In the run-up to this second Trump term, there were a lot of predictions, assumptions, extrapolations, and truisms that turned out to be very wrong. One of the most significant (and arguably among the most defensible) was that the money men would somewhat insulate us from the most extravagantly destructive of Trump’s initiatives—in effect, that the wealthy club that holds most of the cards in Washington would never allow Trump to torpedo the sources of their power and the United States’ rarefied global political and financial primacy.
The story went something like this: Wall Street and the big importers and manufacturers would never let Trump follow through with his sophomoric tariff regime, which would only raise costs and damage global economic relationships. Surely, they would step in and guide the president away via misdirection or, if necessary, sheer capital might if he took steps to devalue the dollar and stunt trade.
The Gulf states and their many proxies throughout American politics and business would block potential sources of instability and insecurity in their region (such as, say, a sudden war with Iran that could throw oil exports into chaos and make them targets of Iranian hostilities). Agribusiness and construction would flex their considerable muscle to temper the most heavy-handed of Stephen Miller’s immigration efforts. Big Tech and Big Pharma would protect international talent pipelines and federal research funding, which had formed much of the backbone of their own growth and profits. The direst predictions of the Trump 2.0 era would not come to pass if only because the richer-than-ever interests behind the scenes would simply say “no.”
Undergirding this view were a set of assumptions, which each seemed reasonable enough: These oligarchic pseudo-cartels were increasingly powerful and had in recent memory managed to brute-force their way out of accountability and protect their interests, even at the height of public discontent, most notably in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash. The revolving door between government and industry meant that regulators were captured and agencies populated by past or future corporate personnel. And, while many of these actors are putatively in competition with one another, they could always set that aside and act in concert to protect their interests.
Above all, these interests valued some level of stability and predictability, in addition to their related goal of shaping policy to socialize risk and privatize profit. They had much to gain from Trump, the thinking went, in large part because they could achieve the latter without him blowing up the former.
Things didn’t exactly go according to plan.
If there is one shred of silver lining from Trump’s total rolling of business and civil society, particularly in the first year and a half of his second term, it’s the pretty conclusive falsification of the idea that Big Money was going to be the ultimate arbiter of what policy was possible in Washington. There have doubtlessly been rewards for those that have sucked up to the president and his political movement, in the way that regime-affiliated oligarchs always find some spoils in authoritarian governments. But as for the money men that were ostensibly going to fly in and curb Trump’s wanton destruction, they either meekly acquiesced early on, or they watched powerlessly as Trump tossed Molotov cocktails into the post-war economic order. As bad as the truth has been to witness, it’s good to shed ourselves of this myth.
The fact of the matter is that the so-called captains of industry have fully ascended into cloudcuckooland. The markets have kept riding high on the fabled promise of some AI renaissance (or AI domination, as some investors are certainly hoping for), but outside of that bubble, the dollar is volatile and down despite short-term rallies, longtime trading partners are restructuring their exports and imports away from an unreliable U.S., and our once gold-standard attraction of global talent and scientific discovery are smoldering.
If the Al evangelists are wrong about the mass adoption and labor replacement potential of their new god—and while indications have been all over the place, it is very hard to imagine that revenues can even reach immense spending on building out these technologies, particularly as public skepticism climbs—then not only will the market crash, we’ll feel the effects of underperformance in pretty much every other sector, from construction to manufacturing to the green energy industry that Trump’s cronies have attacked with particular gusto. The corporate kings have no clothes, and were certainly not able to operate as a unit to protect the systems that made them rich, even if their balance sheets are looking rosy for the moment.
If anything, they’ve been given to debasement, as comically demonstrated by the leaders of some of the nation’s largest corporations instantly switching over to the clunky descriptor of artificial intelligence as “super intelligence” just because Trump said so. The conventional retort is that these people will suck up to fascists but never play ball with a leftist government, but that’s loser talk. They might be more ideologically aligned with Trump’s authoritarian designs, but what these people respond to, ultimately, is power—power of the sort that Democrats have, in recent memory, been reticent to actually use when they win it.
Trump directly, materially impacted their business interests, with arson instead of feared regulation or taxes, but for the worse all the same. Despite all the mystique they’ve tried to build around their power and influence, they were utterly unable to stop him, not least because these are not particularly bright or tactical people. If and when Democrats win back the House and the Senate—which increasingly seems not only likely, but inevitable—and eventually regain the presidency, part of navigating the wreckage will be not forgetting how easily the money men can be buckled through the raw exercise of power, which despite their immense success over the last decades, these players have not actually monopolized, much as that’s what they want us to think.
When increasingly irate voters return power to ostensibly liberal political leaders, they will expect the latter to use it—and forcefully so. There can be no “we have to work in concert with the job creators”; none of this “we can’t stare down all of Wall Street.” Defeatism is a dead letter. A popular mandate around improving lives with social programs, a resurgence of antitrust, a reassertion of privacy rights, and a corporate sphere that exists under regulatory scrutiny instead of the other way around will require going head to head with the moneyed and entrenched interests that nonetheless folded like a cheap suit before a single, now wildly unpopular narcissist and his cabal of misfit toys. It can be done. It must be done.