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Why America’s Oligarchs May Regret Their Obedience
Putin’s Russia shows what happens when billionaire businessmen choose to back a strongman
When tech billionaires and crypto moguls hailed Donald Trump’s reelection and flocked to his inauguration ceremony and ball, million-dollar donations in hand, some were abandoning previous liberal affiliations and all were now lining up behind an openly authoritarian president.
The surface rationale is that megabusiness leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Marc Andreessen are safeguarding their companies and their shareholders’ interests.
The underlying explanation is that America is being reborn as an oligarchy.
This new class—with Trump megadonor Elon Musk as its self-appointed tribune—has thrown its support behind a libertarian economic agenda that maximizes private power and minimizes public accountability.
Whether the billionaires’ alignment with Trump and Musk is merely pragmatic or sincerely ideological, they stand to gain from the new administration’s crash program of dismantling government and regulatory agencies.
For Trump, allying with such concentrated economic power helps him consolidate political control, at the expense of democracy. This fusion of money and power is nothing new. I saw something similar take shape in my native Russia. But three decades later, the Russian oligarchs’ bargain has ended up with only one true beneficiary: Vladimir Putin.
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I SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING
When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won
Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
George Orwell is a useful guide to what we’re witnessing. He understood that it is possible for people to seek power without having any vision of the good. “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake,” an apparatchik says in 1984.
“We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power.” How is power demonstrated? By making others suffer. Orwell’s character continues: “Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation.”
The mafia movie is one of America’s great contributions to world culture. People everywhere can hum the theme tune for The Godfather or repeat lines from Goodfellas or The Sopranos.
But it is still a surprise to see the mob’s methods imported into the Oval Office. There is a distinct whiff of Don Corleone in Donald Trump’s approach to trade and diplomacy.
Like a movie mob boss, Trump knows how to switch between menace and magnanimity. Treat him with respect and he might invite you to his house, where you can mingle with his family. But the menace never disappears. As Trump once explained to Bob Woodward, he
believes that “real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.”
