A huge victory for America’s oligarchy

Trump’s win has handed US democracy to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and a cast of plutocrats and vested interests. Britain is not immune.

Well, now we know. Donald Trump will be the 47th president of the United States. The shady $140 million fund that Republican donors had set up for “election integrity” won’t be needed. The Democrats have lost, and will concede defeat.

When Trump won the presidency eight years ago I was in New York covering the election. This time around, I watched his victory speech from my living room. But even from thousands of miles away something about Trump’s rambling speech hit me. Hard.

Forget the digressions and the wild promises. (Forget, if you can, that he was briefly joined onstage by the boss of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.) Trump’s speech was shocking because it told us who is in complete control of US democracy now - oligarchs, plutocrats and vested interests.

American democracy has always been for sale. Public office sold to the highest bidder. Political lobbyists paid millions to water down legislation.

Take the opioid epidemic that did so much to propel Trump to the White House in 2016. It was largely created by a single company. Purdue Pharma was allowed to mass market a highly addictive drug after it handed huge paychecks to regulators and politicians such as Trump’s bestie Rudy Giuliani.

The corporate influence on US politics has always been there, but often unspoken. This morning Trump said the quiet part loud.

Trump was at pains to single out Elon Musk as a “super genius” who needs to be protected. And how might Musk - who gave $75million to a Trump Super pac and has been blatantly flouting US election law on the Republicans’ behalf - be protected?

Well, given Tesla’s declining market share, a huge tariff on Chinese electric vehicles will definitely bolster the richest man in the world’s bottom line. As will scrapping any pesky regulatory proposals that might stem the flow of disinformation on Musk’s X/Twitter.

But Trump did not just namecheck Musk. In a bizarre segment, Trump said that anti-vax activist Robert J Kennedy Junior was going to “help make America healthy again” but warned him to “leave the oil to me”.

“Bobby,” Trump said, “stay away from the liquid gold. Other than that, go have a good time, Bobby.”

So who will be in charge of the “liquid oil”? The oil bosses who Trump promised to increase drilling and reverse pollution rules in exchange for $1billion in campaign contributions at a dinner in Mar-a-Lago earlier this year.

The billion dollars never materialised but the oil and gas industry did give more than $75million to Trump PACs recently.

Trump’s victory is a big win for Vladimir Putin (and Viktor Orban) but is a gamechanger for America’s emergent oligarch class. The president elect has pledged to rip up the state, liberating public assets and resources for the new private sector masters of the universe.

Jeff Bezos understood this when he pulled a Harris endorsement from his Washington Post. Forget “democracy dies in darkness”, this is “my personal wealth flourishes through silence”. The LA Times’s proprietor pulled the same trick.

The power of traditional media in the US to inform debate - to call out what’s actually going on - is effectively dead. The ‘low propensity’ voters that flocked to Trump don’t read traditional media, they get their news on X, TikTok, Insta and the plethora of other options.

This isn’t just a US problem - and the issue of how to give people verified, trustworthy news in a format they want is something we have been thinking about a lot at Democracy for Sale - but the collision between the information age and democracy is most cataclysmic across the Atlantic.  

Trump will be a boon for vested interests. British American Tobacco - which as we reported earlier this week gave $17.2million to the Republicans - will be cock a hoop. As will Peter Thiel, the democracy agnostic tech billionaire, and the Silicon Valley tech bros who have bankrolled the political career of vice president elect JD Vance.

This is who the Trump that appeared on stage this morning will represent. People who are unashamed in their commitment to ripping up rights and turning public goods into private assets.

While I was doom scrolling on my phone in the early hours of this morning, I came across a couple of news stories - both from Ohio - that I expect will mostly be missed in the fulminations of today.

One was the victory of Ohio senate candidate and crypto cheerleader Bernie Moreno. The crypto industry’s Defend American Jobs Pac spent more than $40million backing the Republican. And guess who the chair of the Senate Banking Committee is? Yep, Ohio’s defeated sitting Democrat Sherrod Brown. (And who else is a recent convert to crypto? Donald J. Trump.)

The other story from Ohio that caught my eye was a proposal on the ballot that would have ended gerrymandering by creating an independent redistricting commission. A no brainer, surely? Well, no. Doubtlessly helped by “incredibly deceptive ballot language”, the measure failed. Politicians - Republicans - will stay in charge of carving up Ohio’s electoral boundaries.

This, folks, is how democracy dies. Amid a swell of dark money and disinformation. With elected leaders paying fealty to the oligarchs who delivered them into office.

It couldn’t happen here, right? Increasingly, I’m not so sure. As our recent story showed, some of Trump’s biggest donors have also been bankrolling the secretive Tufton Street network of think tanks that delivered Liz Truss to power.

This morning I’ve found myself think a lot about what Spotlight on Corruption’s Sue Hawley said after that last investigation: “Unless the new UK government gets serious about closing the loopholes in our electoral laws and looking at caps on donations, these same interests will be pumping money back into the UK to influence who the next UK government should be in no short order.”  

We have to act now. Before it really is too late.