The Election Looks Like an Intramural Squabble Between Billionaires

In 2016, and even to some degree 2020, hardly any high-profile oligarchs beyond Peter Thiel seemed comfortable associating themselves publicly with the Republican standard-bearer. Many of the country’s richest appeared more comfortable describing Donald Trump as a national threat than signing up as campaign co-chairs or hitting the road as surrogates.

These days, when it comes to the country’s wealthiest, the vibes have shifted. In many ways, the country’s politics can feel quite stuck: Presidential polls have been steady, generic congressional ballots haven’t moved much, governors of both parties boast consistently high approval ratings, and since 2020, polling and election results haven’t shown signs of strong backlash to progressive policy.

But in the midst of an otherwise maddeningly static landscape, a cohort of extremely wealthy influencers and power brokers appear to have moved quite a bit, while dropping their mask of gentility and embracing a dog-eat-dog kind of politics. One result is what I called last week the most sociologically interesting development of the entire election cycle: the drift of a certain kind of high-profile “billionaire brain” toward Trump and Trumpism, which has helped change the face of the MAGA brand and make the former president’s third run for the White House seem, even on the surface, considerably less populist and considerably more plutocratic than the first two.

Of the 20 largest individual donors this election cycle, nine have predominantly given to Republicans. Only one is backing Harris and the Democrats — a major shift from 2020, when two of the top three supported Democrats, and 2016, when four of the top six did. At the same time, small-donor donations to the former president, which once formed the foundation of his monster fund-raising hauls, have collapsed. About one-third of all 2024 contributions to the Trump campaign and associated groups have come from billionaires, compared with just 6 percent for Harris.

In his previous races, Trump pitched himself as an anti-establishment force, an insurgent tribune for an army of low-trust MAGA voters. The pitch was always a bad-faith fiction, but this time, he’s surrounded by enough faces of the American plutocracy to make Trumpworld look not anti-establishment so much as counter-establishment — and make the campaign as a whole more like an intramural squabble between rival tribes of moneyed elites. Broadly speaking, one group wants to defend the system that enabled its success; the other wants to go to war with it.