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oligarchs
What a Study of Oligarchs' Second Acts Heralds for Trump 2.0
They’re usually worse off during their subsequent terms in office. So are the rest of us.
Nov 13, 2024
On November 5, Donald Trump was elected as the 47th U.S. president. Trump is an oligarch—an economic or political actor who secures and reproduces power and wealth, then transforms one into the other. And now he is in the small minority of oligarchs across history who have had second acts—having lost power or wealth, they find a way back. What can we learn from those experiences that might inform our understanding of Trump’s second term?
To answer that question, we looked at the track records of three other business oligarchs like Trump who have served as heads of state or government since World War II. Business oligarchs begin their journey by accumulating wealth, then move to power.
In our book The Oligarch’s Grip: Fusing Wealth and Power, we wrote about Chilean president Sebastian Piñera. He served two non-consecutive terms in office (2010-14 and 2018-22). His second act was decidedly worse than his first. During his first term in office, per capita income in constant dollars grew by 14%, while life expectancy expanded by 0.9 years. Sure, there were controversies, such as the appointment of Pinochet-era figures as cabinet ministers and protests over the end of the school voucher system. But, in general, Chileans felt better off.
While we are hesitant to make any grand predictions for the Trump second term based on these cases, it does seem questionable that it will be any better than the first.
By contrast, Piñera’s second term was disastrous. Per capita income rose by only 2% and life expectancy contracted by 0.8 years. The Covid-19 pandemic played a role in these outcomes, but it wasn’t the only driver. Piñera’s poor handling of a second, larger set of student protests has also led to his relatively low ranking among modern Chilean heads of state. He died in a helicopter accident in 2024.
Trump has been compared to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s three-time prime minister (1994-95, 2001-06, and 2008-11). We will focus on his second and third terms, which are longer. Per capita income expanded by 3.5% in that second term, and life expectancy grew by a remarkable 1.4 years. Ambitious goals aimed at constitutional and tax reform were thwarted, but, still, Italians felt better off, even if they narrowly backed a center-left coalition that removed Berlusconi from office.
His third term was dominated by the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the Great Recession of 2008-09, and the 2009-10 eurozone crisis. Italy’s economy was one of the most highly indebted in Europe, and higher interest rates led to a 6.8% GDP decline during 2008-09. Per capita income declined by 3.6% during this term, while life expectancy increased by 0.6 years. Having been ranked by Forbes as the 12th most powerful person in the world in 2009, Berlusconi resigned in 2011 as a deeply unpopular and polarizing figure.
A similar pattern of a poor second act emerges with Rafic Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister for two terms (1992-98 and 2000-04). Per capita income grew by a substantial 44% during his first term, while life expectancy expanded in the post-civil war period by 2.2 years. But when Hariri returned to office for a second term, results were much less compelling: income up by 16% and life expectancy by 0.6 years. Political tensions led to his assassination in 2005. His son Saad served two terms as well and also left office under a cloud. A third oligarch prime minister, Naguib Mikati, is in his third term and, given the recent Israeli invasion, is unlikely to have a successful ending.
Does history offer any relief from this picture of disappointing second acts? Not really. For example, Marcus Licinius Crassus—one of the Roman Republic’s richest and most powerful men, served as consul twice (70 and 55 BCE), both times with often rival and sometimes ally Pompey. The first consulship led to the Triumvirate Alliance of Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus. The second consulship led to Crassus being named governor of the endlessly wealthy province of Syria, where he was defeated by the Parthians and died in 53 BCE.
These examples suggest some preliminary findings and cautions. First, oligarchs’ second acts generally end badly. Sometimes, external circumstances drive this result. Other times, it seems that oligarchs don’t show much evidence of learning from their first terms.
Second, many oligarchs never serve in decision-making roles as heads of state or government like Piñera, Berlusconi, or Hariri. Some have agenda-setting power through political contributions or media ownership. Others have ideological power, shaping the way we think and act. Based on our dataset at the Center for the Study of Oligarchs, we are unaware of any oligarchs who had and lost those types of power who were able to regain it. We also don’t know of any significant cases of oligarchs losing their wealth and then recovering it.
While we are hesitant to make any grand predictions for the Trump second term based on these cases, it does seem questionable that it will be any better than the first. During that first term, per capita in the U.S. rose by 2.9% and life expectancy fell by a jaw-dropping 1.7 years. That record helped earn Trump a ranking as the worst president in U.S history, according to the American Political Science Association survey.
It is difficult to imagine how Trump will be able to successfully fight the dismal history of oligarchs’ second acts.
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When the Fascists Arrive Holding Hands With the Oligarchs
Once the Nazis took power in Germany they banned books, outlawed drag shows, and homosexuality, changed school curricula to remove mention of their atrocities in WWI, and rewrote election laws so they’d never again lose an election. Sound familiar?
Apr 18, 2023
My wife Louise and I just finished watching the Netflix short series Transatlantic, and it prompted us to consider what happens when a rightwing social movement takes over a country, as we’re currently experiencing in the US with more than a third of our states openly embracing fascism.
Transatlantic is a gripping drama about a group of Jewish refugees — including Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall — who are trapped in Marseilles trying to flee the Nazis as they sweep across France in late 1940. Complicating their flight, the American envoy and the head of the local French police are both in agreement with the Nazis that the Jewish refugees are “degenerates” and “animals” who should appropriately end up in the Nazi camps.
The parallels to today’s America are startling. The Republican rhetoric about the queer and Black communities — and, often, about Jews (usually coded as “George Soros”) — is startlingly similar to that of the Nazis and the Vichy French about Jews. Donald Trump, for example, is openly calling Alvin Bragg an “animal.”
But how do things get this far? How and why did it happen in Germany, and how and why is it happening here today?
After Hitler’s failed beer hall putsch, he was legally banned from public speaking and mass rallies. In 1930, however, German media mogul Alfred Hugenberg — a rightwinger who owned two of the largest national newspapers and had considerable influence over radio — joined forces with Hitler and relentlessly promoted him, much like the Murdoch media empire and billionaire-owned rightwing radio helped bring Trump to power in 2016.
The billionaire-funded movement to pass anti-voting, anti-trans, anti-Black history, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, and anti-public school legislation and policy is roaring down the track, as is the billionaire-owned media campaign to promote fascism.
While politically independent, German President Paul von Hindenburg’s sympathies lay with the conservatives and monarchists. Like Reagan’s GOP, Hindenburg’s coalition favored Germany’s morbidly rich (Hindenburg’s father was an aristocrat) and industry, but was always just short of achieving total power over the German state.
Hitler, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care much at first about Germany’s aristocrats; he led a populist evangelical movement dedicated to “purifying” Germany of the “filth” of Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, and socialists. While Hindenburg and the German conservative movement looked down on Hitler and his followers as ignoble rabble rousers, they were more than enthusiastic about getting their votes.
As German industrialist Fritz Thyssen writes in his apologetic book I Paid Hitler, he pressured German President von Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as chancellor, and then lobbied the Association of German Industrialists, that country’s and era’s version of the US Chamber of Commerce, to donate 3 million Reichsmarks to the Nazi Party for the 1932 election.
While Thyssen did it primarily because he wanted tax cuts for morbidly rich people like himself and government contracts for his company, his efforts combined with Hugenberg’s media empire brought Hitler and his bigots to power.
Hitler’s sales pitch to the German people was grounded in the idea that average German working people were victims and Hitler was their champion.
He claimed Jews, homosexuals, and socialists had “stabbed Germany in the back” by participating in negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles that imposed punitive conditions on the country, producing widespread poverty and an economic crisis.
If the German people were victims, Hitler told them, the villains were German minorities, promoting degeneracy like jazz and swing music, tolerance of homosexuality and transgender people, and the “international Jewish conspiracy.”
Once the Nazis took power they banned books, outlawed drag shows, and homosexuality, changed school curricula to remove mention of their atrocities in WWI, and rewrote election laws so they’d never again lose an election.
The transformation of Germany was swift. Former German Nazis I knew well in the 1980s when I lived in that country often commented to me on how “a party of bullies” threatened violence and intimidated people to the point that the average person gave up resisting or even joined along for fear of ending up a victim themselves.
Thus, a minority party that never took more than a third of the national vote before seizing power began a process that inevitably led to the death of 73 million human beings.
Once you build your party’s political base on hate and fear it’s pretty much impossible to one day say, “You know, those Jews and Blacks and queer people we were vilifying aren’t really such bad people after all.”
This is all echoed in the crisis today facing both the GOP and the Democratic Party’s opposition to it.
As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently wrote:
“My friends, the Republican Party is no longer committed to democracy. It is rapidly becoming the American fascist party.”
Rightwing American billionaires, parroting Fritz Thyssen, have spent the past decade pouring money into Republican-aligned groups working to change school textbooks, ban library books, outlaw healthcare for queer people, criminalize trans participation in civil society, and make it harder for college students and Black people to vote.
Like Thyssen, most probably aren’t all that bigoted themselves: their primary motivation is lowering their own taxes and increasing their companies’ government purchases and subsidies.
But to get there they must have Republicans in power, and the GOP’s base — while they don’t much care about billionaire’s taxes or corporate deregulation — are fervent bigots.
Democrats, meanwhile, face the same crisis the Social Democrats did in Germany in the 1930s.
They believe in the free speech and free flow of political ideas associated with democracy, so are wary of using government power to squelch the rise of the current fascist movement within the GOP. Yet they see the direction things are moving and are frequently — but impotently — calling it out.
Holding bullies to account for their crimes and their intimidation tactics is really and truly difficult, as the German Social Democrats discovered in 1933 and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg is realizing today. Typically the only thing that stops bullies is to punch them in the face, which can reduce one to their level.
There are signs that a few of the billionaires funding the modern neofascist wing of the GOP’s rise to power are having second thoughts, much as Fritz Thyssen ultimately did in Germany.
Billionaire DeSantis backer Thomas Peterffy (the second richest man in Florida at $26 billion) told The Financial Times last week:
“I have put myself on hold. Because of (DeSantis’) stance on abortion and book banning ... myself, and a bunch of friends, are holding our powder dry.”
So far, Peterffy is the outlier. The billionaire-funded movement to pass anti-voting, anti-trans, anti-Black history, anti-gay marriage, anti-abortion, and anti-public school legislation and policy is roaring down the track, as is the billionaire-owned media campaign to promote fascism.
And since five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery with Citizens United, the deck remains stacked in their favor.
There is no Democratic equivalent to Fox “News,” 1500 rightwing radio stations, hundreds of subsidized rightwing podcasts and media sites, The Wall Street Journal, ALEC, Heritage Foundation, Musk’s rightwing reinvention of Twitter, Facebook’s GOP-leaning algorithms, or the hundreds of other state and national policy operations and think tanks.
The American people, however, seem to be waking up even in the face of this onslaught of billionaire-owned and -funded media and political infrastructure.
The velocity with which Republican governors are leaving ERIC so they can quietly purge people from their voting rolls (now that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized that in 2018) and passing over 400 new make-it-harder-to-vote laws shows how concerned they are about this trend.
So, to the question about what’s really behind the war Republicans are waging against American democracy, the answer is simple: rightwing billionaires who want more, more, more money and are willing to make common cause with bigots, fascists, and wannabee killers to get it.
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Beware This Libertarian Oligarch's Ecological Utopia in Texas
Even as one arm of Elon Musk's empire was extolling his vision of a Garden of Eden situated along the beauty of the Colorado River, another arm was scheming to pollute it!
Mar 22, 2023
Exciting news, people: Utopia is on the rise!
Space Commander Elon Musk has announced that His Magnificence (i.e., him) intends to construct his very own private town on 3,500 acres of farmland near his new Tesla plant southeast of Austin, Texas. More than a town, Musk explains that he will create utopia in Texas, promising an "ecological paradise" where his Tesla workers can live and do fun things like swimming, pickleball... and paying rent to him.
The gabillionaire is certainly rich enough to erect his own Muskopolis. But, alas, the "utopia" name is already taken. Indeed, I've been to Utopia, Texas, a small town west of San Antonio that was founded in 1855 by (cover your ears, Elon!) Swiss Socialists. Of course, history shows that a company town is ruled by the company, not by residents (much less socialists). And Musk has made clear at Tesla, Twitter, etc. that his personal whims rule over workers, consumers, our environment... and even truth.
Which brings us to that ecological worker's paradise he's promising. Even as one arm of his empire was extolling his vision of a Garden of Eden situated along the beauty of the Colorado River, another arm was scheming to pollute it! Musk is asking Texas' corporate-controlled regulators to let him use the site to dump 140,000 gallons a day of his industrial wastewater into the Colorado.
Excuse me, but that turns Elon's ecological paradise into a fraud. Worse, it adds up to Musk pouring 50 million gallons a year of his waste into the river, fouling the main water source for dozens of towns and hundreds of farms downstream.
Musk seeks to extend the long, sordid history in our country of company-town hucksters, and his latest Texas scam is proof that we should never trust a billionaire promising us paradise.
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