You Voted for a Businessman. You Got 57 of Them.
Money bought the seats in Trump's government, and now those seats make money. Call it what it is. The people who own the economy now run the government that is supposed to regulate them.
Stephen Feinberg is worth as much as 4.6 billion dollars. He runs the day to day of a Pentagon that spends more than a trillion dollars a year, and the private equity firm he built still owns pieces of the defense industry feeding off that budget.
Howard Lutnick was tied to more than 800 companies through Cantor Fitzgerald. Now he runs the Commerce Department, and his sons run Cantor.
Linda McMahon gave Trump more than 22 million dollars. She got the Department of Education.
There are 57 of them.
Fifty-seven people worth as much as 100 million dollars or more sit inside Donald Trump’s second administration, according to a report out this week from the watchdog group Public Citizen. Eight are billionaires. Forty of them run federal agencies. The rest are ambassadors. Their combined declared assets run from 13.9 billion to nearly 34.8 billion dollars, and that is using their own disclosure forms, the ones they signed under penalty of law.
The average American worker makes about 65,000 dollars a year. The median household is worth about 192,900 dollars. Hold those two numbers next to the first ones and you already understand this presidency better than most cable panels do.
A lot of people voted for Trump because they feel that he’s a businessman. The pitch was simple: he built things, he made deals, he knows how money works, and he thinks the government is corrupt. He will run the country like a company, and working people will finally get someone competent at running a business instead of a career politician.
Here is the part the pitch left out. A businessman protects businessmen. That is not a character flaw, it is the job description. And when you hand a businessman the state, he does not stop being one. He just gets a bigger set of tools.
Look at how the seats got filled. McMahon gave more than 22 million dollars to Trump’s committees, then got Education. Warren Stephens gave more than 5 million, then got the London embassy. Kelly Loeffler gave more than 5 million, got the Small Business Administration, then gave another 2.5 million after she was confirmed. The report counts 30 of the 57 who together put more than 65 million dollars into Trump’s political machine.
Money bought the seat. Now watch the seat make money.
Lutnick left Cantor Fitzgerald to run Commerce and handed the firm to his sons. In January his department cut a deal to take a government stake in a rare earth company, and the placement agent on that deal was Cantor. Democratic lawmakers are investigating. Lutnick has not turned over the records they asked for.
Feinberg co-founded Cerberus, which owns defense companies. The Guardian mapped how tightly Cerberus stayed wired into the Pentagon after he took over. Since he became the Pentagon’s number two, one Cerberus owned firm has pulled in at least 784 million dollars in new or modified Pentagon contracts. He did not sell his stake. He put it in trusts for his kids.
Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, blew past his legal deadline to divest his assets by eight months.
Fortune reported that Loeffler went on Newsmax again and again while holding well over 100,000 shares in Newsmax’s parent company.
None of that is against their interests. All of it is against yours.
You could try to file this under Trump. Ken Griffin would stop you. He is a Republican billionaire who poured tens of millions into the GOP, and even he says this administration has made decisions “very, very enriching to the families” of the people running it. His words, not mine. When the oligarchs start complaining that the other oligarchs are being too obvious about it, the red and blue argument is finished. What is left is the only line that ever mattered. The people who own the economy, and everyone who has to work inside it.
There is a name for a government where the people who own the economy also write the rules that govern it, and write them for themselves. It is called bureaucratic capitalism, and it is the worst structure there is, because there is no longer a line between private profit and public power. The same people control both.
America has done this before. Trump likes to praise President McKinley, and he should, because the Gilded Age was exactly this. Robber barons flooded politics with money, then called on the men they had bought to write the laws that fed their businesses. This is the front of that cycle, not the end of it.
They are not even hiding it. They do not have to.
This does not stop, because the loop does not stop. Power makes money, money buys more power, the tools keep getting bigger. In August, as NPR reported, the president’s own media company started selling Wall Street firms early access to his posts for 100,000 dollars a month, so traders can profit off what he says before you can. That is the model now. The president’s decisions, sold in advance to the people who can afford them.
So here they are. Public Citizen counted 57 people in Trump’s administration worth 100 million dollars or more, and the full list is in their report. What follows are the 32 biggest fortunes, the ones running the largest agencies and holding the most money. Every number here comes from their own financial disclosures and their FEC donation records. They signed these figures themselves.
This list does not even count Trump, or Elon Musk. 57 is the floor.
For scale, here is what came before. Barack Obama’s administration had 3 people worth 100 million dollars or more. George W. Bush had 5. Joe Biden had 5. Trump has 57.
That is not a difference of degree. That is a different kind of government.
