The late President Jimmy Carter warned in 2017, during Trump’s first term, that the United States had become more of an oligarchy than a democracy.
On November 9, 2024, thousands gathered in New York for the “Protect Our Future” march, protesting the re-election of Republican Donald Trump as president.
(Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Media coverage of mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s increasingly tumultuous relationship with Donald Trump’s MAGA movement turned into a political soap opera as 2024 ended, with the debate over whether to grant some migrants H-1B visas for skilled workers. The situation became so heated that Musk vowed, “I’m going to war on this problem that you have no way of understanding,” while longtime Trump adviser Steve Bannon dismissed Musk as “small” and accused him of promotion agenda it was “about taking jobs in America and bringing in, essentially, those who had become indentured servants at lower wages.” Right-wing influencers accused Musk of censoring them on his and Britain’s X platform Telegraph reported that “President-elect Donald Trump’s supporters are teetering on the brink of a civil war over immigration.” When Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s wealthy associate at the Trump administration’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” called American workers mediocre, Fox News joined the fray, reporting: “Rich businessmen now face off against Trump’s hottest base.”
It’s a safe bet that this kind of bad insanity will escalate if Republican infighting becomes the dominant political story of 2025.
Trump won the presidential election narrow borderafter building a coalition that ran the gamut from xenophobes who resent immigrants to tech giants who are more than happy to increase their fortunes at the expense of exploiting workers of all backgrounds. Billionaires who support Trump paid for him during last year’s campaign, for which Musk, the richest man in the world, made himself largest donorand his spending in support of Trump reached approximately a quarter of a billion dollars. (And that’s not even counting Musk’s influence relentless Trump propaganda on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that it acquired when the company was just starting out.)
So it’s no surprise that Trump sided with Musk when the conflict erupted. Trump’s stance on the visa issue has been uncharacteristically smart. Downplaying his past criticism of the H-1B program, former Pres said“I was a supporter of H-1B. I have used it many times. Great program.”
The reality is that Trump believes in Musk. The president-elect bows to a mega-billionaire for the same reason Trump bows to other big money interests that seasoned his political efforts.
Despite playing a billionaire on TV, including Trump’s tumultuous financial results six bankruptcies for his hotel business and casino, often left him in economically vulnerable places. He has a long history of pandering to billionaire oligarchs, and during his first term he sought to give them massive tax cuts.
There is little doubt that Trump will try to do it again in his second term, further confirming former President Jimmy Carter’s observations nearly a decade ago about the damage done by billionaire-led governance. “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, where the essence of the presidential nomination or election is unlimited political bribery.” explained Carter in the summer of 2015, just weeks after Trump announced his first bid for the presidency.
“The same goes for US governors and senators and members of Congress. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to big contributors who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election is over… Incumbent Presidents, Democrats and Republicans, see this unlimited money as a huge boon to themselves. Someone who’s already in Congress can sell a lot more to an avid contributor than someone who’s just a challenger.”
During Trump’s first term, Carter said The United States has become more “an oligarchy than a democracy.”
Carter’s death on Sunday deprived the United States of one of the country’s most prominent critics of plutocratic politics. But there are others, including Bernie SandersUS Senator from Vermont, who in recent weeks stated: “We are at a pivotal and unprecedented moment in American history. Either we fight to create a government and economy that works for everyone, or we continue to move rapidly down the path of oligarchy and the rule of the super-rich.”
Another sharp critic of America’s oligarchic turn is Ro Hanna, US representative from California, who closed the 118th Congress with a powerful address to the House of Representatives in which he warned“There is an unholy alliance between heartless wealth and power that has robbed Americans of their freedom.”
The fact that 150 billionaires spent $1.9 billion to influence the outcome of the 2024 election shows that the influence of the ultra-rich is not only “corrupting the soul of our democracy.”
“Money,” said the congressman, “has become more important than votes.”
Illustrating his point, Hanna explained to his colleagues: “If you look at why politicians have sold our jobs overseas, why Wall Street has raided our manufacturers and gutted industry after industry to worship shareholder profits, then you have to look at the influence of billionaires . about our democracy”.
Making a patriotic call for sweeping campaign finance reforms, Khanna argued, “We did not fight a revolution to be spectators at the game of billionaires who put ads on our televisions and cell phones… Our founders would turn over in their graves if they saw what has become of modern American democracy.”
A representative who was elected to Congress in 2016 p a rare endorsement from CarterCarter’s disease often worsens messages in the last years of the former president’s life. Like Carter and Sanders, Hanna knows it’s time to overthrow the oligarchy and restore democracy. In an era where elections, and now governance, are defined by the chaotic power politics of Trump and Musk, the congressman urges to “ban PACs and lobbyist money, repeal Citizens Unitedand return power to the people.”
