I want to share a concern that was expressed very well by someone I know, Thomas B. Edsall, one of the great commentators at The New York Times. He writes on a variety of subjects and is able, because of his standing, to email experts in various fields who answer him.
One of the things he has been writing about is called “The Trump 1% Fan Club Has a Lot of New Members,” [Gift Link] published February 24, 2026. It is a prophetic document about how billionaires are going to try to steal the election by pouring literally billions of dollars into supporting Republican candidates in order to keep Trump not only in power but unencumbered and unregulated.
They want their taxes to continue to go down. They want their AI businesses unregulated. They want their tech businesses unregulated. They want to continue addicting young people with their algorithmic systems on phones and other devices. They want to keep Trump in power because he has kept them free from regulation, whether it is AI or the issues surrounding what happens online.
Trump distributes executive patronage from pardons to favorable regulatory decisions to privileged groups, including those willing to contribute to his preferred committees and causes and those who invest in the Trump family’s crypto business. These people are investing in the Republican Party by the billions to keep Trump from having to answer to anyone.
Despite Trump having lost ground in almost every other demographic group in his second term, including even among some of the MAGA faithful, one group stands firmly in the president’s camp.
The super rich.
They have no second thoughts because they have gotten what they wanted.
The Tech Leaders Are Fascists.
I come from an evangelical background. In the 1970s I was my father’s sidekick. My father was Francis Schaeffer. Along with C. Everett Koop, Ronald Reagan’s Surgeon General, he helped create the Religious Right. That movement eventually morphed into MAGA and helped put Donald Trump in the White House.
In his bid to stave off a Democratic takeover of the House and perhaps the Senate, money from billionaires and mega millionaires is Trump’s ace in the hole. It is his way to end run the system. He will threaten people in the media who stand up to him. He will go after anyone who voices an opinion contrary to his own. He has taken over the FBI and the Justice Department to go after his enemies. But his true advantage is that, despite growing dissatisfaction among ordinary Americans, he has the billionaires in his corner, the tech brothers in his corner, Elon Musk in his corner.
Trump and the Republican Party have effectively become subsidiaries of the nation’s billionaire class. The result is an American presidency setting new standards in oligarchy and kleptocracy. His family are kleptocrats. He is a thief and a con artist. He has aligned himself with other thieves and con artists, billionaires who have reshaped our lives through relentless tech innovation without regard for the consequences for the rest of us or our children.
Evidence of this corruption is pervasive. Presidential pardons for donors and well connected individuals. Regulatory favoritism toward the tech industry. The flow of special interests and foreign investments into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency business.
This level of corruption is unprecedented in American history. Even in the Gilded Age we did not see this degree of concentrated power.
As Edsall notes, if the nineteen wealthiest people in the United States spent all their wealth, they could buy the equivalent of ten percent of the value of all the goods and services produced in a year in this country. That illustrates the overwhelming economic power they possess.
Contributions by the very rich to Republicans grew from roughly three hundred million dollars in 2022 to just under one billion dollars in 2024. Donations to Democrats fell from roughly three hundred million to less than two hundred million. Why? Because Democrats are not offering the super rich a free ride, continued tax cuts, and deregulation.
MAGA Inc., a super PAC revived and turned into a fundraising powerhouse after Trump was elected again, provides some of the clearest evidence of this commitment by the affluent.
Despite the fact that Trump has no legal or constitutional path to a third term, MAGA Inc. holds over three hundred ten million dollars in cash on hand.
Significantly, ninety six percent of that money was raised in contributions over one million dollars each.
These are not small donors.
The result is that MAGA Inc. began 2026 with far more money than any other political committee. This gives Republicans an extraordinary advantage at the party and super PAC levels. It stands in contrast to the fundraising success of many Democratic candidates who rely on small donations.
Another favor the billionaire class is doing for the Republican Party is the emergence of cryptocurrency and the artificial intelligence industry as major players in campaign finance. These industries do not want regulation. They want freedom from oversight. They want to operate without interference.
While Sam Altman has been the public face of OpenAI, others connected to the industry have made significant contributions. Brockman and his wife Anna gave fifty million dollars last fall, twenty five million to MAGA and twenty five million to Leading the Future, a new PAC funded by artificial intelligence industry players.
These individuals want to keep what they earn and avoid taxation and regulation, even as many Americans are deeply concerned about what unregulated technology has already done to our culture and our children.
Consider some of the top donors on the record. Elon Musk of SpaceX and X has given two hundred ninety one and a half million dollars to efforts to keep the House and Senate aligned with Trump. Timothy Mellon has given one hundred ninety seven million. Miriam Adelson has given one hundred forty eight point three million. Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein of Uline have given one hundred forty three point five million. Kenneth Griffin of Citadel has given one hundred eight point four million. Paul Singer of Elliott Management has given sixty six point eight million.
These numbers are staggering.
As Edsall writes, while Trump and his allies have put American democracy under extreme stress, the system of free elections has not yet broken. But the deeper question is whether the Trump administration and the Republican Party have crossed the line into oligarchy and kleptocracy.
Democratic politicians such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been criticized for using the word oligarchy freely. But the reality is that Trump and his Republican allies in Congress fit that description to an extraordinary degree.
If they maintain control of the House and the Senate, the final barrier to an absolute takeover of our country by tech billionaires and their allies will be gone.
