Wayne O'Leary

A number of commentators have remarked recently on the symbolic expression of Trumpian corruption and ostentation, Washington’s new social club for upscale MAGAs, located in nearby Georgetown; it’s called the Executive Branch, and it’s owned by Donald Trump Jr. among others. Access is by membership only, with a modest entry fee totaling a mere $500,000. Call it Mar-a-Lago North.

If you can’t afford to belong, don’t feel bad. Most Americans can’t afford to ante up for much of anything in the nation’s capital these days. The town belongs to the billionaire class and their retainers — or political bosses, as the case may be — and the Executive Branch is where they will henceforth meet, rub shoulders with others of their sort, and plot novel ways to further line their pockets.

I recall time spent in a different Georgetown as a young Smithsonian intern at the tail end of the Kennedy-Johnson years, strolling quiet, tree-lined streets leading from my digs near Dupont Circle past understated, brick-faced colonial homes to a tasteful downtown of small shops, theaters and restaurants.

Tasteful and understated is obviously not the Trump style, as jarring videos of the Donald’s Oval Office with its garish, gold-plated décor, illustrate. The rest of the White House, the people’s house, is apparently in for worse: a gaudy, supersized ballroom for extravagant dance parties, an absurdly attention-getting skyscraper flagpole, and a paved-over rose garden for the grounds.

Capital observer Sally Quinn, former wife of the late JFK confidante and Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, summarized the prevailing vibe not long ago in a New York Times op-ed; it was, she wrote, redolent of Palm Beach or L.A., exuding flash, flaunted wealth, arrogant presumption, and a sense of superiority and dominance.  Oligarchy is in the saddle, and the oligarchs know it.

It’s a strange combination: Fascistic apparatchiks resembling a mafioso peddling conspiratorial extremism, fear and vengefulness are paired with nouveau riche entrepreneurial billionaires willing to happily accommodate the extremist politicos to ensure the success of their personal, wealth-generating vision of a starwars economic future built on monetized technology. Put it all under the command of a godfather figure who is at once chief executive and chief oligarch, as well as chief enforcer, and you have what some have called a gangster government.

The reigning style of Trump world, the repellent opulence featuring multiple mansions, million-dollar yachts, personal jets and lavish lifestyles — one partaker, Jeff Bezos, the centibillionaire owner of Amazon, delusionally credits it to two pillars, “personal liberties and free markets” — is really being paid for by the rest of us. Trump world, style and substance, is the ultimate manifestation of a near half-century of American economic and societal degeneration, an evolving process of decay and debasement that’s reached its apogee in the mid-2020s.

The descent can be said to have begun in the 1980s, when the excesses hailed as freedom by Trump sycophant Bezos were delivered in large helpings to the upper orders under the smiling visage of Ronald Reagan. It was classic American laissez-faire capitalism in application; that is, deregulate and privatize, eliminate high-end taxation, and allow the market’s “invisible hand” to work its will free of government overslght. Assume the rewards will trickle down to the benefit of all. In practice, they never do; the signature characteristic of the system in its mature phase is overwhelming economic concentration and stark class disparities.

The system’s inequities are most dramatically displayed by our billionaire class, those appropriately named oligarchs, who increasingly use their wealth to influence or control government for their own benefit. Worldwide, there were just 140 of these individuals in 1987 when Forbes began tracking them, a number that swelled fourteenfold, to 2,000 in 2017 and to 2,640 in 2023, 735 of those (28%) Americans. Today, they total 3,028 and Americans account for 902, or nearly a third, the most by far and 13 of the top 15 in assets.

Oligarch wealth has more than kept pace. The group Americans for Tax Fairness reports that by the end of 2023, American billionaires were collectively worth a record $5.2 trillion — up an astounding $2.3 trillion, or 78%, since passage of the Trump-GOP tax cut in 2017; that’s an annual increase of 13%, producing unheard of riches even by the rarified standards of U.S. billionaires, who claimed close to half of all the planet’s billionaire wealth. Seven months later, in July 2024, American billionaires broke the $6 trillion barrier, having doubled their previous holdings ($3.1 trillion) after enactment of the Trump tax law.

A reasonable question is how such egregious capital concentration –  it currently stands at 17% of American GDP — has been allowed by develop. The most obvious explanation is federal tax policy. During Donald Trump’s first term, tax rates on individual earned income, unearned capital gains, and corporate profits were all slashed, and the alternative minimum tax (28% pre-2017) fully repealed.

A second iteration of the Trump reductions, contained in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will extend those upper-income gifts and make them permanent. This includes the top individual income tax rate, lowered (to 37%) and made applicable to fewer top earners; the radically reduced corporate rate (21%), the lowest ever; and the doubling of both the estate tax exemption (to $15 million) and the standard deduction applied to the capital gains tax, paid only when selling capital assets at a profit.

Succoring the rich is nothing new, of course, having been established U.S. policy at least since Ronald Reagan declared “morning in America”; it’s become a guiding principle for all Republicans and too many Democrats. Since the 1980s, virtually all federal taxes impacting billionaires — personal income, corporate income, long-term capital gains, shareholder dividend, and inheritance — have been cut roughly in half, radically reducing the money owed, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has pointed out, on one-third of all U.S. income, mainly that of the fabled one percent.

Other economic developments have financially benefited the plutocratic class as well, notably globalized employment outsourcing leading to cheaper labor costs. A new finding by economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson indicates free trade eliminated 2.4 million “expensive” U.S. jobs between 1999 and 2011, which directly rewarded corporate stockholders. And Americans know instinctively that AI will only exacerbate the class divide with its predicted white-collar jobs apocalypse.

Still, with apologies to Eugene O’Neill, it’s the selective failure of the taxman to cometh that’s been the real source of economic injustice.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.