Who ultimately rules: Trump or the US capitalist class?

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A popular theory on the liberal and radical left is that Trump has risen above and subordinated the capitalist ruling class to his will much as dictators from the 19th century Bonapartes to the 20th century Hitlers and Mussolinis have done. A feature article in today’s Financial Times (below) suggests the opposite is true: the economic oligarchy is intervening and controlling the political system as it has not done since the gilded age.

"Now the tycoons are tak­ing to being in gov­ern­ment them­selves,” says Ro Khanna, the Demo­cratic Party congressman from Cali­for­nia. The FT agrees: "It is in Wash­ing­ton that the bil­lion­aires’ influ­ence is most keenly felt. No longer con­tent to lobby from afar, ultra-rich tycoons — espe­cially from Sil­icon Val­ley — have infilt­rated the cap­ital’s eco­sys­tem, tak­ing on advis­ory roles in gov­ern­ment, cul­tiv­at­ing ties on Cap­itol Hill and weigh­ing in on the most import­ant issues of the day, from AI to indus­trial policy."

Administration supporters interviewed by the FT weakly concede "that Trump is simply a pro-busi­ness pres­id­ent who wants to work with fin­ance and industry, rather than view­ing them as adversar­ies.” Among the donors who have shaped administration policy are Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ken Griffin, Miriam Adelson, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks.

The Republicans ignore the patronage and other forms of corruption cited by the report which is more blatant under Trump than under previous US administrations and most bourgeois democratic regimes. The Democratic establishment turns a blind eye to the influence of liberal billionaires on their party such as J.B. Pritzker, Reid Hoff­man, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg,  Dustin Moskovitz and Laurene Pow­ell Jobs.

Khanna, a progressive Democrat, is optimistic.  “He maintains the pen­du­lum of his­tory will swing the other way again", says the FT. "just as the Gil­ded Age paved the way for a new age of pro­gress­ive polit­ics that enforced anti­trust laws to curb mono­pol­ies, reformed tax­a­tion and expan­ded dir­ect demo­cracy.”

We’ll find out soon enough whether the pendulum is swinging back come the midterms.

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Amer­ica’s new olig­archy
By Guy Chazan
Financial Times
8 Aug 2026

In Amer­ica’s Gil­ded Age, mil­lion­aire rob­ber bar­ons oper­ated from the shad­ows, brib­ing pli­ant law­makers to do their bid­ding. Under Pres­id­ent Don­ald Trump, bil­lion­aires have gone one bet­ter. Some are in his cab­inet.

Accord­ing to one widely cited estim­ate, Trump’s cab­inet mem­bers have a com­bined estim­ated net worth of $7.5bn, mak­ing his admin­is­tra­tion the richest in Amer­ican his­tory. Includ­ing Trump him­self, the fig­ure reaches roughly $14bn.

The US has long prided itself on being the world’s lead­ing demo­cracy. But its sys­tem of gov­ern­ment is increas­ingly dom­in­ated by an eco­nomic elite that has par­layed its immense riches into tan­gible polit­ical influ­ence.

“Now the tycoons are tak­ing to being in gov­ern­ment them­selves,” says Ro Khanna, a Demo­cratic mem­ber of the House of Rep­res­ent­at­ives from Cali­for­nia. The res­ult is that polit­ical power in Amer­ica has been “cap­tured by excess­ive wealth”, he adds.

The small coterie of ultra-wealthy indi­vidu­als in Trump’s orbit not only enjoy priv­ileged access to the leader of the free world, they also dom­in­ate the media land­scape and the tech eco­nomy. Some openly boast of their influ­ence over the levers of power.

The admin­is­tra­tion’s defend­ers say that Trump is simply a pro-busi­ness pres­id­ent who wants to work with fin­ance and industry, rather than view­ing them as adversar­ies.

Oth­ers call it the new Amer­ican olig­archy. “Olig­archs . . . have not had this kind of vis­ib­il­ity since the Gil­ded Age — a time when wealthy act­ors were notice­ably, blatantly inter­ven­ing in polit­ics, shap­ing out­comes and really mak­ing sure the sys­tem oper­ated in their nar­row favour,” says Jef­frey Win­ters, author of The Blind Spot: How Olig­archs Dom­in­ate Our Demo­cra­cies.

The bur­geon­ing power of the eco­nomic elite is increas­ingly shap­ing the phys­ical land­scape of Amer­ica’s cit­ies. JPMor­gan Chase’s new headquar­ters in New York, a 60-storey sky­scraper that reportedly cost $3bn to build, has dom­in­ated midtown Man­hat­tan’s sky­line since open­ing last Octo­ber. Some are call­ing it a “monu­ment” to Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO.

But it is in Wash­ing­ton that the bil­lion­aires’ influ­ence is most keenly felt. No longer con­tent to lobby from afar, ultra-rich tycoons — espe­cially from Sil­icon Val­ley — have infilt­rated the cap­ital’s eco­sys­tem, tak­ing on advis­ory roles in gov­ern­ment, cul­tiv­at­ing ties on Cap­itol Hill and weigh­ing in on the most import­ant issues of the day, from AI to indus­trial policy.

They attend glitzy din­ners, donate mil­lions to White House fun­drais­ing projects and are pho­to­graphed with Trump prom­ising eye-pop­ping invest­ments in the US. Many have enjoyed reg­u­lat­ory relief, policies that bene­fit their busi­nesses and, in some cases, luc­rat­ive gov­ern­ment con­tracts worth bil­lions of dol­lars.

But unlike the rob­ber bar­ons of the past, who were often char­it­ably minded and gave gen­er­ously to pub­lic insti­tu­tions, the tech bil­lion­aires of the present show a “com­plete indif­fer­ence” to any kind of “social con­tract” and any need to “com­pensate people for the dis­rup­tion they have brought into their lives”, says Quinn Slobod­ian, a his­tor­ian of cap­it­al­ism at Boston Uni­versity.

“It just tells you something about the impun­ity that seems to be hard-wired into the men­tal­ity of these people, who were treated as gods for the last 25 years and are now act­ing as gods,” he adds.

If there was a trig­ger for the grow­ing influ­ence of the ultra-rich in Amer­ica’s polit­ical sys­tem, it was the Supreme Court’s 2010 Cit­izens United rul­ing, which held that inde­pend­ent polit­ical spend­ing on elec­tions by busi­ness was pro­tec­ted by the First Amend­ment.

The judg­ment opened the floodgates to big money in polit­ics. Amer­ica’s rich had spent $31mn in the 2010 elec­tions, accord­ing to lib­eral advocacy group Amer­ic­ans for Tax Fair­ness (ATF). In the 2024 elec­tion cycle, the 100 largest bil­lion­aire donor fam­il­ies gave $2.6bn.

A huge pro­por­tion of that came from just a hand­ful of indi­vidu­als. Three bil­lion­aires — Elon Musk, Miriam Adel­son and Timothy Mel­lon — accoun­ted for more than a third of the roughly $1.5bn spent to elect Trump.

Cam­paign spend­ing by the ultra-rich has increased as the gap between rich and poor has widened. Accord­ing to Win­ters, who teaches polit­ical sci­ence at North­west­ern Uni­versity, the coun­try’s 400 wealth­i­est people saw their share of the US’s total wealth shoot up by 146 per cent over the past 30 years, while that of the entire bot­tom half of the Amer­ican pop­u­la­tion declined by 25 per cent over the same period.

It is this diver­gence in for­tunes that is prompt­ing so many com­par­is­ons with late 19th-cen­tury Amer­ica, when a small coterie of indus­tri­al­ists and fin­an­ci­ers made fab­ulous for­tunes and wiel­ded vast polit­ical power in a sys­tem riddled with cronyism and cor­rup­tion.

“There’s a kind of pay-to-play sys­tem . . . that Trump is try­ing to bring back — a tra­di­tional form of cor­rup­tion, if you will,” says Mar­tin Gilens, pro­fessor of pub­lic policy at UCLA.

This brazenly trans­ac­tional approach was on full dis­play in a now-fam­ous epis­ode of the Flag­rant com­edy pod­cast last year fea­tur­ing Chamath Pal­i­hap­itiya, a Sil­icon Val­ley ven­ture cap­it­al­ist, former Face­book exec­ut­ive and Repub­lican donor. Pal­i­hap­itiya said he had once been a “mega donor” to the Demo­crats. Des­pite that, dur­ing the era of former pres­id­ent Joe Biden he had little suc­cess get­ting offi­cials to talk to him. “The Trump admin­is­tra­tion is totally dif­fer­ent,” he said. “There’s not a single per­son there you can’t get on the phone to talk to.” Pal­i­hap­itiya co-hos­ted a fun­draiser in San Fran­cisco in June 2024 that raised about $12mn for Trump’s re-elec­tion cam­paign.

Demo­crats said Pal­i­hap­itiya had inad­vert­ently exposed the cosy sym­bi­osis between Trump and the busi­ness elite. “Don­ald Trump’s Gov­ern­ment of, by, and for the ultra-wealthy,” wrote Dan Pfeif­fer, a former Obama adviser, as he repos­ted the Pal­i­hap­itiya clip.

But oth­ers say that behind the bluster, Pal­i­hap­itiya was mak­ing a valid point — that Trump’s eco­nomic policies are simply more busi­ness-friendly than Biden’s. That is less a reflec­tion of “olig­archic” influ­ence than of Trump’s innate feel for what busi­ness wants and needs.

The White House itself dis­misses all talk of a new olig­archy. Davis Ingle, a spokes­man, says Trump has “taken on a broad swath of entrenched spe­cial interests” dur­ing his second term. He has, for example, nego­ti­ated pri­cing deals with big pharma com­pan­ies, launched a dir­ect-to-con­sumer drug plat­form steer­ing people to cheaper medi­cines, and made it easier to fire unelec­ted bur­eau­crats who sub­ver­ted his agenda.

“Through these actions, Pres­id­ent Trump is deliv­er­ing on his prom­ise to empower the for­got­ten men and women of our coun­try by finally put­ting their interests first,” he says.

Senior exec­ut­ives have echoed the idea that Trump has been good for the private sec­tor. Last year David Solomon, chief exec­ut­ive of Gold­man Sachs, praised Trump’s engage­ment with the busi­ness com­munity, say­ing it was a “dif­fer­ent exper­i­ence than what we’ve had over the course of the last four years”.

Sim­il­arly, tech lead­ers have lauded the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s hands-off approach to AI, which they say has helped to unleash explos­ive growth in the sec­tor and pos­i­tion the US as a global leader in the tech­no­logy.

At a meet­ing in the White House last Septem­ber, Sam Alt­man, chief exec­ut­ive of OpenAI, said it was a “very refresh­ing change” to have “such a pro­busi­ness, pro-innov­a­tion pres­id­ent”.

But oth­ers have warned that the bal­ance of power is shift­ing decis­ively in favour of big busi­ness. Biden used his farewell address last year to warn that an “olig­archy” was tak­ing shape in Amer­ica, call­ing it a “dan­ger­ous con­cen­tra­tion of power in the hands of a few ultra-wealthy people”. The new “tech-indus­trial com­plex . . . could pose real dangers to our coun­try”, he said.

Yet he made one import­ant omis­sion — that big donors also wield influ­ence on his own party. “Far more olig­archs, each giv­ing in the tens rather than hun­dreds of mil­lions, con­trib­uted to the $2bn [vice-pres­id­ent and Demo­cratic pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate] Kamala Har­ris raised” for her cam­paign, Win­ters wrote in The Blind Spot.

Indeed, the Demo­cratic Party has its fair share of bil­lion­aire donors with close ties to senior politi­cians in the party, people like LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoff­man, who has been an influ­en­tial voice in Demo­cratic debates over AI reg­u­la­tion, fin­an­cier George Soros, former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, Face­book co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and phil­an­throp­ist Laurene Pow­ell Jobs, widow of the late Apple boss Steve Jobs.

The influ­ence of great wealth on Demo­crats is per­son­i­fied by JB Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel for­tune and one of Amer­ica’s richest men, who serves as gov­ernor of Illinois and is widely regarded as a poten­tial con­tender for the Demo­cratic pres­id­en­tial nom­in­a­tion in 2028. The 2018 gubernat­orial race pit­ting him against incum­bent Repub­lican Bruce Rau­ner, a former private equity exec­ut­ive, was widely described as the “battle of the bil­lion­aires”.

Some believe the Gil­ded Age com­par­is­ons only go so far. Slobod­ian, the his­tor­ian and co-author, with Ben Tar­noff, of Muskism: A Guide for the Per­plexed, says the rob­ber bar­ons of the time — men like Andrew Carne­gie, John D Rock­e­feller and John Pier­pont Mor­gan — were cel­eb­rated for their phil­an­thropy. They cre­ated uni­versit­ies, found­a­tions and lib­rar­ies that have benefited gen­er­a­tions.

Today’s tech-olig­archs show less enthu­si­asm for grand pub­lic ges­tures. Musk is, for Slobod­ian, the prime offender. As head of the now dis­ban­ded, so-called Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­ciency (Doge), he seemed immune to the poten­tial pub­lic back­lash he might face from dis­mant­ling gov­ern­ment agen­cies and fir­ing tens of thou­sands of fed­eral employ­ees.

Indeed he rev­elled in his role, bran­dish­ing a chrome-plated chain­saw given to him by Javier Milei, the Argen­tine pres­id­ent, and boast­ing of feed­ing Amer­ica’s inter­na­tional aid agency into the “wood chip­per”.

Other busi­ness­men have also been able to wield real influ­ence on policy, albeit in a less osten­ta­tious way. One is David Sacks, the Sil­icon Val­ley ven­ture cap­it­al­ist and co-host, with Pal­i­hap­itiya, of the pop­u­lar All-In pod­cast, who served as Trump’s AI and crypto tsar from Janu­ary 2025 till March this year.

In that role, he pushed for the eas­ing of restric­tions on the exports of some AI chips to China, say­ing it would strengthen US com­pan­ies and slow the rise of Hua­wei. He was also the archi­tect of a Trump exec­ut­ive order seek­ing to curb the abil­ity of indi­vidual states to reg­u­late AI. Crit­ics say Sacks’ ven­ture cap­ital firm Craft Ven­tures has invest­ments that stand to bene­fit from the admin­is­tra­tion’s dereg­u­la­tion agenda.

A spokes­per­son for Craft Ven­tures said that while at the White House, Sacks “worked on policies that bene­fit the entire Amer­ican eco­nomy, not any par­tic­u­lar Craft com­pany . . . he com­plied with all gov­ern­ment eth­ics rules and divested com­pan­ies that might pose a con­flict of interest”.

But even wealthy indi­vidu­als with no formal role in the admin­is­tra­tion can shape the agenda and reap the bene­fits of policies favour­able to them­selves and their com­pan­ies — such as the con­sid­er­able tax relief for the ultra-wealthy in Trump’s sig­na­ture One Big Beau­ti­ful Bill last year.

Accord­ing to an ana­lysis by the non­par­tisan research group Cen­ter on Budget and Policy Pri­or­it­ies, the bill delivered tax cuts to the top 1 per cent of people that were three times the size of those for people with incomes in the bot­tom 60 per cent. Mean­while, it cut spend­ing on food assist­ance, edu­ca­tion and Medi­caid, the health insur­ance plan for low-income Amer­ic­ans.

Donors “have got­ten tax breaks, they’ve got­ten dereg­u­la­tion, they’ve got the state to not pro­sec­ute crypto, they’re put­ting white-col­lar defence law­yers out of work in Amer­ica,” says Khanna, the Demo­cratic law­maker. “This has been a total handout to the cap­ital class.”

It’s all in stark con­trast to the plat­form Trump ran on. The former real estate developer won in 2016 as a cham­pion of the little people, an advoc­ate for the ordin­ary Amer­ic­ans left behind by glob­al­isa­tion who prom­ised to wrest power from the estab­lished elites. Instead, his pres­id­ency has cemen­ted it.

But there are lim­its to how much they can achieve. Zohran Mam­dani, a pro­gress­ive, was elec­ted mayor of New York last year des­pite heavy spend­ing by bil­lion­aire oppon­ents such as Bill Ack­man, the Trump-sup­port­ing hedge fund man­ager.

Other can­did­ates, too, are increas­ingly using anti-olig­arch rhet­oric to get elec­ted. One is Troy Jack­son, a fifth-gen­er­a­tion log­ger from Maine and Demo­cratic nom­inee for the US Sen­ate: he will go head-to-head against Repub­lican incum­bent Susan Collins whose re-elec­tion cam­paign is being heav­ily backed by big cor­por­a­tions and wealthy donors.

“These bil­lion­aires have bought the gov­ern­ment and we don’t have enough money to buy it back,” Jack­son told local radio last month. “And I’m sick of that, and many, many people across the state and coun­try are sick of it.”

Khanna main­tains that the pen­du­lum of his­tory will swing the other way again, just as the Gil­ded Age paved the way for a new age of pro­gress­ive polit­ics that enforced anti­trust laws to curb mono­pol­ies, reformed tax­a­tion and expan­ded dir­ect demo­cracy.

“Amer­ica has a remark­able capa­city for self-cor­rec­tion,” he says. “And we have the chance post-Trump to shape a his­tor­ical moment.”


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