Our New MAGA Oligarchs
Plus: Bracing for the unrest to come if Kamala wins.
We normally begin this newsletter with a couple of jaunty sentences commenting on some current news item. On the first anniversary of the atrocity of October 7, 2023, we don’t have the heart for that. So before getting into the news of the day, please join us in taking a moment to reflect on what happened a year ago, and what has happened since. And then, despite all of that, we wish you a Happy Monday.
What I Missed
—William Kristol
Many of us saw, pretty early on, the dangers of demagogic populist nativism, bigotry, and grievance-mongering. That’s why we were Never Trump. We had a sense of the damage Trump as president could do. But we also had a sense of the damage Trumpism, unleashed as a movement, could do.
Trump supporters and anti-anti-Trump apologists speak of Trump Derangement Syndrome. But if anything, we probably underestimated how much damage Trumpism could do to our political system, to our legal order, to our civil society, to our country.
But I did miss something. I didn’t see clearly enough that oligarchic arrogance and entitlement would eagerly join forces with populist demagoguery. The photo of Elon Musk leaping on stage to exultantly join Donald Trump Saturday night in Butler, Pennsylvania, captures the phenomenon that I’m describing.
It’s not that I had an excessively high opinion of the virtues or judgment of the super-wealthy. But I assumed that, having done well in America over the last few decades, they’d be a “conservative” force in more or less upholding the current political and economic order. I assumed they’d be wary of, even opposed to, someone like Trump, who was unleashing forces that could ultimately turn against them. I assumed they wouldn’t want to put their success at risk.
I did realize, of course, that many of them might not stand up against the threat. I expected there might be too much complacency and a good deal of accommodation. What I didn’t expect was the unbridled arrogance and the authoritarian zeal that we’ve seen from the new oligarchs.
I should have remembered the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt in his acceptance speech at the 1936 Democratic convention: “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself.”
I was speaking recently with a political analyst who comes out of the labor movement. We were discussing how the selection of JD Vance cemented the fact that a Trump second term would be a Project 2025 and America First endeavor; that the somewhat incoherent, anti-liberal and anti-democratic impulses of early Trumpism had turned into a far more purposeful and full-blown American authoritarianism.
I did say that I also thought the pick of Vance was risky—that it could antagonize not just voters but donors too—and that the Republican donors I once knew would probably have preferred Tim Scott or Marco Rubio. My friend laughed at my naïveté. The donors who now count, he said, were the new oligarchs: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and the tech bros, as well as some from a previous generation who’d been newly radicalized. He pointed out that they were fully behind Vance and were going to fund Trump-Vance extravagantly. He thought Trump made the pick because he appreciated the importance of the money that would flow as a result. He thought the new oligarchs understood this was the moment at which they could cement their control of the new Republican party—and perhaps the government itself.
My friend was right. I was focused on the ideological implications of Vance, but not, as Marxists would say, the material ones. My friend, who had come out of the labor movement and is an FDR man and a kind of social democrat, made no such mistake.
Reviving a healthy liberal democratic capitalism will, I think, require a recognition of the healthy elements of a social democratic tradition that some of us have neglected in recent decades. Such a recognition can incorporate the lessons of Hayek and Schumpeter and of many others on the limitations of big government and the problems of the welfare state.
But the danger posed by the new oligarchs means that the spirit of social democracy needs to have a place in the fight for liberal democracy. The defense of democratic capitalism is too important to be left to the capitalists.
A Kamala Win Is Not the End
—Andrew Egger
Over at his personal Substack, our Morning Shots predecessor Charlie Sykes is clanging the alarm bell: Even if Kamala Harris wins, he writes, “the worst will have just begun. And yes, it will be worse than the aftermath of the 2020 election. Potentially, much worse.”
Charlie lays out the grisly lay of the land. Trump has battered down nearly every internal party check on his behavior. His lies are flagrant and shameless. His use of them to gather himself power is not hidden.
Trump knows he must win: He may face prison otherwise. His base is sure he will win: They will follow his lies unswervingly. And the governments that will administer the election have suffered four years of militant organization from stop-the-stealers whose express purpose is preventing Democrats from “cheating”—that is to say, winning—again. The risk of social disorder, of election meltdown due to bad actors, and of political violence are all on the rise.
“A subtext of right-wing politics now is that the other side simply cannot be allowed to win,” Charlie writes. “It’s the Flight 93 election forever. It’s Jan. 6th forever.”
You should read the whole thing. But I want to zero in on one point Charlie makes in passing: the way Team Trump has already flooded the zone in swing states and districts with preemptive lawsuits. He quotes the Times:
Republicans have unleashed a flurry of lawsuits challenging voting rules and practices ahead of the November elections . . . The onslaught of litigation, much of it landing in recent weeks, includes nearly 90 lawsuits filed across the country by Republican groups this year. The legal push is already more than three times the number of lawsuits filed before Election Day in 2020.
We should not lose sight of how significant this is. Trump and his allies’ shambolic legal misadventures ran into a buzzsaw in 2020, ultimately prevailing in almost none of the more than 60 suits they brought.1 This was in part because their challenges were unsupported by evidence and almost uniformly stupid.
But the judges who were compelled to play lawsuit whack-a-mole had their jobs made easier by perhaps the dumbest part of Trump’s legal strategy: They got started way too late. If you had a problem with the election laws, judges frequently ruled, why did you only challenge them after you lost?
Trump’s flood-the-zone-with-shit legal strategy might not be any more effective this time around. But in this respect, he’s setting himself up better in advance. That should worry us.
Quick Hits
A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS: There’s a certain pathos to watching North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis as he tries to stem the insane tide of online misinformation about the federal government’s response to the devastation from Hurricane Helene in his state.
“I’ve lived in North Carolina for almost 30 years. I’ve seen a lot of storms come through this state. I’m actually impressed with how much attention was paid to a region that wasn’t likely to have experienced the impact that they did,” Tillis told reporters Friday. “For anybody who thinks that any level of government, anybody here could have been prepared precisely for what we’re dealing with here—clearly [they] are clueless. They’re doing a great job. They can always work harder, there’s always kinks in the slinky, we’re working them out behind the scenes. But I think we’re all here to send a message that we’re working together, and I’m pretty proud of the effort that’s been done.”
NO END IN SIGHT: Anybody out there want to do anything about our monstrously ballooning federal debt? A new analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, out this morning, finds spending plans from both Trump and Harris adding trillions to the deficit over the next decade, though one candidate is clearly worse. The CRFB estimates $7.5 trillion in more debt from Trump, and $3.5 trillion from Harris. In both cases, this is additional deficit spending atop the current annual $1 trillion-plus deficit.
The CRFB notes that “these estimates come with a wide range of uncertainty, reflecting both different interpretations and estimates of the policies.” And of course a campaign’s budgetary promises are one thing, while the legislative changes they’re able to shepherd through Congress are another.
Still, it’s another grim reminder that our leaders really do not care to address our gravest long-term fiscal problem!
CALL HER DADDY: Amid yet another round of growing Democratic nervousness that her campaign is playing things too safe, Kamala Harris is stepping out this week for a significant round of interviews. Over the weekend, she taped a CBS interview that will be aired tonight on 60 Minutes. (You can catch a preview clip of that interview here.) She’ll be on the Late Show and the View Tuesday, and she’ll also do an interview with Howard Stern. Meanwhile, Tim Walz, who appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday, will make an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel tonight.
The first stop on Harris’s media blitz tour came yesterday, when she did a women-focused interview with Alex Cooper, host of the uber-popular Call Her Daddy podcast [Editor’s note and disclaimer: Bill Kristol is a founding member of the Daddy Gang].
In the interview, Harris focused mostly on her familiar attacks on Trump’s abortion policy, but also responded to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s recent dig that Harris “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” since she has no biological children.
“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” Harris said. “Two, a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life, and children in their life.”
Cheap Shots
They did partially prevail in one lawsuit in Pennsylvania.
I only have one critique here, based on a specific line: "Such a recognition can incorporate the lessons of Hayek and Schumpeter and of many others on the limitations of big government and the problems of the welfare state."
We are in this mess because our government is not big enough and we do not possess a big enough welfare state. We have a mental health crisis that becomes a homelessness one, because Reagan closed down all the government asylums. We have a medical debt crisis because the hospitals are privatized. Our prisons are privatized. Forty years of unions being gutted have isolated and impoverished working class people. Over half of Americans have more debt than they can afford to pay.
But let's say you don't think any of that is for the realm of government. If you believe we have a border crisis, that means we need more agents. We need more resources. Even if you think climate change isn't real, the amount of disasters has increased in recent years, and FEMA is lacking money, which means it needs more money and more resources. In the Middle East, our soldiers are engaged in more conflicts, which means they need more money.
None of this can be accomplished without MORE government.
Government, by nature, should not be small. It should be as non-intrusive as possible. But that is not the same as being small. A government needs, by design, to be big and well funded so that it can respond to the needs of the population. The smallest of governments would be the tribal societies of the ancient past, and unsurprisingly, life was not particularly good during those times.
The core issue facing those who clamor for 'small government' is that you will now have to ask what you want to cut that hasn't already been cut, and you will have to answer for the fact that such idealism has led us to Trumpism, when people die of deaths of despair and feel trapped in a world that is getting worse, entirely because there is no one there to aid them in their times of need.
In other words, there is little difference between Reagan and Herbert Hoover.
I'm not advocating for any one position here. What I am saying is that regardless of what you believe the problem in America is, the solution will require a larger government. We no longer have the luxury of having a small government. The problems facing America, the problems we all agree on, whether that's inflation or abortion rights or immigration or climate change or whatever else, will require larger government. It will require this, because these are not problems that can be solved on the personal, individual level.
That will require uncomfortable conversations about raising taxes. It will be required. We cannot, in fact, simply sit around and think that individuals can fix the problems that face them. North Carolina, for example, would not be better off if FEMA wasn't there, if the people suffering from the hurricane were left to their own devices and told that personal responsibility and 1% lower taxes was the price to pay for it. Nor can North Carolina's state government afford to solve this problem on its own.
The entire purpose of a government is to benefit the people it rules; a government should not be independent of the people. A government by the people and for the people means that it needs to respond to the needs of those people. And that means bigger government.
I think mega-billionaires world-wide identify more with one another than they do with their respective countries. A core belief of this group is that they should be driving the train. Thiel and Musk are interested in Trump in the same way Putin is. Honestly, it's like a James Bond flick.