The Brooklyn Rail

When I hear President-elect Trump talk about the accomplishments of his first term in office, I’m reminded of something the eighth US President, Martin Van Buren, said: “It is easier to do a job right than to explain why you didn’t.” Trump spends an inordinate amount of time and extraordinary effort explaining why he didn’t do the job right the first time, in regard to the economy, the pandemic, and virtually everything else he encountered in his first term.

His tax cuts in 2017 only benefited the wealthy and did nothing for the working class he had promised to help. He did everything he could to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), but failed. He also tried to make big cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, but mostly failed. He eliminated a lot of environmental regulations, but they mostly came back. He did increase the federal deficit significantly, and mishandled the COVID-19 pandemic terribly, causing needless deaths. He was impeached twice and he tried repeatedly to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

And in his new term, Trump has explicitly vowed to turn the country over to billionaires and their corporations. On December 10, he announced on Truth Social: “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” In other words, the US government is now officially for sale, and billionaires are lining up to buy it. Oligarchy, meet Kleptocracy.

Elon Musk has more than doubled his own net worth since Election Day. He is now the first person in history to have a net worth of more than $400 billion. He went from $264 billion on November 6 to $447 billion on December 12, an increase of 69%. Musk’s net worth now represents 1.5% of the entire US gross domestic product.

And that’s just the beginning. Musk stands to vastly increase his wealth over the next few years because of his relationship with the Trump administration, leading to lucrative government contracts for EVs, space travel, and satellites, and the rapid deregulation of his companies, especially the one dedicated to Artificial Intelligence.

Other tech billionaires are trying desperately to get in on the sale, however they can. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman all just donated a million dollars each to Trump’s “inauguration fund.” And they all, as well as Google’s Sundar Pichai and Apple’s Tim Cook, are falling all over each other to dine with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, bend the knee, and grease the palm.

Big Tech billionaires think they just took over the country and turned it to the right. Harbinger Peter Thiel just told Piers Morgan on his YouTube show that “the ancien régime that is liberalism is really exhausted. The 1990s are over. The 20^th century is over. The 2020 election was not a return to normalcy, but it was, in retrospect, a last stand for the ancien régime with its very ancien president and I think that’s kind of what’s over.” And Thiel crowed that it was technologists like himself that have made this revolution happen, and indicated that liberalism could not survive in the age of the internet and social media.

The billionaires Trump has picked for his Cabinet are collectively worth at least $383 billion, which is more than the GDP of 172 separate countries. In comparison, Joe Biden’s Cabinet net worth totaled $118 million. This will be a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.

Trump invited Xi Jinping of China and Viktor Orbán of Hungary to his inauguration/coronation ceremony in Washington on January 20. Apparently, Putin and Kim Jong-Un were otherwise engaged.

It now looks like the few Republican Senators with vestiges of a backbone left are collapsing under pressure from MAGA, especially the threat of being primaried if they don’t approve Trump’s ridiculous nominees for top offices. It is the most blatant instance of “defining deviancy down” since Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase in 1993, based on Emile Durkheim’s theory that there is only so much heinous behavior a society can take before it capitulates and changes its very definition of deviancy and decency.

Once you’ve accepted Pete Hegseth’s savage misogyny and Kash Patel’s rank incompetence, it’s easier to condone Tulsi Gabbard’s embrace of bloodthirsty dictators and Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s actions in 2019 resulting in the deaths of 83 children from measles in Samoa.

All of the constraints and “guardrails” that were there in 2016 are now gone. There will be no “adults in the room” to stop Trump from following his worst impulses in the coming term. All of the Republican members of the House and Senate who might have argued with him before have now been cowed into abject submission. Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times posit that the only two things left that can really affect Trump’s actions now are the stock market and TV, or “bad press.”

When Donald J. Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with news cameras rolling, the moment perfectly captured two of the president-elect’s biggest obsessions: the stock market and television.

Mr. Trump’s fear of falling markets and bad imagery on TV may serve as more formidable checks on some of his more aggressive policies, like mass deportations and sweeping tariffs on trade with China, than any institutional restraints he may face in Washington.

. . .

More than a dozen people close to Mr. Trump say he sees the market as a barometer of his success and abhors the idea that his actions might drive down stock prices. And they say he is so obsessed with how he comes across on television that a barrage of negative coverage can make him hesitate, or even reverse course.¹

Otherwise, it’s billionaires and autocrats all the way down.