In 2016, and to some extent in 2020, no more prominent oligarch than Peter Thiel felt comfortable associating with Republican standard-bearers in public. Many of the country’s wealthy people seemed more comfortable portraying Donald Trump as a national threat than co-chairing his campaign or running as his surrogate.
Recently, the mood of this country’s wealthy class has been changing. In many ways, politics in this country feels deeply stalemate. The president’s polls have been stable, the general legislative vote hasn’t moved much, governors of both parties have consistently had high approval ratings, and polls and election results have shown signs of that since 2020. Strong opposition to progressive policies that are not seen.
But in the midst of an otherwise maddeningly static landscape, a group of extremely wealthy influencers and power brokers are moving quite a bit, shedding the mask of gentility and embracing a politics of the fittest. It seems there is. One of the results is what I called last week the most sociologically interesting development of the entire election cycle. It’s some kind of high-profile “billionaire brains” turning to Trump and Trumpism, which changes the face of the MAGA brand, and which makes the former president’s third White House bid seem superficial. Even looking at it, it seems to be much less populist than the first two, and much more plutocratic.
Of the top 20 individual donors this election cycle, nine are giving primarily to Republicans. Only one company backs Harris and the Democratic Party, a big change from 2020, when two of the top three companies supported Democrats, and 2016, when four of the top six companies supported Democrats. At the same time, small donations to former presidents, once the bedrock of large-scale fundraising, have collapsed. About a third of the 2024 donations to the Trump campaign and related groups came from billionaires, compared to just 6% for Harris.
In previous campaigns, Mr. Trump has pitched himself as an anti-establishment force, a rebel tribune for the distrustful MAGA electorate. The pitch has always been malicious fiction, but this time it’s surrounded by enough faces from the American plutocracy to make Trumpworld seem more anti-establishment than anti-establishment, making the entire campaign something of a floor fight. between rival tribes of wealthy elites. Broadly speaking, a group wants to defend the system that made its success possible. The other wants to go to war with it.
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