Big money is complicit in the unravelling of American democracy

America’s plutocrats are quietly normalising the resurgence of a figure they once disavowed

America’s plutocrats are systemically complicit in the Trump restoration. Whether from ideological affinity, fear of retribution, or cynicism, big money is either passively or actively contributing to his attempts to subvert the anchor institutions of American democracy.
The US corporate world has either fallen silent or quietly “normalised” Donald Trump, as if the storming of Congress and the attempted coup d’état of Jan 6 had never happened.
The warnings of America’s top military officers can hardly be clearer. “A fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”, says General Mark Milley, ex-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
A proto-dictator willing to throw off all constraints, is the verdict of General John Kelly, Trump’s White House chief of staff. It seems to fall on deaf ears.
More than 100 major companies vowed to cut off campaign funding for the 147 Republican congressmen who voted to decertify the election result in 2020 or persisted in claiming that Joe Biden had stolen the election. This corporate pledge has been comprehensively ignored.
An analysis of campaign finance records by Accountable.US shows that Amazon, Intel, Pfizer, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, Goldman Sachs, Allstate, General Motors, Ford, Boeing, GE, ADM, AT&T, J&J, Tyson, Walmart and Home Depot, among others, have since funnelled money to election deniers after saying they would not do so.
ProPublica says the percentage that goes to deniers makes up 75pc of total political funding for Alcoa, 62pc for Cheniere Energy, 57pc for NRG Energy, 40pc for ADM and 38pc for American Electric. Most oil majors never made the pledge in the first place.
The result of letting off all these putschists with a slap across the wrist is a Congress today with a composition unlikely to certify a victory by Kamala Harris, should she win by anything less than a landslide, and therefore creates the pre-conditions for political civil war.
This insouciance is in striking contrast to what happened in Brazil two years ago. The Chamber of Commerce, the Federation of Banks, and the São Paulo Federation of Industries, all joined a national front of civil society to resist Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on the rule of law, even if it meant enduring the soak-the-rich taxes of a Lula government.
Where is the US Chamber of Commerce today? We hear not a whisper because most of its members want Trump to win. This is understandable on a policy level. The Biden plan for a 25pc tax on unrealised capital gains – belatedly dropped by Kamala Harris – borders on economic lunacy.
But it is hard to separate this from the parallel fact that top executives stand to make a windfall from stock options if Trump cuts corporation tax from 21pc to 15pc, leading mechanically to a surge in equity prices (ceteris paribus). Harris wants to raise the tax to 28pc. Goldman Sachs estimates that this would lead to a 5pc haircut for stocks.
The National Association of Manufacturers has fallen silent as well. Has it forgotten its thundering condemnation of the putschists on Jan 6 2020, when it called for Trump’s immediate removal from office under the 25th Amendment?
“Throughout this whole disgusting episode, Trump has been cheered on by members of his own party, adding fuel to the distrust that has inflamed violent anger. It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such,” it said.
Four years later the same body is quietly acquiescing as the same man stands again on the cusp of power, this time vowing to go even further: to stack the Justice Department with loyalists, to deploy the military to crush the “enemies within”, and to dismantle the checks and balances of American democracy from top to bottom.
Billionaire owners of two of the country’s great liberal newspapers have blocked editorials over the last week endorsing Kamala Harris. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the pharma tycoon, intervened at the Los Angeles Times, saying the publication should not aggravate political divisions. Three members of the editorial board have resigned.
“How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger – who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?” said Mariel Garza, head of editorials, in her resignation letter.
Much the same has happened at the Washington Post, the newspaper that brought down Richard Nixon for abuse of power over Watergate, a misdemeanour when set against insurrection. Staff accused Amazon’s Jeff Bezos of unconscionable meddling, calling it the “abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.
Mr Bezos is right to fear Trump. Amazon alleged in a lawsuit in 2019 that it had lost a $10bn (£7.7bn) cloud computing contract with the Pentagon as punishment for earlier quarrels. But if Mr Bezos has too many irons in the fire to risk a fight, he should not be the proprietor of the Washington Post.
Collaboration takes many colours. We dwell too much on the faux-ridiculous Elon Musk, who has swung from staunch Democrat and climate apostle to Trump’s cheerleader-in-chief in barely two years, donating $132m of his own money to the cause and actively working to muddy the Pennsylvania election.
We can speculate about motives. Tesla is worth a small fraction of its $850bn market cap if it fails to secure regulatory approval for level four autonomous driving, reducing it to just another car company in a crowded global field for electric vehicles. He depends on federal contracts for his SpaceX satellites. Or has he just gone bonkers?
Less attention is devoted to all the other plutocrats either full-square behind Trump or willing to cross the moral picket line to help him, whether Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, or Stephen Schwartzman, chief executive of Blackstone; Bill Ackman, boss of Pershing Square, or hedge fund king John Paulson.
And what are we to make of Microsoft’s Bill Gates or JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon “tiptoeing around Trump” in the words of Vanity Fair? Everybody is lying low.
It is in poor taste, and generally unwise, to bring up the interwar years in Germany or Italy, but there is a loose parallel of sorts. Hitler could not have risen to power without the backing of the German economic elites, a pact sealed by his speech to the Industry Club in Düsseldorf in January 1932.
A circle around steel magnate Fritz Thyssen persuaded president Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor a year later, mistakenly thinking that they could control him. Thyssen himself came to regret it. He ended up in Dachau.
You can understand how it happened in Germany, where banks had collapsed, unemployment had hit 30pc and Bolshevism loomed large. But nothing of the sort is going on in America today. The economy is the envy of the world. Unemployment is 4.1pc. The US remains the paramount energy, technological and military superpower. And Comrade Kamala is no Spartacist.
The Trump phenomenon is a sociological paradox and so is la trahison des riches that feeds it.
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