Why is a group of billionaires working to
re-elect Trump?
Robert
Reich
Oligarchs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel aren’t just
hostile to progressivism. They’re hostile to American democracy itself
Mon 3 Jun
2024 12.01 CEST
Elon Musk
and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner
party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to
defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.
The guest
list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and
Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.
Meanwhile,
Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on
Twitter/X, the platform he owns.
According
to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at
least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on
issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration,
calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”.
The Times
analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20
times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president
now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias.
This is no
small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the
platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people
who see his posts.
No other
leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting
authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his
platform in support of India’s Narendra Modi, Argentina’s Javier Milei and
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
Some of
this aligns with Musk’s business interests. In India, he secured lower import
tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he opened a major new market for
Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he solidified
access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries.
But
something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch and their cronies are
leading a movement against democracy.
Peter
Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, once wrote: “I no longer believe that
freedom and democracy are compatible.”
If freedom
is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with?
Thiel
donated $15m to the successful Republican senatorial campaign of JD Vance, who
alleged that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy
meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country”. (Vance is now high on
the list of Trump vice-presidential possibilities.)
Thiel also
donated at least $10m to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters,
who also claimed Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the
authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.
Billionaire
money is now gushing into the 2024 election. Just 50 families have already
injected more than $600m into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new
report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of this is going to the Trump
Republican party.
In 2021,
Stephen A Schwarzman, the billionaire chairman and chief executive of the
Blackstone Group, called the January 6 attack on the US Capitol an
“insurrection” and “an affront to the democratic values we hold dear”. Now he’s
backing Trump because, Schwarzman says, “our economic, immigration and foreign
policies are taking the country in the wrong direction.”
Trump
recently solicited a group of top oil executives to raise $1bn for his
campaign, reportedly promising that if elected he would immediately reverse
dozens of environmental rules and green energy policies adopted by Biden. Trump
said this would be a “deal” for the oil executives that would avoid taxation
and regulation on their industry.
Speaking
from the World Economic Forum’s confab last January in Davos, Switzerland,
Jamie Dimon – chair and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest and most profitable
bank in the United States, and one of the most influential CEOs in the world –
heaped praise on Trump’s policies while president. “Take a step back, be
honest,” Dimon said. Trump “grew the economy quite well. Tax reform worked”.
Rubbish.
Under Trump the economy lost 2.9m jobs. Even before the pandemic, job growth
under Trump was slower than it’s been under Biden.
Most of the
benefits of Trump’s tax cut went to big corporations like JPMorgan Chase and
wealthy individuals like Dimon, while the costs blew a giant hole in the budget
deficit. If not for those Trump tax cuts, along with the Bush tax cuts and
their extensions, the ratio of the federal debt to the national economy would
now be declining.
But don’t
assume that the increasing flow of billionaire money to Trump and his
Republican party is motivated solely by tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks. The
goal of these US oligarchs is to roll back democracy.
When asked
if he was becoming more political, Musk admitted (in a podcast in November):
“If you consider fighting the woke mind virus, which I consider to be a
civilizational threat, to be political, then yes … Woke mind virus is communism
rebranded.”
Communism
rebranded? Hello?
A former
generation of wealthy US conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater
because they wanted to conserve American institutions. Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman,
Murdoch and their fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want
to conserve much of anything – at least not anything that occurred after the
1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote.
As Thiel
wrote: “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one
could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in
welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two
constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the
notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
If
“capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public
assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire
capitalists like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting
Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.
Not
incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s
robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the US
had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to
maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced.
When that
debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression. Benito Mussolini and
Adolf Hitler then emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy
the modern world had ever witnessed.
If America
learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a
cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and
wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power – as Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman,
Murdoch and other billionaires are now putting on full display – which in turn
generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.
Under
fascist strongmen, no one is safe – not even oligarchs.
If we want
to guard what’s left of our freedom, we must meet the anti-democracy movement
with a bold pro-democracy movement that protects the institutions of
self-government from oligarchs like Musk and Thiel and neo-fascists like Trump.
Robert
Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the
University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For
the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who
Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His
newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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