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TRUMP’S NEW OLIGARCHY  
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The New Republic
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_ The elevation of Elon Musk to a key role suggests that right-wing
elites are set to embark on a spree of sordid self-dealing. _

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Last spring, Donald Trump presided over a meeting with the country’s
top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort. According to _The
Washington Post,_ Trump promised to fulfill a wish list of policies
[[link removed]] sought
by their industry—while explicitly soliciting $1 billion in campaign
contributions from them. Trump made similar promises to other
ultrawealthy donors, vowing to keep their taxes low
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urging them to cut large campaign checks.

Now that Trump has won the presidency again, it’s worth revisiting
these episodes as a guide to what might be coming. It’s often said
that Trump campaigned expressly
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a platform of authoritarian rule, but this also applies to corruption:
He didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of
some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country—and
he won anyway. Trump and his allies will likely interpret this as a
green light to engage in an extraordinary spree of unrestrained
malfeasance.

There are several reasons to fear this could amount to a level of
oligarchic corruption that outdoes anything Trump did in his first
term. In short, conditions are ripe for right-wing elites to try to
loot the place from top to bottom.

First, Senate Democrats, who just lost majority control, are now
bracing to hit a wall in their inquiries into Trump’s apparent quid
pro quo dealings. The Senate Budget Committee has been investigating
[[link removed]] the
aforementioned $1 billion solicitation from Big Oil executives, aiming
to establish precisely what Trump promised them—he reportedly
offered to systematically roll back President Biden’s green energy
policies and other regulations—seemingly in direct exchange for
campaign money.

With little fanfare, this investigation has been making progress: At
least one major energy company confirmed
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the gathering happened, and most of the other companies haven’t
refuted the central allegation, according to a committee aide.
Democrats have followed up with demands
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company documents that might illuminate exactly what took place.

But there is zero chance the incoming GOP majority will continue down
this road, which means it will be much harder for Democrats to compel
these companies to illuminate the true nature of their transaction
with Trump.

“Republican control of the Senate will unfortunately undermine
congressional efforts to hold Trump and executives accountable for
wreaking havoc on our planet and selling out American families and
U.S. energy policy to the highest bidder,” Senator Sheldon
Whitehouse of Rhode Island, chair of the Budget Committee, told me in
a statement. He added that this will hamper getting to the bottom of
this “apparent quid pro quo.” Once these policy changes start in
earnest, we’ll have no way to trace them back to it, let alone to
shed congressional light on influence peddling in real time.

Or take the ongoing Senate Finance Committee investigation into Trump
son-in-law Jared Kushner’s international business dealings.
That probe has established
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Kusher took in over $100 million from Saudi and other foreign
investors without returning any profits on those investments.

This is raising questions for Democrats about whether the arrangement
was a means for foreign entities to channel money to the family of the
potential next president, raising obvious conflict of interest issues.
(Kushner has provided an alternate explanation: that his firm moved
slowly to invest the money he’d collected.)

GOP control of the Senate could make it significantly harder to get to
the bottom of these arrangements, a Democratic aide tells me, even as
Trump takes control over the nation’s foreign policies, inviting
still more influence seeking.

“The next four years are going to be a smash and grab under
Trump,” Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Finance Committee, told me
in a statement. Wyden added that the “special interests who put
Trump back in office expect a return on their investment,” which is
“all the more reason not to let up on oversight.” But Republicans
will now make this oversight a lot harder.

Then there’s Trump’s decision to tap billionaire Elon Musk to head
the grandiosely and misleadingly titled Department of Government
Efficiency, a nongovernmental body
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will push substantial cuts in regulations, spending, and personnel.
As _The New York Times_ reports, Musk has grown infuriated with
oversight
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his SpaceX company, yet he will now be in a position to get Trump to
consider regulatory rollbacks that benefit him, even as he enjoys
lucrative federal contracts. That, plus government oversight on his
other companies, creates the potential for serious conflicts of
interest.

Trump has suggested Musk’s role will only be advisory. But even if
that proves true, it’s ominous that Trump would so conspicuously
hand Musk so much public influence over decisions that could heavily
impact Musk’s own bottom line, especially with Trump so heavily
indebted to Musk for transforming Twitter into a pro-Trump propaganda
and MAGA disinformation machine. At minimum, Trump is basically
declaring that his administration will be open for business to those
who boost and assist him politically.

“Trump is showing that he will reward people who help him by giving
them tremendous influence over his administration,” Noah Bookbinder,
president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington,
told me. “This will encourage more people to direct their largesse
Trump’s way. We expect government to look out for the public
interest. Trump is open about the fact that government is meant to
serve his supporters, business partners, and friends.”

Other new openings for influence peddling will beckon. Bookbinder
notes that during Trump’s first term, his publicly traded
[[link removed]] Truth
Social platform did not exist. Now, Bookbinder points out, it provides
an easy channel for wealthy people to curry favor with Trump by buying
stock in it—even simpler than booking rooms at his hotels,
which reaped millions for Trump’s businesses during his first term
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“A publicly traded stock in a large company provides an easy way to
drop a lot of money and quickly affect Trump’s net worth,”
Bookbinder said. “Every president before him has divested financial
interests so there wasn’t a clear way to influence them. Truth
Social stock makes that even easier.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to purge the government of career civil
servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists will create new avenues
for sordid inside dealing. For instance, Biden initiatives like new
federal protections for millions of workers from excessive
heat—which are opposed
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some business interests—are now in the rulemaking process and will
be in the hands of the new administration. It’s easy to see MAGA
appointees letting bogus information peddled by special interests
undermine that regulation’s future. Career officials who
remain—but whose protections against termination will be weaker
under Trump—will be less likely to object when Trumpist appointees
corrupt the rulemaking process more broadly.

It is of course possible that Trump’s administration will display no
trace of such seamy schemes. But that’s unlikely. When Trump first
ran in 2016, he similarly celebrated his own corruption—declaring
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not paying taxes “makes me smart”—but positioned himself as a
traitor-to-his-class figure who would employ his personal familiarity
with insider corruption to benefit ordinary Americans. Now he is
openly promising to directly reward his elite allies with governing
spoils, and not bothering to make a serious case that this will
benefit the public.

It is sometimes argued that Trump’s reelection was driven by
revulsion at “elites.” However true that is, it’s not hard to
see what’s coming next. If and when Trump’s initiatives—from
canceling prosecutions of himself to unleashing hell on
immigrants—spur widespread criticism, certain pundits will intone
that the criticism merely reflects his success in “taking on the
elite class.” Meanwhile, Trump will be selling the government off
for parts to his oligarchic right-wing elite cronies, and the jarring
incongruity of it all won’t disturb these pundits in the slightest.
After winning the presidency again despite making these corrupt deals
right out in the open, why would Trump feel remotely constrained?

_Greg Sargent
[[link removed]] @GregTSargent
[[link removed]] is a staff writer at The New
Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast
[[link removed]]. A
seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he
was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from
2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New
York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author
of the critically acclaimed book
[[link removed]] An
Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and
Thunderdome Politics.  _

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* Donald Trump
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* Elon Musk
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* corruption
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* Corruption in politics
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