One of the more emblematic moments of any presidency happened late last week. In a follow-up to some of the richest men (and they’re all men) in America getting prime seating at Donald Trump’s inauguration, these titans returned to Washington to butter up the president some more at a dinner meeting. No fewer than 33 Silicon Valley executives and venture capitalists attended the dinner, 13 of them billionaires, all of them fawning over Trump to persuade him to continue to adopt their preferred policies.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg sat right at Trump’s side, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates was next to Melania. Zuckerberg fumbled when Trump asked directly how much he would invest in the U.S., throwing out $600 billion. He was later caught on a hot mic admitting that he made up the number.
But for all the humiliation of sucking up to an autocrat, it’s Big Tech and big business getting the last laugh from Trump. Maybe some corporate leaders are unnerved by tariffs, but they’re mostly getting exactly what they would from any Republican president: low taxes and deregulation. Trump is going out of his way to deliver, groveling before Big Money far more than Big Money is groveling before him.
Trump told everyone he was different, a right-wing populist who would stick it to the establishment. But the MAGA voters who supported Trump because they hoped their lives would get better are plainly getting sacrificed to the oligarchy. Will Trump’s Democratic opposition get more strategic about pointing out that reality and connecting the dots?
Policy shifts in favor of powerful industries and billionaires, at the expense of consumers, are less dramatic than invading cities or blowing up boats. They sometimes go by so fast that the media barely notices or calls attention to them. The fact that some of them are technical and arcane adds to the obfuscation.
One that is pretty clear is the Department of Transportation’s withdrawal of a Biden-era rule requiring airlines to meaningfully compensate passengers between $200 and $775 for canceled or seriously delayed flights, rather than just giving them meager meal vouchers or transfers to other flights. Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, a former lobbyist for the airline industry (of course), canceled the rule last week.
The rule was belatedly issued by Biden’s transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, in May 2023 with an extended comment period, after prolonged publicity and pressure by consumer groups. It never actually took effect. The rule was narrowly drawn so that airlines were required to give cash compensation only if the cause of the extended delay was something they should have been able to anticipate and prevent, such as short-staffing crews. The idea was to create an incentive for them not to make false promises at the expense of passengers.
Now even that very modest consumer protection, which has been standard in Europe for 20 years, is gone. This, of course, has nothing whatever to do with Making America Great Again. It’s conventional corporate right-wing Republican stuff: a pure gift for industry at the expense of passengers, red and blue alike.
Here are a few more examples of Trump making the American oligarchy even greater, which you may have missed. Trump’s tax cuts will benefit mainly billionaires, but apparently that’s not sufficient. Trump also wants to reduce the inconvenience of audits that occasionally catch the very rich trying to illegally reduce the tax that they owe.
House GOP appropriators last week proposed slashing the IRS budget by $2.8 billion, an even deeper cut in tax compliance staffing than the Office of Management and Budget requested. In a case of perfect symmetry, helping the rich while hurting everyone else, the measure would also block funding for the IRS to provide free, public online tax filing, another Biden-era initiative. This is a gift to tax preparation companies, and an added cost to taxpayers.
And last week, the Federal Trade Commission effectively killed one of the Biden administration’s best policies to help workers defend their incomes—a ban on noncompete clauses. See this piece by our colleague David Dayen for details.
The administration also continues to use trade policy, and not just tariffs, to harm consumers by punishing pro-competitive regulation used by other countries. Last Friday, the European Commission held that Google had abused its market dominance by giving its own ad exchanges a competitive advantage. The Commission fined Google nearly three billion euros, and said Google must end these abuses.
“When markets fail, public institutions must act to prevent dominant players from abusing their power,” European Union antitrust commissioner Teresa Ribera said in a statement. Trump immediately threatened to punish the Europeans with higher tariffs.
Nationally, Trump tried to keep the focus on the supposed hellholes of cities governed by Democrats and his war on DEI. His opposition needs to point out the real economic beating that Trump is inflicting on ordinary people and his favoritism for powerful industries and billionaires.