Evan Vucci/AP Photo
White House chief of staff Jeffrey Zients attends an event in the Rose Garden of the White House, May 25, 2023, in Washington.
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Donald Trump held court before America’s wealthiest CEOs last Thursday at a meeting of the Business Roundtable, a powerful D.C. lobbying group. Trump supposedly floated eliminating federal income taxes and replacing the revenue with tariffs, an awful idea that would make the rich much richer, the poor much poorer, and maybe even delegitimize the dollar. To CEOs who have been outsourcing production for 40 years, super-high taxes on imports probably didn’t sound so great either.
Back in 2021, the Business Roundtable denounced the January 6th insurrection. Today, many of its members have already endorsed Trump’s campaign. As the Prospect’s David Dayen wrote on Friday, concentrated wealth is unifying behind one candidate, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley to the oil patch. The forces of capital are falling in line behind America’s homegrown fascist, who has only grown more unhinged, violent, and grievance-fueled since he descended that damn escalator nearly a decade ago.
President Biden has been ramping up high-dollar fundraisers of his own, of course, but so far these have mostly been with celebrities and media figures, many of whom were on strike last year. These people are rich, but they’re not oligarchic.
According to OpenSecrets, 69 percent of Trump’s campaign cash comes from large donors. Republicans have received a staggering $508 million in direct campaign contributions and super PAC or party committee giving from the 100 families that have donated the most wealth in this campaign cycle, three times the $169 million these families have given to Democrats.
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In policy terms, big business is certain that Trump will slash their taxes even lower, deregulate their industries even further, attack unions even more harshly, and so on. Trump even described his demand of a $1 billion tithe from Big Oil as a “deal” for the destruction of U.S. environmental protections. The man does make the subtext text.
Clearly, the billionaire class isn’t so put off by Trump’s social politics that they won’t do everything they can to make him the most powerful man on Earth; in fact, some of them positively love the bigotry. In my book, finding white supremacy uncouth, but not disqualifying, does not redeem anyone. The proper term for “fascism apologist” is “fascist.”
JOE BIDEN MIGHT SEE THIS AS AN ELECTORAL OPPORTUNITY, especially given that his personal hero was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR’s first re-election in 1936 was supposed to be a nail-biter, but turned into a landslide. Why? Millions of working-class Americans who’d never voted before turned out for Roosevelt, because he welcomed the hatred of the ultra-wealthy “economic royalists.” In the words of an unnamed 1936 factory worker, quoted in Michael Kazin’s history of the Democratic Party, “Mr. Roosevelt is the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.”
Would workers say the same of Joe Biden today? If not, why?
Recall the Business Roundtable confab with Trump last Thursday. Less remarked upon—and more telling of why a second Trump term is so terrifyingly probable—was that he was only one of the speakers. Representing the other side, and attending in Biden’s place while he was at the G7, was current White House chief of staff Jeff Zients.
If Trump’s talent is saying out loud what the rich are thinking, Zients’s talent is saying out loud what the rich want to hear. As I’ve written for the Prospect before, Zients became a billionaire through management consulting, essentially being paid to give businessmen permission to be cruel. He then became the Obama White House’s go-between for corporate America, once telling a group of CEOs, “You are the customers” of Obama’s economic policy. Zients spent the Trump years investing in surprise medical billing firms, then became Biden’s first COVID-19 czar in 2021. He failed miserably; that winter, Zients left Americans short on masks, tests, and treatments—all of which the administration could have produced domestically via the Defense Production Act—after ignoring months of pleas by epidemiologists to stockpile early.
For a man whose campaign slogan is “finish the job,” Biden rarely seems to articulate what exactly the job that needs finishing is.
Biden rewarded Zients’s poor performance by making him White House chief of staff. Zients’s predecessor, Ronald Klain, was pragmatic enough to maintain close ties with the Democrats’ progressive wing. As a result, Klain steered Congress toward passing historic investments in clean energy and infrastructure and reductions in health costs, paid for by tax hikes on wealthy corporations. Plus, he empowered progressive personnel at the regulatory agencies to crack down on exploitative fees and corporate power.
The very last speech Klain presided over was one of the most populist State of the Union addresses in U.S. history. Letting Zients fail upward into the number two role in the White House sent a message to corporate America that the days of tough talk like that were over.
It would be wildly unfair to blame Zients for all, or even most, of the disappointments of the last two years. Republicans winning the House of Representatives in 2022 effectively foreclosed any positive legislation. Ukraine and Gaza rightly drew the public’s attention to the international stage. The conservative media echo chamber remains a millstone around Democrats’ necks for which the party still doesn’t have a clear plan. And the Senate map of 2024 is … challenging.
But if anything, being locked out of legislative power should make it even more important for Biden to be crystal clear about his domestic ambitions. Take the PRO Act, the legislation that would expand union power: It isn’t just good policy, it’s ridiculously good politics. Raising taxes on the rich is even more popular across party lines. If Biden still wants to remobilize the working class into the Democratic Party, as Roosevelt did, this is where to start.
He and his party should be talking up the PRO Act on the campaign trail, right now, as a potentially transformative leg up for labor. “This law will improve your life and piss off your boss, and we alone will pass it if you vote for us.” Particularly given the public’s chilly response to “Bidenomics,” the president ought to try to address the underlying problems with his economic policy—reaching full employment is a key first step, but you then need to use the leverage it provides to actually change the terms of working life in America.
Yet Biden’s campaign website doesn’t even have a policy section. You hear nothing about the bills Democrats have in the tank. You don’t even hear about a plan to take Congress back in the first place.
What issues Biden does engage on, he frames in exclusively negative terms: his ads on abortion, for example, feature rightful condemnation of Trump, but no actual promises to restore Roe v. Wade, much less make bodily autonomy a basic legal right in this country. He assures viewers that he will protect what’s left of the right to choose (which is now a state-level issue in practice, so the White House can’t do much anyway), but not that he will try to restore or expand anyone’s rights through new national legislation or constitutional amendments.
I follow politics more closely than most people. As far as I can tell, the campaign’s only clear promise is to stave off Trumpism for a few more years. For a man whose campaign slogan is “finish the job,” Biden rarely seems to articulate what exactly the job that needs finishing is.
NOW, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS HAD SOME GENUINE, even populist, successes in the Zients era. But these have mostly come from independent agencies and their directors, like Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission, or Jennifer Abruzzo at the National Labor Relations Board. Biden nominated all of them, so he can take some credit for their achievements. But they do lead independent agencies—Chopra, Khan, and Abruzzo do not take orders from the White House. If Zients had disapproved of their antagonizing Wall Street and Big Tech ahead of an election, he could not have stopped them.
Moreover, Biden has done little to tout these accomplishments from his team. His communications officials routinely balk at even talking about actions against big business. If this was meant to show corporate America that Biden isn’t as scary as The Wall Street Journal editorial board makes him out to be, clearly it hasn’t worked. It never could. It is abundantly clear to the world that Joe Biden is a capitalist — it’s in all of his speeches, it’s why moderates united behind him in the 2020 primary, it’s something anyone with a passing knowledge of his 50 years in national politics could tell you. The C-suites are fully aware that Joe Biden is not a socialist bent on their destruction. They don’t care.
If Zients actually did unite the formidable power of industry behind Biden instead of Trump, or at least keep big money evenly distributed in the race, I’d have to grudgingly admit that it was effective. As Lyndon Johnson once said, “there’s nothing more useless than a dead liberal.” But that has not happened. Just as they have for 50 years, the captains of industry are mostly lining up behind the Republican. Whatever his ideology, clearly Biden does think the business world should have at least some set of checks on its power sometimes. That is enough for the billionaire class to prefer the fascist.
Given all of this, what’s the point of continuing to wear kid gloves on the campaign trail? Biden has shut his trap about the most exciting parts of his domestic agenda for two years in hopes of keeping capital from backing Trump, and he’s gotten practically nothing for it. This has left Biden with an electoral strategy of meekly hoping the opposition implodes.
Biden has a lot to offer the American people in 2024. He just has to tell them. The people who will be angry about this are already aligned against him, and aligned against the vast majority of this country’s population in terms of both basic social tolerance and economic equity. Triangulation, centrism, and corporate coddling have not delivered the promised goods. It’s time to change strategy.
