MAGA Exclusivity, A Half Million Dollar Membership Fee & Red Velvet Ropes To Keep Out The Riff-Raff?

Trump Regime: More Corrupt Than The Sublime Porte Or The Ming Dynasty

Honoré Daumier’s "The Legislative Belly" (1834)

Will there ever be a time when there’s been too much written about Donald Trump’s personal corruption? There’s certainly never been a president even nearly as corrupt. Of course there’s never been a president with all those felony convictions either. Most presidential scholars agree Trump is more corrupt, even far more corrupt, than Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, Ulysses Grant, Andrew Jackson and James Buchanan— combined! In this term alone, Trump has earned a dozen trips to a guillotine— and we’re only 5 months in! Believe me, he’s just getting started. Or don’t believe me— believe Biden biographer and New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos instead. He lays it out in much more measured way than I do in his essay this week, Donald Trump’s Politics Of Plunder. He started with a discussion of the most anti-MAGA place you’re likely to find in DC— the Executive Branch the new half million dollar membership club started by Don Jr. and other Trump circle criminal types. Osnos noted that a Twitter user “wrote that ‘those who supported MAGA now feel we have been played.’ Marcy Kaptur, a Democratic representative from Ohio, invoked the excesses of Nero, and called the club a ‘grotesque portrait of ruling billionaires.’ Historically, ruling billionaires have tried to avoid such portraits. (A publicist for J. P. Morgan used to say that he was ‘paid to keep the bank out of the press.’) But the Trump Presidency has embraced an unusually open marriage of politics and profit. Official filings revealed that his Inauguration fund set a new record by collecting some two hundred and fifty million dollars from corporations, CEOs, and other large donors. The biggest donation, five million dollars, came from a major poultry producer called Pilgrim’s Pride. A few months later, Trump’s Agriculture Secretary delighted the industry by agreeing not to increase salmonella testing and promising to cut ‘unnecessary bureaucracy.’ By then, Trump had already fired the director of the Office of Government Ethics and the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which investigates whistle-blower complaints. Even seasoned practitioners of Washington pay-to-play have been startled by the new rules for buying influence. In December, a seat at a group dinner at Mar-a-Lago could be had for a million-dollar contribution to MAGA Inc., a super PAC that serves as a war chest for the midterms. More recently, one-on-one conversations with the President have become available for five million. The return on investment is uncertain, a government-affairs executive told me: “What if he’s in a bad mood? You have no clue where the money is eventually going.” Another lobbying veteran described the frank exchange as ‘outer-borough Mafia shit.’”

Trump's war on elites?

“Outer-Borough Mafia shit” captures the essence of the Trump regime perfectly… but Osnos was just warming up. He wrote that Señor Trumpanzyy “has sold influence so briskly that the political machinery cannot keep up. After he was offered a four-hundred-million-dollar gift from the government of Qatar— an airplane so opulent that it was dubbed the ‘palace in the sky’— Dan Pfeiffer, a former White House communications director, called it ‘the most brazenly corrupt move by any President in U.S. history, and it’s not close.’ Less than a day later, a crypto venture owned by the Trump family auctioned off a dinner with the President at one of his golf clubs. The family profited from the crypto auction twice over: from fees, which have so far netted them and their partners three hundred and twenty million dollars, and from their own stash of Trump-branded coins, which had grown in value to $4.1 billion even before the auction was complete. The President has received tributes from a parade of wealthy patrons. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the owner of the Washington Post, once said that he ‘would be humiliated to interfere’ in journalistic decisions; in February, he ordered the paper’s opinion section, which had featured criticisms of Trump, to focus on promoting ‘personal liberties and free markets.’ Amazon committed forty million dollars to a documentary on Melania Trump, who stood to gain a reported twenty-eight million dollars from the deal. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, dined at Mar-a-Lago, then scuttled his company’s fact-checking system and settled a lawsuit with Trump by agreeing to pay him twenty-five million dollars. Not long afterward, Zuckerberg bought a mansion near the White House; his company even paid sponsorship fees for the White House Easter Egg Roll. But nobody has blended his empire with Trump’s more than the world’s richest person, Elon Musk. After spending nearly three hundred million dollars on the election, he was given vast powers to reshape the government, as well as access to an office in the White House complex and, occasionally, an overnight berth in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

In a matter of weeks, the flood of cash swirling around the White House swamped whatever bulwarks against corruption remained in American law and culture. There have always been wealthy donors, of course. But a decade ago no one on earth had more than a hundred billion dollars. Now, according to Forbes, at least fifteen people have surpassed that mark. Since Trump first took office, Musk’s net worth has grown from roughly ten billion dollars to more than four hundred billion.

The ultra-rich have captured more of America’s wealth than even the nineteenth-century tycoons of the Gilded Age. Scholars who study inequality as far back as the Neolithic period struggle to find precedents. Tim Kerig, an archeologist who directs the Museum Alzey, in Germany, told me, “The people who built the Egyptian pyramids were probably in a less unequal society.” He suggested that today’s richest people are simply accumulating too much wealth for the system to contain. “The economic and technical evolution is much faster than the social, mental, and ideological evolution,” he said. “We had no time to adapt to all those billionaires.”

… As Trump’s second term took shape, he rarely missed a chance to remind Americans of the powers at his disposal, to reward and to punish. The new F.C.C. chairman, Brendan Carr, who demonstrated his loyalty by wearing a gold lapel pin shaped like Trump’s head, launched investigations of all the major broadcasting companies—except for Fox. He dismissed suggestions of partisanship by saying, “If you are a broadcast and you don’t want to serve the public interest, you are free to turn your license in, and you can go podcast.”

Soon afterward, Trump pardoned a fellow billionaire felon, Trevor Milton, an electric-truck-maker convicted of defrauding investors. (In a promotional video, Milton had showcased a speeding prototype that was, in fact, rolling downhill.) Milton and his wife had donated $1.8 million to Trump’s campaign, and hired a lawyer who happened to be the brother of Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi. The pardon spared him restitution payments estimated at six hundred and eighty million dollars. Trump claimed that Milton had been targeted for his political views. Speaking of himself in the third person, the President said, “He supported Trump, he liked Trump. I didn’t know him, but he liked him.”

Trump’s executive branch— the government version— also wasted no time in aiding Musk’s businesses. The Commerce Department is considering his Starlink internet service for a forty-two-billion-dollar expansion of rural broadband; the Defense Department may enlist SpaceX to help build a missile-defense project called the Golden Dome. Musk, in turn, has found moments when his business needs aligned with Trump’s political needs. As a major recipient of Pentagon contracts, Musk took a special interest in defending the nomination of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, as Secretary of Defense. After Senator Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican, expressed doubts about Hegseth, a political group tied to Musk ran digital ads against her. Ernst fell in line.

… [T]he “big, beautiful” bill that enshrined his Administration’s agenda left the top tax rate unchanged. Instead, it offered concessions to Trump’s wealthiest supporters, including a tech-friendly provision to prevent states from regulating A.I. and a tax cut, paid for partly with cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, that steered sixty per cent of the benefits to the top twenty per cent of Americans.

Trump and Musk had already advanced proposals to privatize more of the government by selling off public buildings, handing over weather forecasting to private operators, and dispensing federal lands to real-estate developers and fossil-fuel producers. At times, the Administration seemed to be testing how much destruction Americans would tolerate, if it was packaged as tough-minded business wisdom. After the introduction of tariffs tanked the stock market and vaporized trillions of dollars of value, the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, a former hedge-fund manager worth at least half a billion dollars, said bluffly that Americans weren’t looking at “day-to-day fluctuations” in their retirement accounts. Musk, while overseeing the firing of tens of thousands of people, called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme” and said that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

But eventually Musk found the limits of the public’s tolerance for belligerence. After he handed out million-dollar checks to voters in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, his candidate lost by double digits. His company Tesla posted a seventy-one-per-cent drop in profits, as buyers recoiled. He also critiqued Trump’s tariff policy, referring to one of its principal authors as a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.” Musk retreated from Washington, but he left behind damage that will likely be felt for decades— not only the gutting of programs dedicated to foreign aid, public health, and national service but also harm to America’s moral credibility. After Musk bragged about feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development to the “wood chipper,” the agency predicted that the cuts would lead to millions of deaths in places where its programs had provided care. Bill Gates told a reporter, “The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one.”

… [W]ith the event several hours off, the line of attendees gathered to protest Trump’s Presidency already stretched down the road and out of sight. The organizers had moved the speech from a smaller venue to a track-and-field complex as big as three football fields. It was shaping up to be a crowd of thirty thousand, more than a third of the city’s population. Venders were selling pins tailored to the moment. One read, “f* elon and the felon.” Another had the word “oligarchy” in the Monopoly font, along with a cartoon plutocrat in a top hat.

I joined Sanders backstage, in a windowless office near the locker rooms. He was slumped in a desk chair— wisps of white hair, the familiar rumpled blue Oxford shirt— and looked exhausted after a day of events across the state. But when he started talking about the crowds his eyes widened, and his finger poked the air for emphasis. The first sign that his tour might excite the public came on the opening day, in Omaha, where the organizers switched venues to accommodate a rush of attendees and still had to turn hundreds more away. In Iowa, he said, “I had to do two separate speeches, because it was an overflow crowd.” On a stop in Salt Lake City, twenty thousand people showed up. “In Nampa, Idaho, we had twelve thousand, in the most conservative state in America,” he said. “It’s just a stunning sight.”

Very little of what Sanders said onstage was new material. Thirty-five years ago, shortly after leaving office as the mayor of Burlington, he warned a reporter against the perils of oligarchy and insisted, “The rich and the powerful cannot continue to get everything!” But back then he wasn’t drawing crowds of thirty thousand people. “It’s one thing for me to talk about oligarchy as an abstraction,” he told me. “Trump has made it clear. He has said it loudly and clearly: we are a government of billionaires.”

Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, had urged her party to stop using the term “oligarchy,” saying that it would not resonate beyond the coasts. Sanders, citing the scale of his crowds, responded that “the American people are not quite as dumb as Ms. Slotkin thinks they are.” During my visit, he did not hide his satisfaction that the largest political rallies in America were for an eighty-three-year-old socialist who had twice lost his bid for the Presidential nomination. “What bothers me most about the failure of the Democratic Party,” he said, was a reluctance “to acknowledge reality.” Democrats, in his view, congratulated the Biden Administration for having lowered the price of insulin, then wondered why people voted for Trump. “You want to know why people are angry?” he said. “They are hurting! They can’t go to the grocery store and buy food for the kids that they want, they can’t pay their rent, they can’t afford health care.”

At the heart of Sanders’ tour was his long-held hope to build a “class-based effort” that crossed party lines. In the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that, during times of extreme inequality, the wealthy distract those who might resent them by fostering a “mutual hatred and distrust, by setting the rights and interests of one against those of another.” It was the essence of Trump’s politics— the knowledge that desperate people feel powerful when they can “look more below than above them,” and so “domination becomes dearer to them than independence.”

Outside, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York, was warming up the crowd. She mocked the banner overhead that declared this was Trump country. “It sure don’t look like it today,” she said. “I think this is our country.” As the crowd cheered, it wasn’t hard to see why some Democrats have taken to asking whether Ocasio-Cortez could be the next leader of a party groping for direction. For the moment, though, her support did not reach far beyond progressives. Republicans had spent years framing her as the avatar of identity politics and language policing. A poll published a day later by YouGov gave her a favorability rating that placed her eighteen points behind Sanders— even with Trump, but trailing J. D. Vance.

Sanders took the stage to the strains of “Power to the People,” offered gruff thanks, and set to work. After decades of broad systemic critiques, he now had the advantage of a target with a face and a name. “Elon owns more wealth than the bottom fifty per cent of households in America,” Sanders shouted. “That, brothers and sisters, is insane!” I was reminded of the tips from the Excessive Wealth Disorder Institute, about avoiding “categorical villainization of the wealthy.” Subtlety is probably never going to be Sanders’s style, but it didn’t seem to matter. As he spoke, the line of attendees was still winding out the entrance to the stadium. Others were peering through fences and watching from neighboring hillsides.

When I talked to people in the crowd, I was struck by how many were at their first Sanders rally. One of them, Stephen Jackson, a retired home builder, told me, “I know a lot of Republicans that are really sorry that they voted the way they did. They were hoping it would just be better for business, less government. They’re seeing the total opposite.” He went on, “Musk is not there because he’s trying to lower the government’s spending. And everybody can see it.” In a country where the two dominant parties agree on scarcely anything, the collective exasperation with Musk generated unusual consensus. “Republicans and Democrats are on the same roller coaster,” Jackson said, “and everybody’s thinking, Where’s the seat belts? Well, we got rid of the seat belts, because it saves money.”

Half a century after Trump started selling the illusion of exclusivity— through casinos, mail-order steaks, and a bogus university— his family has finally discovered what people will pay for most exorbitantly: access to the top of the U.S. government. The open practice of crony capitalism is pushing America toward a reckoning between two paths, one in which oligarchy comes to be seen as normal and one in which it does not. McCoy, the historian, sketched the first scenario. “The standards for propriety of those holding office will be diminished,” he said. “It will lower the bar on what we expect from our public servants.” If the current economic trend continues, the effect will be severe. In the next four decades, according to the tax expert Bob Lord, the top .00001 per cent of Americans (about nineteen people, at current population) will increase their share of the nation’s wealth tenfold, from 1.8 per cent to eighteen per cent. In other words, if Washington pretends that Trump’s corruption is not connected to a deeper imbalance of power, the oligarchs win.

Even for those who benefit from the current arrangement, it is not without risk. In the short run, using money to buy power and power to make money may shield them from Trump’s rages. But they are also investing their sultan with immense power. “What happens to business élites who align with autocrats?” Barbara Walter said. “It doesn’t end well.” After Russian tycoons helped Vladimir Putin cement his rule, he grew worried about empowering competitors, so he jailed some and exiled others, giving their empires to new loyalists. “The party is great while it’s happening, but there’s a really terrible hangover at the end, and they don’t seem to consider this, even as Russian oligarchs are being thrown out of windows,” Walter went on. “That’s all I want to say to these tech entrepreneurs. The data shows that autocracies don’t do well economically, so the dictator needs resources to survive, and eventually the pots of money that these oligarchs are sitting on become quite attractive.”

Sultanistic oligarchies have inherent fragilities. The élites must submit to a version of what scholars call the “authoritarian bargain”: the leader agrees to defend their wealth against legal challenges and calls for redistribution, in return for payoffs and political fealty. Élites who do not adequately submit are often destroyed—but leaders who fail to protect the élite are also prone to be overthrown.

Oligarchs can also be vulnerable to civil society. Popular movements in South Africa, Ukraine, and the Philippines demonstrate a pattern: sustained pressure— cross-class protests, labor strikes, investigative reporting— can chip away at self-enriching, inept regimes. When a crack appears, in the form of a recession, a botched show of force, or an élite split, the ruling order must reform, bargain, or collapse. But in places like Egypt and Russia, where civic forces are demoralized or divided, oligarchs can hang on with daunting endurance.

If politics can help solve America’s inequities, it will not happen quickly. Seventeen years passed between when Mark Twain coined the phrase “the gilded age” and when the country enshrined its first law against monopolies, in 1890. Even that was only a limited success. A few years later, the United States tried to establish an income tax, but it was derided as part of a “communist march,” and the Supreme Court struck it down. Eventually, the ultra-rich brought trouble on themselves by ignoring public anger. (At a notable party of the time, held in a Manhattan ballroom, a host brought in dozens of horses with champagne in the saddlebags, so that his guests could dine on horseback.) The income tax was finally implemented in 1913—after nearly two decades of concerted activism.

Benjamin Page, a Northwestern political scientist who has studied attitudes on inequality, told me, “It’s a mistake to say nothing can be done.” The social movement of the eighteen-nineties revealed how to “dilute and equalize oligarchy power with citizen power.” He went on, “If enough people are angry enough, it becomes feasible to think about what institutions, rules, and arrangements could be changed that would actually make a big difference.”

In politics and business, leaders become so insulated from unflattering truths that they blunder into igniting public outrage, a pattern sometimes called “autocratic backfire.” When oligarchs start to see their winnings as evidence of all-encompassing brilliance— rather than a combination of specific acumen, timing, government contracts, and luck— they can get grandiose. Richard White, a Stanford historian who specializes in the Gilded Age, said, “They cannot manage things as complex as they try to manage. I think Elon Musk’s implosion is an example that things just slip out of their control very, very quickly.”

In April, protests around the country surprised even the organizers with their scale; in Washington, there were a hundred thousand demonstrators, quintuple the projections. Trump, who was golfing that day, did not comment on the protesters, and Musk dismissed them as “puppets.” But their presence, like the crowds lining up to hear Sanders speak, raises the prospect that an angry public may unite, even if some of them are ultimately less interested in eating the rich than in joining them at the table. During the Gilded Age, White said, “the oligarchs allowed people to have a set of common targets. There was no common solution then, and I don’t think there will be a common solution now. But when you can agree that this is not working, this is not fair, this is not right— then you can get a movement.”

Elisabeth Bumiller had more on the Executive Branch yesterday. “Executive Branch,” she wrote, “is set to open in June in a subterranean space tucked behind the Georgetown Park shopping mall, reachable from Wisconsin Avenue via a set of stairs next to the mall’s parking garage. A grand entrance it is not… a hidden cavern for fewer than 200 members of the Trump ultrarich… There are to be no prying outsiders. ‘You have to know the owners,’ said an Executive Branch spokesman who declined to be interviewed on the record but did say he was speaking on a private jet heading back to the United States from overseas. ‘This is not just for any Saudi businessman.’ Members, he said, want a place ‘where they’re not annoyed.’ Sacks, a founding member of the club, made clear on his All-In podcast this month (where he announced the club ban on media members) that the chosen ones are unlikely to include traditional Republicans who frequent decades-old Washington clubs. ‘To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be like more Bush-era Republicans as opposed to Trump-era Republicans,’ Sacks said. ‘So we wanted to create something new, hipper and Trump-aligned.’ Beyond Sacks, founding members of the club include Jeff Miller, a lobbyist and top Trump fund-raiser, and Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, whose crypto firm was targeted by the Securities and Exchange Commission until new agency leaders picked by Trump put the lawsuit on hold.”

Diana Kendall, an emeritus professor of sociology at Baylor University and the author of Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion, said that Executive Branch was “amazing and appalling” to her. When the president dined at the Trump International Hotel, she said, he was at least relatively out in the open.

Now, she said, he has “this ability to go behind the curtain” and not have people know who he is talking to, “particularly business and tech moguls, who really want access to the power of the throne.”