Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“Every morning,” the billionaire Marc Andreessen smiled a few weeks after Donald Trump’s re-election this past November, “I wake up happier than the day before.”
The stoked Andreessen, with Trump’s re-entry into the White House only days away, must by now be sitting in seventh heaven. He no doubt has plenty of deep-pocket company. We’ve never before had an incoming president as openly committed to stocking his administration with the already super rich.
Trump is entering his second term, as the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson put it, “fixated on helping the wealthiest Americans.”
And who knows better how to do that helping than those wealthiest themselves? In Trump’s second term, these wealthy will be more directly running the government of the United States than they have in any other presidency. The Trump transition team — co-chaired by the billionaire Wall Street financier Howard Lutnick — is filling Trump II’s top slots with more holders of grand fortune than any previous administration ever dared.
Lutnick himself has ended up as the Trump pick for Commerce secretary. Lutnick will be sitting through meetings in a West Wing Cabinet Room overflowing with his fellow ultra-rich. He’ll also be running a department neatly positioned to advance his cryptocurrency and other business interests.
The Trump pick for Treasury secretary, the billionaire hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, complements Lutnick nicely. Bessent sees cryptocurrencies as “integral to economic freedom” and may soon be moving to invest our tax dollars in speculative crypto schemes that enrich the richest among us.
For Department of Energy secretary, Trump has selected the CEO of the Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy, Chris Wright, a drill-baby-drill character who last year claimed “there is no climate crisis.” The billionaire oilman Harold Hamm, Trump’s go-to energy adviser, is getting the credit for putting Wright on Trump’s radar screen.
Trump’s pick for Education secretary, the billionaire Linda McMahon, once claimed she has a bachelor’s degree in education. She doesn’t. McMahon does, on the other hand, have more than a passing acquaintance with civics. She spent nearly $100 million from her own fortune on two self-funded and unsuccessful races to become a U.S. senator from Connecticut.
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