Elite Impunity and Failure is the Story of the Second Trump Administration
The last weeks have seen multiple stories exposing the immorality and failures of America’s elite. The Epstein email dump is of course the biggest one, ensnaring the president along with many other big names, including former Harvard president Larry Summers. There’s also been the spectacle of a reporter (Olivia Nuzzi) putting out a splashy memoir and getting defended by members of her guild after she slept with one of her sources, who happened to be running for president. Not only that, this man used his higher profile to become the director of Health and Human Services, where he is doing incalculable damage by undermining vaccination. Of course, the denizens of the upper reaches of the Fourth Estate don’t care because Nuzzi is “one of us.”
These stories are a metonym for the second Trump administration writ large, which has exposed, more than anything else, the failure and corruption of America’s elites and the institutions that they run. You can see it with how the Lords of Silicon Valley put their thumb on the scale in the election and its aftermath. It wasn’t just Elon Musk sending his broccoli-haired myrmidons on a wrecking spree inside the federal government, it was Bezos killing an endorsement for Harris in the Washington Post and Tim Cook giving Trump a gold plaque. And of course, more pathetically, it was Mark Zuckerberg hiring Trumpy people to do moderation and talking in a creepy way about masculine energy.
It hasn’t just been the Silicon Valley overlords pledging their fealty to the wannabe despot. When Trump threatened universities, many of their leaders, who are completely lacking in any principle other than increasing their endowments, immediately caved. Both ABC and CBS settled lawsuits they could have won with Trump in the hopes of maintaining access and avoiding punishment. CBS has hired a professional crank with zero reporting experience -Bari Weiss- to run their entire news operation because this will please their orange master.
This has actually been a departure from how things went the first time around. While plenty of elites made their peace with Trump in his first administration, one got the feeling that the institutions were not willing to embrace him. The media certainly enjoyed his presence for eyeballs of their stories, but the leaders of media outfits were not currying favor in a servile fashion. Many in the government pushed back on the worst of what Trump wanted to do, and were even willing to flat out call him a fascist in public during the last election.
I still remember inauguration day in 2021, where I was working remotely because a new spike in COVID was raging through the Tri-State. It was two weeks after the January 6th insurrection, and watching Biden take the oath I felt enormous relief. I cried, thankful that we had managed to survive the storm. It felt like the institutions had held, and that maybe we could put Trump and what he represented behind us.
Obviously things turned out differently, and the collaboration of the elites has a lot to do with that. A recent report shows that billionaires vastly increased their campaign spending in the past few years, and have done so in ways that give much more to Republicans while reduing contributions to Democrats. They suddenly got very scared, and decided that Trumpism was the lesser of two evils. The bosses were frightened by the power workers had gained in the pandemic and by a Democratic Party that had finally, after many decades of equivocation, aggressively supported the labor movement.
The elites were also really scared by the racial reckoning of 2020. Consider Bari Weiss. This is someone who grew up in a wealthy white family, attended private school and then went on to Columbia. She had all the right credentials, and is by no means stupid, but is definitely not remarkable, and certainly not remarkable enough to deserve a perch at the New York Times or running CBS news. However, she comes from the right background and was trained in the right places and has a talent for repeating what those people want to hear. In an America with a more inclusive, and frankly, talented set of media voices rather than the products of elite upbringings, she would be a nobody. The people like her, who come from a ruling class but call it a meritocracy, know deep down that their privilege is under threat.
The rampagings of the mad king Trump have been less beneficial to many of the business elites who decided to support him this time around. They got their lower taxes and regulations, but also a chaotic tariff regime and an immigration policy that’s robbing them of workers. Except for the AI bubble, things are not looking good for the economy. This is a reminder that for all their power, these elites are not that smart. They are sharp about making themselves more money, but only in the short term. The fact that they would make common cause with a corrupt wannabe dictator for such meager gains should cause us to question not only their intelligence but their very existence. We don’t need them.
Like affluent people everywhere, they craved peace and quiet over justice. After a decade of political tumult, they just wanted people to shut up. They were tired of hearing about unearned privilege, tired of hearing demands to share their power. After years of bitter partisan disputes they thought they could be the deus ex machina to come in and just end it. They didn’t necessarily like Trump per se, but with the death of the traditional Republican Party and a Democratic Party no longer willing to triangulate, he was their only option. They thought they could make some “deals” with this transactional man and get what they wanted, not reckoning that this transactional man comes with the baggage of a neo-fascist gang that’s using him too.
Luckily for the rest of us, the public really doesn’t like the neo-fascist agenda nor trust the elites who caved to it. (I can write another time why so many voters got hoodwinked, but much of it has to do with narrative crafted by media elites.) I am confident this nightmare will end, but not without some pain along the way. When it’s over we need to make some real changes. We must tear out the culture of elite impunity root and branch. I want a world where the Olivia Nuzzis will be too ashamed to show their faces, where Amazon warehouse workers are given more consideration by politicians than Jeff Bezos (who will pay pre-Reagan level taxes), and where anyone implicated in Epstein’s crimes (and I do mean ANYONE) is drummed out of public life with an eternal cloud of shame around them at the very least (and better yet, prosecution). It’s not merely enough to let a new person occupy the White House.