The Carnegie Institution’s 123rd anniversary this week is a reminder that our country used to shame its plutocrats into caring about the rest of us. The political populism of Carnegie’s Gilded Age has surged back to relevance with President Trump’s MAGA movement — but this time, Republicans want to ensure it aids the ultra-rich instead of the working class.
One of the inauguration’s most enduring images is that of tech billionaires — including Google’s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Tesla’s Elon Musk — arrayed obediently behind Trump. It says a lot about how Trump will govern, effectively allowing CEOs to draft their own laws and industry regulations.
In other words, it’s a great time to lead a megacorporation.
We’re already seeing the influence of Trump’s powerful friends in the inexplicable pardon of global drug trafficker and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht — a saintly figure among government-skeptical “Bitcoin bros” — and in sweeping executive orders benefiting Silicon Valley’s AI industry titans, handing federal lands to Big Oil and delaying the ban on Chinese social media app TikTok. Things will only get better for Trump’s billionaire friends as they continue embedding themselves in core White House operations.
But Trump’s government-by-plutocrat isn’t restricted to the army of wealthy lackeys who are trying to influence policy from outside. Trump has also assembled what is inarguably the wealthiest Cabinet in American history, including 13 billionaires, drawn almost exclusively from the rarefied worlds of corporate management and television. Those officials have largely called on their industry friends to fill positions normally staffed by civil servants or issue area experts, reducing key federal departments to little more than vending machines for corporate handouts.
The end result is that the regular American is left holding an impossibly heavy bag. Trump’s Cabinet officials clearly disdain working- and middle-class Americans. That was undeniable in last week’s confirmation hearings, where Treasury secretary nominee Scott Bessent testily refused to even consider raising the federal minimum wage above $7.25. To Bessent, whose net worth sits somewhere between $521 million and several billion dollars, those struggling workers are someone else’s constituency.
That will feel like a betrayal to the 30 million Americans who still work at or near the minimum wage. They will remember that Trump teased raising the minimum wage as recently as last month, while promising the working-class people who attended his rallies that they would see their paychecks increase. Instead, Trump is now packing the Treasury and Commerce Departments with the same Big Bank executives and corporate raiders who crippled the nation’s middle class.
It’s worth asking which America Trump is planning to “make great” again, because nearly all of his administration’s proposed policies shore up the folks at the very top — at the expense of everyone else.
The GOP’s plan to extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts includes killing a laundry list of tax breaks that benefit working Americans, including limiting the mortgage interest deduction, ending the American Opportunity Credit for educational expenses, ending the student loan interest deduction, and scrapping the $2,100 Child and Dependent Care tax credit.
Trump’s handouts to wealthy corporate interests are so transparent that even some Republicans are questioning whether any of this actually helps lower-income Americans at all. They fret that the $6 billion price tag for extending Trump’s tax cuts will mean exploding the deficit while cutting popular tax credits for nearly 100 million working people.
“We all want to support what President Trump is doing. But we also recognize the need to get our fiscal house in order,” conservative Rep. Michael Cloud (R-Texas) told Reuters. “We’ve got to have a course correction, and it’s got to be dramatic.”
Not that any of that will matter to Trump, who is more than happy to have eager billionaires lightening his workload and managing the actual administration of government. But Trump should be worried. His bloated tax cut extension is rankling members of the Freedom Caucus and alienating regular Americans who see themselves losing cherished tax credits in order to give the ultra-rich another fat check. And with unified control of government, Trump now finds himself without any Democrats to scapegoat.
Trump has offered his billionaire friends the sweetest of deals: Authority without accountability. If the billionaires really screw it up as unofficial government officials — and they will — don’t expect to see them stepping up to take responsibility. Instead, they will melt back into the anonymity of the business world from which they emerged, leaving Trump to take the heat alone. That political isolation will be a fitting punishment for Trump’s bogus corporate populism.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
