We live in an age of monsters: Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the Ellison family, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, the sundry billionaires who don’t own apps. This may sound like a caustic and dramatic comment coming from me. Some of them are genuine monsters: Musk, Trump, probably Thiel. In other cases, like with Zuckerberg, they are probably more or less normal and might even be okay to have lunch with. But functionally, in the role they play and power they wield in our society, they are monsters. And the function of the Trump era has been to wind them all together into a single formation, first by allurement and then by force.
This realization first started to dawn on me in the years after Citizens United, the court decision that essentially ended meaningful campaign finance law in the United States. It came in the first reactions to Citizens United or more specifically the spending it made possible. Billionaires and centi-millionaires started gaining publicity and critical reactions to the scale of their spending and the impact it had on elections. Political giving at scale by the extremely wealthy wasn’t new. It had just taken a half-century hiatus. Perhaps the difference was the internet. Whatever it was, the years after 2010 spawned the idea that the very wealthy and the extremely powerful needed to be afforded more protections, more privacy for their giving then ordinary people who might donate $50 or even $5,000 up near the candidate donation limit.
The rationale was simultaneously perverse and compelling: their very power made them more vulnerable. The ability to give so much money and the power behind it made people mad. It might be mad or interested in who they were or questioning why they got to stand up new candidates at a whim. This was true. The Koch Brothers became household names, punch lines or targets of attacks by Democratic activists and candidates. Needless to say this was and is a ratchet-like logic. The more political power they got, the more rights they needed because they were so different from everyone else.
Everything we see today is in a sense the playing out of that moment. In a way we can see this as a form of the putative rationale for draconian limits on speech after the murder of Charlie Kirk. The more extreme Donald Trump’s actions become the greater need there is to limit what people can say about him … because “fascist” and “dictator” are in fact very inflammatory words. And total control by Donald Trump probably requires total control over criticism or jokes. It just follows.
More concretely, we see it in the existence of early 21st century billionaires themselves. They act now like latter-day dukes or earls, several hundred individuals, from the lower rungs to the top of the peerage who hover somewhere between necessary and sufficient conditions of exercising political power.
I mentioned yesterday that Nexstar was the real driver of the Jimmy Kimmel story. FCC Chair Brendan Carr made his demand. Nexstar needs Carr’s help with their merger. So they cut off Kimmel and then ABC did too. But Nexstar’s founder and CEO Perry Sook was already on board. He told shareholders he wanted to get down to business working with Trump on industry consolidation as soon as Trump was elected.
I’ve mentioned a number of times recently that societal elites and big corporations have shown themselves very soft touches for Trump. Most give way rapidly. It’s ordinary people and organizations much lower on the hierarchy of power where resistance is located.
One way of looking at that is that elites are simply much more vulnerable. As I’ve noted, every big corporation needs some help with an acquisition or merger. No big law firm, certainly in commercial and M&A law, can afford to be blackballed by the government. The federal government can make life hell for any average individual; in fact, any big MAGA influencer with a couple million followers can do that. But it can’t do it to all of them at once.
Others say that gets it wrong. They don’t need to be pressured or extorted. They like what Trump is doing. They want to be part of it.
But that’s too binary a view. The truth is that the big and powerful can be both brutalized and rewarded beyond any imaginings by a rogue president. On that Sook investor call I mentioned above it was all illustrated quite clearly. Sook said that industry consolidation in the television station business was what was necessary and Trump was willing to toss out the rule book to let the big swallow everyone else. Put a little differently, Sook had built the biggest holding company of television stations in the country. These behemoths are like sharks. They need to keep moving and eating or they die. Trump and his appointees were ready to make that possible. Only one thing was necessary. Complete support for Donald Trump.
As I said, inducements or punishments isn’t the question. It’s both. It’s one stop shopping and the same key opens every door. Unlimited political spending and corporate gigantism have all led us to this moment. Donald Trump knew how to pick the lock.