Back in 2021, I wrote about the rise of words such as oligarchy, kleptocracy, and plutocracy. My attitude at the time was that many of the wealthiest Americans—Elon Musk chief among them—were taking on outsized power and influence in the American political sphere. Since then, things have only gotten worse.
As I’m sure you are aware, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has become an unelected member of the Trump Administration, heading up an illegally-formed organization known as the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.” Under Musk’s leadership, DOGE has fired thousands of government employees, slashed government spending, and eliminated entire agencies, all under the guise of ferreting out waste, fraud, and abuse. Never mind that neither Musk nor his minions in DOGE have ben able to credibly document any significant waste, fraud, or abuse. Even so, their work continues apace.
In a recent interview with Tim Miller from The Bulwark, journalist and expert on autocracy, Anne Applebaum, spoke about her recent article, “Kleptocracy, Inc.“, in the Atlantic. In both the interview and the article, Applebaum weaves a tale of corruption that is unapparelled in American history. And it is all happening out in the open, for everyone to see. If it was happening in a foreign country—particularly in a foreign democracy—we would be horrified and would call for some sort of intervention. Instead, because it is happening in the United States, we sit by idly, certain that what we are seeing with our own eyes isn’t really happening.
We have been blessed in the United States with a relatively stable liberal democratic system of government throughout our history. We’re not used to seeing our elected representatives take bribes or act in their own financial self-interest rather than in the interests of the country. Yet, that is exactly what is happening with Donald Trump. And despite the fact that it is happening out in the open for everyone to see, we are slow to accept that it is happening, and even slower yet to do anything about it. But as Applebaum suggests, we should be outraged about it. We should rise up and act against the corruption, and we should do it quickly.
Here is a portion of Applebaum’s interview with The Bulwark. I encourage you to listen to the entire interview and to read Applebaum’s article in the the Atlantic. They are both eye-opening and help to explain the situation we find ourselves in in the United States.
(Lightly edited for clarity)
The Bulwark interview with Anne Applebaum
Applebaum: “(Kleptocracy) is about people who have political power and are using that political power to enrich themselves. To be clear, wealthy people have been very influential in America forever and probably always will be, like they are in every country. And there have been other examples of corruption in the past. But I don’t know of another administration where there were so many people who had double interests.
“The President himself, on the day the stock market was crashing—Friday, April the 4th—instead of going to Wall Street to find out what was going on, Trump went to his personal golf course and to his club in Florida (Mar-A-Lago), where a golf tournament was taking place that is sponsored by companies from Saudi Arabia. One of the people in attendance was the head of the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund. Several other Saudi companies were on the list of sponsors, including Aramco, which is the Saudi oil company. Tik Tok was one of the sponsors of this golf tournament. These are companies that have direct interest in U.S. foreign policy and are directly interested in influencing Donald Trump. In effect, their sponsorship is a form of payment. They’re paying him. They’re supporting his course. They’re supporting his club. That’s unthinkable in any other administration. That would be such a blatant abuse.
“The genesis of the article (“Kleptocracy, Inc“.) was that I started to pull together some of these things, both Trump’s family and Trump himself, but also other people in the administration, and other instances of people trying to buy influence, or “get out of court” cases, or get out of other tangles with the government through financial influence or financial relationships with the Trump family or with Donald Trump, as well as lists of what the Trump Administration is doing to loosen all the laws against fraud and against corruption that we have in our system. The list is astonishingly long. There are dozens and dozens of instances already, and we’re only three months into the administration.
It starts in December when the Trump family announces a big investment in Saudi Arabia. It continues with the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business, which, in effect, allows anyone to be an investor in that business, and that’s again a way to pay the Trump family. There’s already one instance of somebody who was a major investor who had a piece of civil litigation against him lifted or suspended. We don’t know if there was a quid pro quo, but it certainly appears that it could have been. Nobody has made any effort to avoid that appearance.
“Elon Musk’s conflicts of interest are substantial. Musk is responsible for firing people at government agencies who were responsible for regulating his companies. He has a presence, also, in government agencies that are able to subsidize his companies or buy things from his companies, whether it’s Starlink or whether it’s the State Department buying armored Teslas. That is a grotesque conflict of interest, of which there is no contemporary precedent.
“Again, rich people are influential, they get laws passed, they lobby for things, and so on. But to actually have the owner of major companies that have major interests, have been heavily subsidized by the U.S. government, personally going into government agencies and firing people and making policy there, I can’t think of anything like that happening previously. That is a kind of oligarchy that you see in autocratic states. That’s Russian-style oligarchy. It is a profound challenge to the rule of law and to the assumption that democracy needs transparency and accountability, and that people who are acting in the public interest should be acting in the interests of Americans, and not in their personal financial interests.
“When Musk has people fired at the transportation safety regulatory bodies, is that because it’s good for Americans or because it’s good for Tesla? If it’s just good for Tesla, then that’s a catastrophe for Americans. And sooner or later, there will be repercussions. We will be less safe and more poorly regulated. Taxpayer money will be wasted on Musk’s companies.
“There’s something called the Corporate Transparency Act that the Trump Administration has announced they are not going to enforce, which requires people to reveal the name of owners of shell companies, to reveal who they really are. These are anonymous companies that are often used to hide stolen money or escape paying taxes.
“Kleptocracy can be a complicated thing to describe. But to me, this should cause more outrage than anything else. If there’s a way that opponents of this administration can explain it to people, such as, ‘Your money is being taken and used to enrich people around Trump, and your policy has been captured by people who are using it to enrich themselves or pursue their own interests.’ This is about as fundamental a violation of what government is for, let alone democracy, as anything that we have seen. Combined with the illegal deportations, they both show this scorn for the rule of law, and a scorn for any type of basic responsibility that government officials should have to the people who elected them.”
