Of the Plutocrats, By the Plutocrats, For the Plutocrats
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“Every morning,” the billionaire Marc Andreessen smiled a few weeks after Donald Trump’s re-election this past November, “I wake up happier than the day before.”
The stoked Andreessen, with Trump’s re-entry into the White House only days away, must by now be sitting in seventh heaven. He no doubt has plenty of deep-pocket company. We’ve never before had an incoming president as openly committed to stocking his administration with the already super rich.
Trump is entering his second term, as the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson put it, “fixated on helping the wealthiest Americans.”
And who knows better how to do that helping than those wealthiest themselves? In Trump’s second term, these wealthy will be more directly running the government of the United States than they have in any other presidency. The Trump transition team — co-chaired by the billionaire Wall Street financier Howard Lutnick — is filling Trump II’s top slots with more holders of grand fortune than any previous administration ever dared.
Lutnick himself has ended up as the Trump pick for Commerce secretary. Lutnick will be sitting through meetings in a West Wing Cabinet Room overflowing with his fellow ultra-rich. He’ll also be running a department neatly positioned to advance his cryptocurrency and other business interests.
The Trump pick for Treasury secretary, the billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, complements Lutnick nicely. Bessent sees cryptocurrencies as “integral to economic freedom” and may soon be moving to invest our tax dollars in speculative crypto schemes that enrich the richest among us.
For Department of Energy secretary, Trump has selected the CEO of the Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy, Chris Wright, a drill-baby-drill character who last year claimed “there is no climate crisis.” The billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, Trump’s go-to energy adviser, is getting the credit for putting Wright on Trump’s radar screen.
Trump’s pick for Education secretary, the billionaire Linda McMahon, once claimed she has a bachelor’s degree in education. She doesn’t. McMahon does, on the other hand, have more than a passing acquaintance with civics. She spent nearly $100 million from her own fortune on two self-funded and unsuccessful races to become a U.S. senator from Connecticut.
For the corner office at the Department of the Interior, the Trump team has selectedthe holder of still another fortune of at least 10 digits, the former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, net worth $1.1 billion. Burgum jumped onto Trump’s shortlist once he threw in the towel early on his candidacy for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.
Two other billionaires — Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, and Vivek Ramaswamy, another friendly Trump rival in the 2024 presidential campaign — have exceedingly visible quasi-official roles in the new administration. They’re running the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” an off-the-books entity that will be identifying federal government programs “deserving” of defunding.
Musk, meanwhile, has plenty of deep-pocketed pals he feels deserve high government office. One of them, the billionaire Jared Isaacman — a big-time customer of Musk’s SpaceX — now has Trump’s nod to run the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Another Musk pal, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, will become the Trump administration’s “czar” for crypto and artificial intelligence. His naming to this new White House slot, notes a New York Times analysis, “cements the expectation” that Trump “intends to take a lighter hand” on regulating crypto, an area where “Trump personally has a business interest.”
Other Musk-friendly tech CEOs and venture capitalists are performing their patriotic duty by interviewing candidates for top positions in the second Trump administration.
Marc Andreessen, for instance, has been quizzing candidates for “senior roles” at departments ranging from State to Health and Human Services. Shaun Maguire, an investor at Sequoia Capital, is concentrating on candidates for top Defense Department slots.
By early December, according to a Guardian analysis, Trump had named to key federal executive slots at least 11 affluents who were either living life large in billionaire households or grinning “within touching distance” of billionaire status.
Among the touching-distance picks: Trump’s choice to head the Social Security Administration, Frank Bisignano, a former mortgage banking executive at JPMorgan Chase who went on to become Wisconsin’s highest-paid CEO of a publicly traded company. His estimated net worth: a mere $974 million.
Trump has also given America’s diplomatic corps a distinct billionaire glitter. He’s named Tilman Fertitta (net worth $10.4 billion) his choice for ambassador to Italy and Warren Stephens ($3.4 billion) his pick for ambassador to the UK. His son-in-law’s father, the pardoned tax-cheat Charles Kushner ($2.9 billion), will run the U.S. embassy in Paris.
So what should we call all this? Plutocracy? Kleptocracy? Something else?
Take your pick. Anything but democracy.
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