The Billionaire Coup

Is Our Democracy for Sale?

So, a bunch of billionaires are underwriting a “Weekend at Bernie’s” presidential campaign in conjunction with a Russian op to fatally weaken the United States and gut our democracy and roughly half the people in the United States are ok with that?

It’s no exaggeration. None of it.

You’ve already seen the reports that Trump, who is lagging behind Kamala Harris dramatically in terms of raising funds from regular Americans, is relying heavily on a small group of billionaires to keep his campaign afloat. Just three such billionaires gave groups backing the Trump campaign $220 million during the most recent three month period tracked by the Federal Election Commission. Racist Russophile manboy Elon Musk plunked down $75 million to a super PAC supporting Trump over the summer.

For more on this phenomenon, there’s a great rundown by The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser called “How Republican Billionaire's Learned to Love Trump Again." Read it. It’s definitely worth your time. In many ways it explores one of the central stories not only in this campaign but in American politics for the past decade and a half. What the ultra-rich are now doing would not have been possible in the past. But the GOP project to tilt the Supreme Court rightward produced one of its most damaging results when in 2010 the right wing majority on the court produced the Citizens United decision that shifted American political power away from the people at large and to the rich and big corporations.

Now, as never before, we’re seeing the consequences of this. A billionaire presidential candidate wins the support of the super rich by promising them the one thing that matters to them: more wealth. He will cut taxes. He will eliminate regulations. More corporate revenues will make it to the bottom line and under Trump they can keep more and more of it.

These billionaires truly don’t care about anything else. They don’t seem to care that Trump is a convicted felon. They don’t care that he has been adjudicated to be a rapist. They don’t care that he was impeached twice. They don’t care that he stole national secrets. They don’t care that he actively supports America’s enemies (who support him right back.) They don’t care that he has promised to gut American democracy. (In fact, if you listen to Musk, they like it. It’s a feature not a bug as they say in the tech world from which many of these rich guys hail.)

They don’t even care that Trump is in a rapid, obvious and deeply disturbing state of mental decline. Whether Trump is threatening to turn U.S. troops against his political opponents or dancing aimlessly on a stage for forty minutes or regaling a crowd with stories he has heard about the size of golf legend Arnold Palmer’s dick, they just smile and defend him. After all, the man who would step in for Trump if he were unable to fulfill his presidential duties…rather, the man who will step in for Trump when he is finally deemed unable to fulfill his presidential duties…Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio was expressly picked by Trump’s inner circle of billionaires.

One might be shocked by the raging greed of Trump’s billionaires but that only suggests you haven’t studied them very closely. Most of them have been backing Trump and his fascist and racist political and policy views for a long long time. And now, late in this campaign, they are once again displaying their colors. Take Musk in the past week. First we learned that a group under his control has been cynically producing and distributing dishonest and deeply cynical advertisements that to audiences of Jews, describe Vice President Harris as being pro-Arab, and to audiences of Arabs, describe Harris as being pro-Jewish. Then, when he took to the campaign trail in support of Trump, he started spreading old, long-disproven lies about the integrity of Dominion voting systems. And he is following all that up with a gross and apparent violation of campaign finance laws by offering million dollar prizes to one signer of a petition he is promoting in support of “free speech and the 2d amendment.”

Not only is Trump cutting secret deals with fat cats to cut their taxes or let them destroy the environment to their heart's content , he has promised Musk a role in the government that would enable him to both gut the civil service and the protections they provide, but that would also, coincidentally, allow him to make even more money than he has (and reminder: he is already the richest man in the world.) And it would enable him to settle scores. And boy, is his Mom proud of her little boy. She has said that if Trump is elected, Musk would effectively become the behind the scenes president. (For her part, she has also been using Twitter/X to encourage voters to commit voter fraud.)

This is not just a case of some rich folks bankrolling a candidate. That has been an odious feature of American politics for years. This takes that phenomenon down to new depths. It carries the fundamental flaw within Citizens United to its most extreme manifestation: The decision was based on the idea that money donated to campaigns is a form of speech and thus is protected by the Constitution. However, the logical implication of that is that if money is speech those with more money have louder or bigger voices in our national debate.

Not only is that corrupt. But it is made worse when the candidate that they support has promised to be a “dictator on day one,” when he has been given immunity by the Supreme Court, when he has promised retribution against his enemies, when he has told voters that all they need to do is vote for him this time around and they will not have to worry about voting again, when he has expressed sympathy for our enemies and promised to undermine our allies (which has led our enemies to intervene to help his campaign yet again), and when he has already led one coup against the U.S. government and is seeking to do the same this time by silencing the will of the people once and for all.

With the people silenced and Trump clearly spiraling toward an inability to actually do the job, it is important to ask: If he is forced to step aside, who will that leave in charge? Have his successors or puppeteers objected to Trump’s crimes, racism, corruption or fascism or do they support it? Will they, through Vance or through roles they might play in the government they bought, defer to the people or will they continue Trump’s plan to end our democracy?

Not to fear the worst is not to understand the situation we are in or the players who have aligned against us.

The situation was, I thought, well-described by a Tweet I saw in which someone, I truly apologize for not recalling who, said something to the effect that to sell the presidency to the highest bidder is not an election, it’s an auction…and it makes this country an oligarchy not a democracy. My concern is that that was not simply a well-turned phrase I happened to see on social media but instead was a prophecy that could begin to be manifest into truth just two short weeks from now.