The billionaires who have been spotted in President Donald Trump’s orbit since he won the presidency a second time last November are not just spies for his regime, contrary to all other theories.
Ann Telnaes, a former political cartoonist for the Washington Post, ought to be aware. Telnaes resigned from her position last month after her editor turned down the publication of her most recent cartoon. In it, Telnaes drew Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI billionaire Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Mickey Mouse (representing media giant Disney/American Broadcasting Company) either kneeling or bowing face down in front of a statue of the president.
Telnaes stated in her explanation of her decision to leave the Post that “trying to get into an autocrat-in-waiting will only lead to undermining that free press.” The attempts of billionaires and megacorporations to win over Trump have them acting like yes-men, according to Telnaes and other critics.
It is true that a wannabe dictator may appear to be caving in to billionaires and trillion-dollar companies when Trump is paid. However, that is all that seems to be happening. Zuckerberg’s recent call with shareholders is a case in point. Zuckerberg thanked Trump for backing businesses like Meta by revealing his positive news about market share gains and higher-than-expected profits at the end of 2024. I’m optimistic about the advancement and innovation that this can bring, according to Zuckerberg, who is proud of our leading companies and puts American technology at the forefront of future development.
Trump serves as a means of achieving these goals, with the wealthy and large corporations pursuing their bottom lines. As for the federal government’s purse, if it requires a bent knee or effusive praise to nudge more market share or control, so be it.
Looking at the billionaire class’ relationship with Trump over the past year will show that the billionaire class is actually using Trump to reset the priorities of the federal government. Take the hundreds of millions multi-billionaires like Elon Musk, Miriam Adelson, and Linda McMahon poured into Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. During the post-election transition, Musk, Altman, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Apple’s Tim Cook, along with trillion-dollar corporations like Amazon, Meta, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs, also contributed millions of dollars to Trump’s $150m inauguration fund. Trump sued Disney-ABC for $15 million in a defamation lawsuit, while Meta settled for $25 million after the insurrection on January 6 in 2021.
With such enormous sums of money involved, at the very least, the billionaire set has been paying Trump to land leading roles in his administration. Of course, there are other likely causes for their behavior, such as greater business monopoly and greater influence over the president as he formulates national and international economic and social policies. These corporations and capitalists aren’t giving Trump this money out of deference, whatever the reason is.
Since Trump’s actions since taking office on January 20th, another way to see how the billionaire class has been using him would be through his actions. One needs only look at Trump’s flurry of executive orders and memos, which authorize a number of executive branch branches to take new, presumably business-friendly orders. Since taking office, Trump has signed and put into effect dozens of executive orders. To be sure, some of these orders have their roots in Project 2025 or are primarily Islamophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic, anti-Black, and transphobic in nature.
This includes executive orders like Protecting the American People from Invasion, Protecting Women from Gender Ideology Extremism, and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government. However, some of Trump’s orders involve profits for megacorporations and one-percenter corporations, as well as increased deregulation and less federal oversight of business issues. These kinds of orders include Declaring a National Energy Emergency, Establishing and Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, and Unleashing American Energy. Trump’s orders also included allowing businesspeople like Musk and Ramaswamy to impose their own corporate governance and halting efforts to combat climate change.
The most extensive and harmful of Trump’s edicts have been those imposed by his administration, which have ordered the government to halt its operations. With the Department of Health and Human Services, for example, the Trump administration directed its various agencies to pause all their communication updates, public presentations, research studies, and related travel. In particular, agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institutes for Health halted their work. Trump may be able to recoup this by showing up during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 in some ways. One can only reason to assume that private industry, especially pharmaceutical corporations, would ultimately benefit from less competition from federal agencies developing cutting-edge cancer treatments or preventing the onset of a new pandemic.
A full day of outrage over a Trump administration memo to the Office of Management and Budget that unlawfully paused all federal grants and loans erupted. The memo’s line read, “The use of Federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not improve the day-to-day lives of those we serve.” Trump used this as justification to try to stop federal spending that had already been approved, potentially in the hundreds of billions.
This rule would have applied to everything, including federally subventioned student loans and food aid appropriations for WIC, SNAP, and school lunch programs. Only the National Council of Nonprofits and Democracy Forward collaborated to file a motion in federal district court that has stalled Trump’s plan’s implementation. The main motivation for making this decision would be to find the $500 billion needed for Trump’s Stargate Initiative, a project that Musk himself mocked on X, formerly Twitter, by saying that “they don’t actually have the money.” This may be a reason why Musk and his associates were directly involved in the development of payment systems for Social Security and Medicare, as well as for sensitive government databases with Social Security numbers and pay grades.
In Hiding in Plain Sight, author and journalist Sarah Kendzior described Trump’s first term as “the Trump administration is very competent in achieving its main goal: stripping America down for parts and selling those parts to the highest bidder. The majority of the time, it is not accurate to say that the billionaire elite and the large corporations they represent are bending their knees to show deference to Trump or kiss his ring in imitation of a king or mafia boss. They are making an effort to conceal their increasingly revealing influence on the US government’s power and purse.
With Trump now in power, they can advance closer to their ultimate goal, which is a capitalist system that is obstructed by the influence of democratic institutions and government regulation, and which the American people are too confused and worn out to stop. The narcissistic robber baron elite is currently working to turn Trump and the US government into their puppets, rather than the other way around.
Source: Aljazeera
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