David Goldman/AP Photo
Arif Armanjisan watches an advertisement for Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump at his campaign office the night before the general election, November 4, 2024, in Hamtramck, Michigan.
Every presidential election going back to 1992 has been more expensive than the last. But as political scientist Seth Masket pointed out years ago, measured as a share of the economy, the 1896 election was much, much more expensive than any race in the 1990s, 2000s, or 2010s. Back in 1896, the presidential campaigns together spent about 0.06 percent of that year’s GDP, which comes to about $17.6 billion today.
But the 1896 record has now fallen. It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison to 19th-century political spending, because back in those days there were essentially no limits of any kind, and most spending went directly through campaigns. Today, we have also very few limits thanks to the Citizens United decision, but there are some rules for formal campaigns, and so spending has migrated to super PACs and other outside groups. The Harris and Trump campaigns raised about $1.6 billion, but more than $10 billion was spent on ads alone across the nation, and it will take some time to sort out how much of that should be viewed as presidential campaign spending or on state and local races.
But we don’t need precise figures to know the old record is toast. It is now clear that a principal goal of Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter was to turn it into a firehose of right-wing propaganda—essentially, an in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That purchase alone is roughly two and a half times the share of GDP reached in 1896.
It is pretty clear to anyone who logs on to Twitter these days that the algorithm is force-feeding you Trump propaganda. My “for you” page has been consistently filled with conservative garbage from accounts I don’t follow, Trump campaign messaging, and of course lots of Elon Musk posts. A formal study recently confirmed this. The Queensland University of Technology recently published a paper by Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic which found that immediately after endorsing Trump, Musk’s account saw a major increase in engagement, as well as a smaller increase for a sampling of other right-wing accounts. Left-wing accounts saw no such increase.
The argument that the Twitter purchase was specifically political spending is strengthened by the fact that Musk’s changes are clearly destroying the platform. His encouragement of extreme right-wing content, and in particular posting bigoted things himself, has driven away most of the advertisers that provided 90 percent of the company’s prior revenue. (Although some craven advertisers are coming back to X, presumably to curry favor with the new governmental regime.) So far this year, it hasn’t been making enough money to cover the interest payment on the loan Musk secured to buy it, let alone labor and overhead expenses. Twitter’s userbase, traffic, and rankings in app stores on Apple and Android are plummeting. Upstart competitor Bluesky, meanwhile, is growing exponentially, and might even displace Twitter as the de facto place for discussion of politics, journalism, and sports online.
It is pretty clear to anyone who logs on to Twitter these days that the algorithm is force-feeding you Trump propaganda.
If Musk were just making a business decision, he would not have obliterated Twitter’s business model and driven away its users by the millions. But if he bought it to blast right-wing propaganda to the largest possible audience, his actions make sense. And it clearly worked, even as the megaphone he spent the GDP of Moldova to acquire fell to pieces in his hands.
It’s an interesting question why ultra-billionaires like Musk were willing to spend so much money to elect Trump. It’s not like Musk was doing badly under the Biden administration—after all, if Biden had carried out the kind of blistering soak-the-rich taxation that FDR did in the 1930s, Musk wouldn’t have had the billions to buy Twitter in the first place.
The 1896 election makes for an instructive comparison. Essentially, it was an oligarch conspiracy against the public. The Gilded Age economy was a maelstrom of corruption and looting, as various robber barons rolled up monopoly control over whole sections of the economy, in particular collecting tremendous state subsidies to build out often nonsensical and dangerous railroad lines. If workers tried to fight back with strikes or sabotage, they got the business end of private security forces, state militias, or the Army.
The Democratic nominee that year was the young William Jennings Bryan, who bested conservative factions in his party to run on a platform of agrarian populism and “free silver,” which meant expanding the money supply. The Panic of 1893 had led to a deep recession, and Bryan argued in his famous “cross of gold” speech that injecting more money into the economy would help workers and farmers. The robber barons viewed the prospect of inflation—which might erode the value of their wealth—or any worker or farmer influence whatsoever over government policy as intolerable.
The Republican Party nominated William McKinley, a gold-standard conservative backed by big business, and spent stupendous sums to stop Bryan. And it worked, as Bryan lost by five points. (Ironically, around this time a gigantic gold deposit was discovered in South Africa, which eventually produced about 40 percent of all the gold ever mined in history, and hence generated the same kind of currency expansion Bryan was proposing.)
This election was not remotely the stark choice of 1896. Again, the stock market is booming under Biden, and Harris is not proposing to put the top marginal tax rate up to 94 percent as it was in the 1940s. But Biden did carry out some regulations that oligarchs found highly annoying, and did not pander to them as much as they would have liked. Reportedly, a major motivation for Musk going full Trump was that Biden excluded him from a largely meaningless electric-vehicle summit, because of his union-busting record.
I conclude that this is just what happens when a society allows its wealthiest members to accumulate nation-state-sized pots of resources. They go mad with power and the isolation of wealth—often developing extreme sensitivity to criticism, as they typically surround themselves with yes-men and toadies—and they react with howling outrage at the slightest threat to their power. Then with so much wealth, they can buy up a central artery of the global communication system and turn it into the Völkischer Beobachter.
If Democrats ever manage to hold power again, confiscatory taxation on the ultra-rich should be viewed as a national-security priority. As FDR said in 1936: The rich “had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob.” If anything, it’s more true today than it was then.
