During his first presidential run back in 2016, Donald Trump’s credibility as a “populist” rested largely on the fact that he was a billionaire. Unlike his opponents, who he accused of being “controlled” by their donors, the New York real estate developer claimed to be entirely self-funded and therefore free from any kind of outside influence. “I don’t need anybody’s money,” he bragged at his announcement in 2015, where he disparaged his opponents as mere puppets to plutocrats like himself.
This was a paradoxical yet also powerful message that ultimately helped propel the billionaire to victory.n. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, embodied the Washington establishment and had a long history of courting big donors to fund her political career. This made her particularly vulnerable to his attacks. While Trump could claim with some credibility to funding his own campaign, there was little doubt that Clinton was the preferred candidate of the donor class. Big donors weren’t necessarily thrilled with the prospect of a Clinton presidency, but most considered Trump too much of a wild card to get behind. In any case, few thought he had any chance of winning.
Fast-forward to the present, and Trump is no longer the outsider that he was back in 2016. Though still something of a wild card (for democracy, at least), many of America’s economic elite are no longer filled with the kind of trepidation that they had about him eight years ago. And unlike in 2016, Trump is heading into his third consecutive run for president as the clear favorite in the polls.
There is another major difference in Trump this year that has become increasingly obvious in recent weeks as the former president has struggled to pay his legal fees and other costs related to his ongoing criminal and civil trials. Trump no longer appears to be the financially independent anti-politician that he was in 2016. Indeed, if any candidate appears to be desperate for big donor cash this year, it is Donald Trump.
With his campaign and associated Super PACs facing a cash crunch after spending more than $100 million (and counting) on legal bills, the former president and his team have become increasingly focused on courting the very same big donors that Trump once scorned. Even more humiliating, the former president has reportedly started working the phones for “hours at a time” and blocking out entire days to make “personalized” pitches to potential financial backers, including many of his fellow billionaires. The candidate who once mocked his opponents for soliciting money from wealthy donors has thus become the pandering politician who he railed against eight years ago. Gone is the swaggering, self-funding billionaire telling donors to shove it; in his place comes an embattled politician who is low on cash and anxious to charm his plutocratic peers.
Fortunately for Trump, this charm offensive is starting to pay off.
Now that Trump has secured his Republican nomination, America’s economic elite seem to be warming up to the former president’s reelection bid. Last week, the RNC and Trump campaign announced an impressive $65.6 million haul for March, tripling what they raised in February. A few days later, the campaign held its first major fundraiser since Trump clinched his party’s nomination in March, and reportedly brought in a record-breaking $50.5 million. Held at the home of a hedge fund billionaire John Paulson, the dinner was attended by a who’s who of conservative plutocrats, including casino mogul Steve Wynn, hedge funder Robert Mercer, Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson, fracking billionaire Harold Hamm, and many others. With tickets starting at $250,000 and going up to $814,600 per guest — the legal limit for a joint fundraiser — the event injected much-needed cash into the coffers of the Trump campaign and the RNC, along with the Super PAC currently paying Trump’s legal bills, which received a cut from each donation. The more than $50 million raised was nearly double the $26 million raised by the Biden campaign at its star-studded fundraiser in New York City the previous weekend.
These impressive numbers indicate that the Republican donor class has lined up behind their candidate. But it’s not just Republican billionaires who seem to have made peace with Trump. While most of the guests at Trump’s big fundraiser on Saturday have been GOP donors for years, there have also been signs suggesting that other billionaires are coalescing around the effort to dethrone Joe Biden.
As Brad Stone recently observed in Bloomberg, Trump’s “most visible supporters” this time around are no longer “angry blue-collar workers” but “some of the most successful businessmen in the country.” Importantly, this includes businessmen who have previously been apolitical or even supportive of the Democratic Party. The most prominent example of this trend has undoubtedly been Elon Musk, who claims to have voted for Biden in 2020 but now presents a second Biden term as an existential threat to the country. “I voted 100% Dem until a few years ago. Now, I think we need a red wave or America is toast,” the billionaire recently posted on X, where he regularly boosts right-wing conspiracy theories and misinformation on everything from voter fraud to immigration to Covid vaccines. While the Tesla CEO has yet to explicitly endorse Trump, he has consistently used his megaphone to rail against Biden and amplify right-wing talking points.
Musk is hardly alone among his fellow billionaires. Consider the case of hedge fund manager Bill Ackmam — a longtime donor to centrist Democrats who has become increasingly critical of the party over the Biden years. Like Musk, Ackman regularly vents against “wokeism” on X, and in January he officially renounced his ties with the Democratic Party. “I was a Bill Clinton Democrat and what the party has morphed into is not something I want to be associated with,” said the Wall Street billionaire.
Musk and Ackman have both presented their turn away from Biden and the Democratic Party as a principled response to the cultural extremism and “woke” politics that has supposedly infected the party in recent years. But there is a much more plausible explanation for the growing revolt of the billionaire class that has little to do with “principles” and everything to do with material interests.
While Musk talks a lot about the “woke mind virus,” there’s little doubt about what initially drove him away from the Biden administration. Almost from the beginning of Biden’s term, the Tesla CEO has complained about the administration’s supposed hostility towards his companies, which he has repeatedly blamed on the president’s pro-labor bias. “Seems to be controlled by unions,” said Musk on Biden back in 2021, shortly after the president held an EV summit at the White House that included Detroit’s Big Three and the United Auto Workers (UAW) but not Tesla. When Democrats in Congress unveiled a bill that would have given a $4,500 tax incentive to consumers for buying union-made EVs around the same time, the notorious union buster had a predictable response: “This is written by Ford/UAW lobbyists.” Musk’s animosity towards Biden has only deepened in the years since, especially as the administration has continued to advance a broadly pro-union agenda. In January, Musk essentially declared war on Biden’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) when his rocket company, SpaceX, filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the 90-year old New Deal agency.
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This conflict between Musk and Biden reflects a broader trend. The more the Biden administration has advanced a populist economic agenda that bolsters the labor movement and confronts monopolistic corporations, the more critical billionaires and corporate CEOs like Musk have become of the president. “The simplest and easiest explanation for this [billionaire] blowback,” notes Stone, is the “barely concealed fear that a majority might be coming for their wealth.” This was clear after Biden put forward a plan to increase corporate taxes and create a minimum tax for anyone worth more than $100 million during his State of the Union address last month, which immediately drew the ire of billionaires crying “socialism.”
It is for similar reasons that many plutocrats who once criticized Trump now seem to be warming up to the former president’s second election bid. In 2016, Trump ran as a populist and could make a legitimate claim to independence. But in the end it didn’t matter. As a plutocrat himself, Trump did not need to be “controlled” by the plutocrats because he instinctively shared most of their goals, be it tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, or undermining organized labor. Trump claimed to be the candidate of working men and women, but his Cabinet was stacked with Wall Street swamp creatures like Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross, along with militant union busters like Eugene Scalia — a man who spent his career as a corporate lawyer representing union-busting employers — running the Labor Department. In addition to lower taxes, corporate America also benefited from the Trump administration’s unprecedented assault on the regulatory state, with Trump officials rolling back hundreds of regulations on everything from the environment to workers’ rights to big finance.
The stark contrast between the Biden and Trump administrations on the economy belies the claim often heard on the “populist” right that the Democratic Party is now the “party of the rich” while the GOP has become a “working class party.” Right-wing populists assert that the Democratic Party has become increasingly disconnected from the concerns of working people as its base has grown more affluent and college-educated. According to this narrative, the former party of the people has abandoned its earlier pro-worker disposition while embracing “woke” cultural politics that appeal to its heavily suburban and college-educated base.
But the actual facts paint a very different picture. Indeed, a recent study by political scientists Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson found that Democratic discourse and policy initiatives continue to show a “clear emphasis on economic priorities,” and that they have actually grown more populist during the Biden years (in contrast, Republican discourse greatly emphasizes cultural issues while keeping discussion of their unpopular economic policies to a bare minimum).
In their 2020 book, Let Them Eat Tweets, Hacker and Pierson described Trump’s politics as “plutocratic populism” because he employs populist rhetoric and themes to advance plutocratic ends. In 2016, many in the donor class seemed genuinely turned off by Trump’s anti-elitist persona. Trump was an unknown quantity who at times appeared to be genuinely populist on economic issues. But after his first term America’s plutocrats no longer fear that Trump would pursue a populist economic agenda. Besides, the so-called “elites” who Trump targets today are not billionaires but college-educated professionals who tend to vote Democrat and work in white collar professions, particularly in academia, journalism, and other opinion-shaping fields. For pluto-populists like Trump, the real problem with today’s society is not so much that elites exist but that the wrong elites have gained too much power over everything from the federal government (i.e. the “deep state”) to the press to the top universities. Many plutocrats sympathize with this view, seeing themselves as the real elite taking on an undeserving and malevolent pseudo-elite in the “professional managerial class.” In his Bloomberg piece, Brad Stone touches on this very real intra-elite conflict and how it explains the swelling plutocratic support for Trump, which “feels tinged with real anger and a palpable tension between the über-wealthy and other elites in politics, academia and the media, who view each other with increasing disdain.”
For the billionaire class, the Biden administration has come to represent not just a threat to their material interests but to their outsized egos. When Elon Musk is snubbed by the White House at an EV event, it is a personal affront to the man who proclaims he has done “more for the environment than any single human on Earth.” For many billionaires, Biden simply does not give them the respect or fawning praise they feel they deserve. But soon enough they may have one of their own back in the White House — and this time Trump is aiming to please the “forgotten billionaires and millionaires” of America.
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