Where power meets money in Trump’s gilded city on the Potomac

The advent of the second Trump presidency is upon us, and the vultures have come home to roost. It’s a love-fest where autocrats and plutocrats get into bed together in a corporate fascist state that would have made Mussolini proud and makes The Donald jump for joy.

The titans of tech lead the parade to jump onto the new president’s bandwagon. Elon Musk, the man who would be king is clearly the corporate frontrunner for Trump’s affections. The new president would be an ingrate for ignoring the man who spent a quarter billion dollars to help him win a second White House term. Trump has already included Musk in a foreign policy discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The titan of Tesla and the company formerly known as Twitter is a frequent guest at the power soirées at Mar-a-Lago. Musk’s power surge will increase exponentially if he is able to purchase Tik-Tok from the Chinese.

Musk is moving up the MAGA hit parade with a bullet. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos must act quickly to move up on the Trump hit parade. They need to feast on the Trump food chain and protect the federal goodies available to their companies.

Zuckerberg is doing his darndest to catch up to Musk and promote himself from Meta CEO to MAGA CEO. Like Amazon, Meta made a seven figure contribution to the Trump inaugural treasure chest. Zuckerberg has ended fact checking on Meta, even though a new round of MAGA lies makes accuracy on social media more vital than ever. He also bought into the Trump attack on diversity and eliminated DEI programs at the company.

Last in line is Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos. A current ad for potential Post subscribers states, “New administration in office. Same journalists holding power to account.” The declining number of Post subscribers might disagree.

Bezos has followed the lead of his fellow moguls and added a million dollars to the Trump inaugural kitty. During the presidential campaign he did his bit by killing his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. The Post recently backed Trump’s nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general without bothering to mention that she had acted as a lobbyist for Amazon.

The tech kings aren’t the only ones bringing big money to the nation’s capital. Several Trump appointees are what CNN describes as “uber-wealthy.” The nominee for Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and homes stretching from North Dakota to the Bahamas.

In his confirmation testimony, Bessent said that Trump’s policies could usher in a “new economic golden age.” What he really meant was that bankers and billionaires would get a lot more gold now that Trump, a corporate CEO himself, holds the reins.

No member of the new administration will want for lunch money. But the recipients of grants from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program will go hungry if congressional Republicans get their way and reduce funding for the program to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for bankers and billionaires.

Trump ran as a populist and successfully touched the millions of voters who were fed up with the status quo. Now he is furiously courting the corporate status quo and starting to alienate the populist contingent of true believers who have struck with him through hell and high water and legal liability and conviction for felony fraud. Now Democrats need to drive a wedge between Trump’s corporate and working-class constituencies

The second Trump presidency is a monument to the birth of a new Gilded Age that marked the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Concentration of corporate power was the crown jewel of William McKinley’s presidency. Back then, a rich industrialist, Mark Hanna was the power behind the throne. Musk could play the same role for Trump.

The MAGA crowd and Democrats should keep in mind that McKinley’s successor, the great trustbuster Teddy Roosevelt, started the campaign to bring the rotten corporate edifice down. TR’s distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt finished the job.

Joe Biden has never been much of a populist, but even he was worried enough about the alarming concentration of wealth and power in the Trump regime that he used his nationally televised address on Wednesday to warn Americans about the dangers of oligarchy.

Trump will try to tear apart much of what Biden and his Democratic predecessors created. Democrats will attempt to stop these efforts, but that won’t be enough to satisfy most Americans who have nothing but contempt for the status quo. Progressives must go above and beyond that standard and call for an economy that rewards all Americans, not just the ultra-wealthy corporate magnates who feast at the government trough.

Democrats must aggressively and progressively exploit this crack in Trump’s armor. Joseph Geevarghese, the head of Our Revolution, put it best when he said, “If we’re gonna win, the only path is representing regular, everyday Americans who are about to get screwed by Trump and the oligarchs.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Brad Bannon is a national Democratic strategist and CEO of Bannon Communications Research which polls for Democrats, labor unions and progressive issue groups. He hosts the popular progressive podcast on power, politics and policy, Deadline D.C. with Brad Bannon.

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