In the second Trump administration, “they are seizing control of the levers of power.” That’s dangerous: In autocracies, the rich and powerful “often blur the line between public office and private interests.” Thomas Jefferson warned against the anti-democratic dangers of concentrated wealth, saying in 1816 that profit-minded people are not the “ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure.” Musk’s position alongside Trump “risks entrenching corporate interests within the very structures of our federal government,” Velshi said.
Politics long ‘dominated’ by the rich
Billionaires “almost always use their influence quietly” in American politics, Whizy Kim said at Vox. Musk is different. Now he’s showing that a “private citizen can grab power in full view of the public” as long as they’re rich and have a sizable online fanbase. Politics in America have long been “dominated by its most well-heeled citizens,” Kim said. The shift from quiet influence to brash public power, though, has “worrying implications.” Musk’s sudden political prominence “lays bare the mechanism of power in American democracy in the starkest terms.”
America’s wealthiest citizens may not be running the country so much as they’re bending the knee to the new president. CEOs are flocking to Trump to “help their bottom lines and spare them from Trump’s wrath,” said The Wall Street Journal. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have both donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. They may have little choice, said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist: “Smart CEOs realize it’s better to shape an agenda than fight an agenda.”