What's Preventing Harris From Crushing Trump Is Shockingly Simple

If Trump wins, blame the billionaires. Without them, this presidential race wouldn’t be close at all. As Elon Musk’s rabid pro-Trump mania makes clear, billionaires are wielding their financial might in this year’s presidential election far more than in any previous campaign—and far more openly, too. More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy.

There’s no denying that billionaires are trying to bend society to their will. America’s 800-plus billionaires hold over $6 trillion in wealth, more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households. The super wealthy own a greater share of the nation’s wealth today than they did during the Gilded Age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. And they will do whatever they have to do to keep things that way. Without the enormous aid from these and other billionaires, Trump’s race against Kamala Harris wouldn’t even be close—he’d be well behind. These plutocrats’ efforts underline the wisdom of something that Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

Crystallizing Brandeis’ fears, the billionaires backing Trump don’t seem terribly concerned about preserving our democracy. They support Trump despite his talk of being a dictator on Day One, terminating the Constitution and siccing federal prosecutors on his political opponents and critics. They’re far more concerned about slashing taxes and regulations than about the risks of electing a demagogue who hails Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban, as a model.

Many Americans fail to realize just how much the super rich use their financial muscle to twist and tilt policymaking to their liking. After the painful 2008 recession, the super rich got Washington’s policymakers to focus on cutting the budget deficit instead of cutting the painfully high unemployment rate and assuring a speedy recovery. The ultrawealthy successfully lobbied to stop Presidents Obama and Biden from repealing the “carried interest” loophole that saves private equity executives billions by taxing their profits at lower capital gains rates, around 20 percent, instead of higher personal income tax rates, around 37 percent. Billionaires’ successes in helping elect right-wing lawmakers and in lobbying help explain why Congress keeps blocking progressive ideas that have overwhelming public support, like a higher minimum wage and paid family and medical leave. (In one of the most insidious and destructive moves by billionaires, the Koch brothers used their wealth to essentially create the climate denial movement, as Jane Mayer explains in her book Dark Money, funding pseudoscientists to produce “studies” that supposedly debunked human-caused global warming and donating heavily to right-wing think tanks and politicians to get them to deny global warming and fight efforts to curb fossil fuels.)

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