What Billionaires See in Donald Trump
41:34 Share

Did you see that Obama and her husband are going to be campaigning with Harris pretty soon? I did not see that. I did see that. I think Michelle's doing some of her own things out there, right? She's really out on the hustings. Well, this is the thing is that, I mean, this is one thing that I came across when I was doing the Harris profile is that she went all in on Harris. And this is a very, in some ways, very smart thing that Harris did when she was in the first years of the vice presidency was that she

became very close with Michelle. Smart move, definitely. Well, I did think, okay, what I noticed was that when, I don't know if you guys saw Harris in Wisconsin, she had a move that seemed very vintage and, in fact, almost better than Obama's way of dealing with the crowd. I don't know if you saw this. So there was a heckler, somebody, and she just said, Oh, you guys are at the wrong rally.

No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street. And it was like, snap, you know, that very open. The crowd went completely, they loved it. When she saw that it was working, I was just watching her face. And then she was like, oh, yeah, this is a good one. Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos, and I'm joined, as ever, by my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer. Hi, Susan. Hey there. And good morning, Jane. Hey, Evan. Hi.

When it comes to campaign fundraising, Kamala Harris has so far outraised and outspent Donald Trump. But Trump is playing catch up with a lot of help from some billionaire friends. Take over, Eladius. Take over. Hi, everyone. Fight, fight, fight. Vote, vote, vote. Thank you.

With Trump losing so many traditional Republicans, how did he manage to get so many mega donors on his side? And what do they want in return? Our very own Susan Glasser digs into this question in an excellent new piece that will be published in the magazine on Monday and is already up online. Susan, before we get into the details, which I have to say are astonishing, let's

I want to take a moment just to gape slack jawed at some of these new numbers that are out on the scale of money that are coming into the Trump campaign. We already knew that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, is funding a big get out the vote operation somewhat controversially, even within Trump circles. People wonder whether he knows what he's doing.

Now we know just how much money he spent, $75 million in the most recent quarter. Meanwhile, Miriam Adelson, who's a longtime conservative donor, she spent $95 million in the same period. When you see these numbers and you know the culture around it today, around this donor movement, what jumps out at you? Well, thank you, Evan. I've been around the money and politics circle for a long time, and I think...

I was glad to take the time and do the reporting and take stock because I feel like a whole bunch of zeros got added into these numbers without us even reckoning with it. You know, we all knew back in 2010, Citizens United, it spelled kind of the end of the legal regime for money in politics. But I feel like we've become inured to just how out of control things

The amounts of money that individual wealthy people are dumping into our politics and distorting and warping our politics more than I even realized, by the way, more than even at the beginning of the Trump era. So you mentioned Miriam Adelson. She's a great example. They've been longtime big donors, her and her late husband, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. OK, well, they gave 50 million dollars to Romney Super PAC, right? Kind of the last super

of the team normal Republicans, right? Still out of control, money in politics. Boom, up to $90 million giving to support Trump's reelection in 2020. She's now over $100 million and counting in this election cycle. I just think that tells you a lot about the metastasization of money in politics and

Also, how much influence are these billionaires going to be able to ask in exchange for this money to Trump? One of the most amazing things in here is that you point out that back in the Bush years, for instance, to become a pioneer or one of these kind of elevated class of donors, you had to give a certain amount of money. And today it is just –

literally many more zeros on that sum that is required to become a big mocker in the Trump world. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. That was sort of my frame of reference way back long, long ago. I actually covered money in politics for The Washington Post. And my big, very modest little scoop was the story that George W. Bush was going to create this new club essentially for fundraisers. And to get in it, you had to round up very meticulously

because it was only a few thousand dollars at a time, these hard money contributions. And if you were able to raise, put together 100,000 of those, you got this corny title of pioneer. And then in 2004, they added a ranger if you got up to 200,000. Okay, so if we've gone from 200,000 as a bundler in 2004 campaign to

$2.5 million to be in the top tier Trump victory trust. And by the way, that's not even considered the serious money for Trump and the billionaires. The reason he's personally handholding the folks like Elon Musk, that doesn't even get you to the real price of entry. $5.

$50 million checks have not become uncommon in this environment. Susan, I got to say first, as someone who's also been writing a lot about money and politics over the years, this is a fantastic piece. And I hope everybody reads it. It's amazing. And it is really important to take a look at what's happened in the few years since Citizens United. It's unbelievable what's happening with American politics.

You know, people now talk about the possibility that there will be, at some point, a billion-dollar campaign donation. I mean, it is not outside of the realm of possibility. You open your story in the home of Nelson Peltz down in Florida. Can you tell us a little bit about what was going on there? Who's Nelson Peltz? Why did you start with your piece right there? Well, thank you, Jane. I have to say, everybody knows, I'm sure, but if you don't,

Jane's amazing book, Dark Money, is the gold standard definitive portrait of how America got off the rails in money and politics. And, you know, we're all just filling in the details from there. And by the way, one of the details that blew my mind is the one that you just mentioned, Jane, that we are not that far off from the first billion dollar contribution. This was something that a longtime political operative said to me when we were talking for this piece. And I just I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

But the piece opens, as you said, at Nelson Peltz's home, the $300 million plus oceanfront mansion not far from Mar-a-Lago might be even fancier than Mar-a-Lago. Nelson Peltz, an activist investor, you might remember him. He tried and failed to mount a big boardroom coup in Disney earlier this year. It didn't work out. Actually, with another one of the people he convened,

at his home. Imagine the wealthiest conservative big givers in America all together at the same dinner. You've got Elon Musk, the world's richest man. You've got people who might be Donald Trump's treasury secretary in a second term. And by the way, you've got a lot of people

who really don't like Donald Trump very much. And that's the thing that's fascinating, right? It's true, of course, of many Republican senators, but I found in reporting this piece, it's also true of many Republican big business types and donors. And

Like many Americans, they denounced Donald Trump after January 6th. Nelson Peltz, the host of this dinner gathering, he was so disgusted by January 6th that he went on CNBC the very next day and he said that Donald Trump was a disgrace.

He apologized to America for voting for Donald Trump. He had had a $10 million fundraiser at this huge mansion of his called Montserrat in the 2020 campaign. He said he was sorry. Well, of course, America, we all know the ending of this, right, which is that one by one they somehow find ways to rationalize it. February 16th at this dinner was Nelson Peltz's moment of

to rationalize it. He wasn't even on speaking terms with Donald Trump. And he opens this dinner at his home for about two dozen of the wealthiest Republicans in the country. And according to an attendee I spoke with, he opens this dinner and he says, Donald Trump is a terrible human being. I know many of us really don't like him. And yet it was clear by this point Trump was going to win the nomination again. And he said,

Well, you know, the country is going to hell and we don't like Joe Biden, so we have no choice. We're going to have to fall in line behind Donald Trump again. To me, that dinner was really an iconic moment because one by one, they begin the process of rationalizing, justifying, and virtually all of the major givers of the Trump era, they find ways to justify it.

One other line that followed that, that I thought was so important was Nelson Peltz says, we can't afford to have four more years of Biden. The word that he uses as a financial term, afford. What are these guys thinking about? Their pocketbooks. It's all about how much money they will or won't make in the next four years. Who are these people in this room? A lot of them are finance people who, as you say,

They live to make money and they seem to be looking. They want a winner. And by then they're beginning to think that Trump might be the winner. It's just another venture capital investment for them. And then it's not giving anything away to say that then there is another Nelson Peltz dinner in which Donald Trump, who the host has previously described as a terrible human being, is then in attendance and is in fact then now receiving these promises.

pledges of fealty and obedience. Well, that's right. You kind of come full circle. So on February 16th, you have this dinner and Nelson Bells is still calling him a terrible guy. What happens in the next few weeks is that Donald Trump, as they understood he was going to do, locks up the nomination. Nikki Haley, who many of them had flirted with giving to, drops out. And so by later in March,

Nelson Peltz invites Trump back. He invites Musk back. And they have a Sunday morning breakfast at his same place. And now Trump is the guest of honor. One of the things that you're doing here that is really important in this piece is that you're helping us identify and categorize a new generation of supporters. How do you understand what actually has drawn them to Trump's side? Is it about Biden? Is it about

woke politics, as they would describe it, or is it about something else? I mean, this is something that you spend a lot of time, you know, trying to figure out and talking with these folks. And you want to unpack it because, of course, there are different motives. And they're also kind of different in the kind of anthropology of this, right? There are different tribes of Republican donors. So you

have the ideologues who have been in it for a long time, some of them deeply uncomfortable with Donald Trump, like the Koch brothers, now down to one brother, Gene, wrote so amazingly about them. They've never liked Donald Trump. They still haven't endorsed him. Their network spent millions trying to defeat Trump in this year's primaries, primarily by backing Haley. Didn't work out. So, you know, there are some of the ideologues, actually, who aren't comfortable with Trump, but are

enormous givers to shape the party, including many Trump supporters. Then there are, you know, the kind of more traditional Republican corporate donors and the like. Again, fascinating to me, many of them have left the big giving, at least in the presidential race. And that was another interesting takeaway in this. There are statistics that show that more than a quarter of the Fortune 100 CEOs are

were publicly endorsing and giving to Republican presidential candidates through the Romney era. It, quote, fell off a cliff, as one person told me, after Donald Trump became the party leader. So who are the new people? Well, there's the Silicon Valley types like Elon Musk,

who seemed to be attracted in part by Donald Trump's extreme transactionalism and his willingness to almost openly say, fine, I'm open for business. I was fascinated to do reporting around Trump's flip-flopping on the crypto industry, for example. He was publicly saying Bitcoin seems like a scam to me. I'm not in favor of it. Now, this year, he's become like the big public proponent of Bitcoin. Is it a coincidence, though?

that one of his biggest fundraisers this year is the CEO of the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Letnick, longtime acquaintance of Donald Trump. But back in 2016, he was giving only a few thousand dollars to Republicans. Now he's giving millions and millions of dollars. He has become himself a leading public proponent of crypto. He is appearing alongside Donald Trump this summer at the Maine Bidding.

Bitcoin annual conference. He even gets a ride on Trump's plane. Trump, like with Musk, he puts him on stage at a rally. He says, you know, to a TV interviewer, you know, traveling to a rally with Donald Trump, it's like going to a concert with Mick Jagger. And what happens? Donald Trump not only gets the support from the crypto industry, he actually names people

Howard Lutnick to be one of the co-chairs of his transition team this year. Now, Lutnick is giving interviews saying there's going to be a loyalty oath in the new Donald Trump White House. And, of course, the Trump children start their careers.

Bitcoin business. With Trump. With Trump, who is now making money off of this already, before the election even. And similarly, you describe how Trump flip-flopped on the subject of what to do about TikTok. Previously, he was saying that it had to be sold to a United States bank

business owner. Now he's flipped on that. Even, you could quote Steve Bannon, his friend who sort of tips everyone off. Why did that change? Well, because a huge backer of Trump, Jeffrey Yass, is also someone who owns a lot of ByteDance, which owns TikTok. And so what the donors want somehow becomes what Trump wants. And he makes a little money on the side in that case, too. Well, again, to this question of psychology, Jane, you brought up one of my other favorite

observations in the piece. And this was from a billionaire I spoke with earlier this summer, definitely a non-Trump billionaire, but somebody who obviously talks to these folks a lot. He made the observation a couple points. One,

Pick the winners. Pick the winner money is a big factor in American politics. These are men, almost all of them, who define themselves as, you know, winners in life. They want to be on the winning side. They see advantage in that to them. It's also a game, a competitive game that they play. And one thing that really did influence, I think, the early stages of this money race was a perception of

Among the money crowd that Donald Trump had the advantage over Joe Biden. Obviously, that was a perception that was building through the spring and early summer of this year up until the debate between Biden and Trump that ultimately spelled the end of Biden's candidacy.

I heard a lot of that when I began reporting this piece early this summer. Well, you know, Biden in a way made it easy for them. They would just justify what we can't have four more years of this. And, you know, look, these are partisan people, too. So my guess is that they would have found a way even if Biden wasn't.

visibly aging in front of our eyes to justify their choice. But they definitely talked in terms of, you know, well, Biden has not only been terrible, but he can't possibly be president for four more years. So that was one factor. I think built-in partisanship is another. Pick the winner money is another. And the transactionalism of Donald Trump. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

Hey, podcast listeners. I'm Chris Morocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious and host of the Dinner SOS podcast.

Every week on Dinner SOS, we help listeners tackle cooking challenges. I cannot manage pork in like any fashion. And with all the big cooking holidays coming up, there's a lot of home cooks who need our help. We're doing a Thanksgiving with 15 friends, and the friend with the biggest house is hosting. But unfortunately, that house also has the teeny-tiniest kitchen.

Christmas morning. I flipped them over, walked away, and one loaf collapsed onto the floor. Luckily, I come prepared with over 50,000 recipes in the Bon Appetit and Epicurious archives, plus my incredible co-hosts from the Test Kitchen and beyond. I was almost overexcited about the options that we had. There were so many. I have so many options, too. Okay, great. Nelson, you're in a great place. I love it.

Listen to and follow Dinner SOS wherever you get your podcasts. Happy cooking. It's really interesting because, of course, there's always been transactionalism when it comes to big money and politics.

Something seems to have changed a little bit, though, and that's what you get at here. And you quote the historian Sean Wilentz saying that in the past we had robber barons, but what we've got now are oligarchs. And what he's saying is there's not even a pretense that it's about being civic-minded. There's nothing about what

It's good for the rest of the country, the planet, anything else, but what's good for me? These guys are not running, for the most part, public companies where there are stockholders who could care. These are private people who are extraordinarily rich, right?

and part of this economy we're in with tremendous economic inequality. They're the winners among the winners. They want to ensure that the winners keep winning. It's a different period in the history of campaign finance. We're now into an era when it is no longer about giving money in order to just be on the winning team or to get the ambassadorship to Paris. No, you actually quote Gordon Sondland at one point. Tell that story. He is actually saying the quiet part out loud.

By the way, this guy, of course, is already famous for saying the quiet part out loud. You may remember him from his walk on role in the 2019 impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. He was the wealthy hotel owner who parlayed a one million dollar contribution to Trump's inauguration into a role as the ambassador to the European Union.

and then managed somehow to insert himself into the politics of Ukraine and Russia during the course of his time as ambassador, lands in the middle of the impeachment mess and testifies under oath ultimately in public that there was in fact a, quote, quid pro quo, unquote, in Trump's pressuring of President Zelensky to open investigations of his political opponents, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

Trump, of course, was furious about this. And Trump fired him two days after the Senate trial in the impeachment case ended in Trump's acquittal. And yet, amazingly enough, someone told me this summer, oh, you can't even believe it. There's Gordon Sondland back out there supporting Donald Trump. And so I reached him. I called him at his house in the Hamptons, which seemed appropriate for this discussion. And, you know, we had this conversation and he said, I've been bundling.

for Republican candidates all the way back to George W. Bush. George W. Bush, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and then Donald Trump. And the difference is the zeros that have been added to it, the sums, even compared with the beginning of Trump's

are unbelievable. He said, you used to be able to buy a seat at a roundtable for $50,000. Now at a zero, you're talking $500,000 just to get a seat at the table for a 10 or 15 minute conversation with the candidate where nothing is really said. And he said, today's donor class is

really has different expectations along with those increased dollar amounts. I think this goes to Sean Wilentz's point as well. When he says it's an oligarchy today, he says they want power for this money. They want, in effect, to be taking over parts of the government and, you know, really reshaping the country in what they expect the president to do. Not just they

They want a president of the United States to call them from the Oval Office. But they want it to mean something. They want to do something with it. And in that regard, I think Elon Musk's demands here, which are escalating and highly specific, are something that have yet to get

enough scrutiny. We talked about the Nelson Peltz meetings, right? The dinner and then the breakfast. Well, at that breakfast, according to the Wall Street Journal, they had a very specific conversation. And this is all the way back in March, even though it didn't come public until much later. A very specific conversation between Musk and Trump where Musk says, yeah, I want to play a specific role. By August, he's endorsed Trump and he's publicly talking about how there needs to be a national debate

presidential commission that would cut government money and that would essentially reshape the entire structure of the federal government, what it spends and how it spends it. And not surprisingly, Musk thought he should do that. Donald Trump then endorses that in a speech at the New York Economic Club. He now calls Musk his future secretary of cost cutting. This, again, is a man who would be the most self-interested person you could imagine, a walking conflict of interest. He has a

billions and billions of dollars in federal government contracts. I believe he's one of the largest Pentagon contractors at this point. Our space program through SpaceX is highly dependent upon him. Of course, his venture Tesla wouldn't really exist today if it hadn't been for significant government subsidies. Can you imagine a more conflicted person

to be sitting as a czar over all government spending in a future Trump administration? I so agree that the story of Musk is one of the most unbelievably corrupt things I have seen in American politics and that people are not just requiring information about this is amazing. The natural rebuttal to what you just said, Jane, will be people say, oh, don't be naive. There's always been money in politics. And I think it's a huge mistake to

to succumb to that. That's an illusion of being wised up. Because what we're actually saying here is that things have fundamentally changed. The differences of degree are so vast that they become a difference in kind. And that this really begins to approximate the kind of oligarchic relationship that you see in other countries. It's not just a natural extension. In very corrupt other countries. I mean, if you go back and you take a look at the amount of money that was involved in, say, Watergate with the big donors giving to Nixon, it's a

pittance compared to what we're looking at here. And that was considered one of the biggest scandals in American history. People have lost their sense of proportion. They're being boiled alive. You know, I really appreciate you guys saying that because for me, I think that's what this piece was. It was an exercise in realizing that we've almost tuned out and that while we had a

the entire legal basis of any regulation around campaign finance had sort of disappeared in the years since Citizens United.

that it still matters. It matters even more what's happened just in the last few years. And I think we've kind of collectively, we've already, we're the boiled frog. One of the other things that so strikes me as someone who's written a lot about the Kochs and dark money is that that was dark money for a reason. The Kochs had a family motto, which was, it's when the whale spouts that it gets harpooned. They were underwater. They were trying not to

to be seen. Okay, what's happened since then? Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is on the stage in public, jumping for joy at his power with Trump. You've now got oligarchs

who have a sense of impunity. They are basically above the law. There are no limits to how much they can give and how much power they can get. And I do think it's because of the Supreme Court Citizens United decision. What it basically said was money is speech. What is more American than free speech? They made it sound like a good thing that you can spend as much as you can. And from that moment on, corruption was no longer...

viewed as corrupt. Two quick points to this, because it's so important to underscore. It's the meeting and the collision of two really nefarious developments. One is the Supreme Court decision, which just makes it wide open. And then it's fused with the advent of Donald Trump on the scene, the ultimate transactional

I'm open for business. I'm willing to, you know, essentially auction off swaths of the federal government to self-interested parties. And there was this very important story The Washington Post broke earlier this year of his meeting with oil and gas donors at Mar-a-Lago in which he essentially said, well, I'm going to be so good for you. You should see this as a business opportunity for you and raise a billion dollars for me. This leaked online.

to the post because it was so outrageous to me, very reminiscent of the quid pro quo that Donald Trump offered to Ukraine and that he offers everywhere in life. And so I think it's the fusion of these two things, right? It's a historical outburst

and disaster for the U.S., that we had this kind of no-rules regime for billionaires in place because of the Supreme Court, and then the rise of the ultimate transactional Republican. All right, we're going to take a quick break. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

If you've been enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and a review on the podcast platform of your choice. And while you're there, don't forget to hit the follow button so you never miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening.

Hi, this is David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. The New Yorker Festival returns on October 25th to the 27th. Now, some events have already sold out, so hurry and check out the schedule. We'll be joined by Julianne Moore, Atul Gawande, Julie Nuretu, Alan Cumming, Liz Cheney, John Mulaney, Dax Shepard,

and Brian Washington. Plus, there'll be live podcast recordings and panels on politics, literature, technology, and much more. You can learn all about it at newyorker.com slash festival.

Susan, I had dinner the other night with some folks visiting from the Bay Area. These are sort of younger tech people. And one of the things they were talking about that caught my attention was how many folks in the Silicon Valley leadership crowd see J.D. Vance as their natural friend.

agent, as the person who will ultimately represent their interests in the future. How much do you see J.D. Vance figuring into this decision making? And you have a scene in there that's really impossible to forget, which is people sitting around a dinner in New York City, almost literally picking a

Yeah, that scene is something because it's the very same night that Donald Trump was convicted in New York, which might seem like a bizarre moment for the high watermark of his fundraising. And yet, nonetheless, he turned this

around. As we know, he played the victim in a way that seemed to resonate with the donor class. And he goes almost immediately from his post-verdict press conference at the courthouse in New York. He hops in the motorcade, goes uptown to the Fifth Avenue apartment, one of the wealthiest men in America, the Florida sugar and real estate magnate, Jose Pepe Fanjul. And

There's two dozen of the wealthiest Republican donors in the country. That's who Donald Trump and his son Eric have dinner with right after he's been convicted of 34 felony counts. It's the first time in American history, of course, that a former president has been tried and convicted of anything. And he has dinner with these wealthy magnates and he literally goes around the room.

and asked their opinion on who should I pick for vice president. I was told that he asked every single person in the room. You know, some of them say Nikki Haley. Some of them say Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, who himself was a very successful businessman.

And actually, even in this kind of establishment room, a couple of them do mention J.D. Vance, who ultimately would be picked by Donald Trump. Can I just say, all right, I know that's an extraordinary situation, but I, too, have been asked by Donald Trump—

Who should be his vice president? I had this conversation with him in 2016. I was interviewing him and he starts asking, well, who do you think I should pick? I think he does it just to flatter them and to cast himself in the position of always being the boss. He's back to the apprentice and deciding who to fire and who to hire. Can I just say, I think that's right, Jane. Actually, it's about the psychology of the donors.

as much as it is about Donald Trump, because that is his MO. And so what I thought was really revealing was the quote from the attendee who told me about this, who just marveled at it. He said they'd never seen anything like it. They loved it. And, you know, although this guy was self-aware, he also later told me one of the biggest Republican donors who has been a holdout, I should say, is financier

And he has given more than $75 million, probably in the end it'll be pushing $100 million to conservative causes and candidates in this year's election. And yet he has held out on Trump. He said at one point he would consider voting for him.

But he wanted to see who the vice president was, and sources told me he was very much against J.D. Vance. But this source also told me, you know, Donald Trump doesn't give two hoots, you know, who Ken Griffin wants as vice president.

Jane, you mentioned you brought us back to 2016 for a minute, and I think both of you guys would have a sense of the history here. One of the questions we should be asking is how much does this kind of money matter? Jane, how much when you've looked at it over the course of many of these presidential campaigns in the end, does it equate to electoral success?

I mean, 2016 was a bit of an aberration because actually Hillary Clinton raised more than Donald Trump and it didn't make her win. Generally, if you look back over the last few decades, almost always the candidate that spent the most is the candidate that wins. Not always, but almost always. And this year, I mean, we have to say just in fairness that

Kamala Harris is raising historic amounts of money herself. But as Susan points out in this piece, it's different, the money that she's raising. She has more of the wealthiest people in the country giving to her, but on the Democratic side, they're giving smaller donations to her. And she has many more really small donations. What you see in Trump is this concentration of

intensely gigantic, just shocking gifts of money to Trump from a handful of the very, very richest right-wing people in the country. And what we've seen over the last few decades overall is that Hardy's role has completely diminished because the whole game has moved to individuals who generally want something.

This theme today really ties into some of the things we've talked about on other shows, which is this sense of the decline of the party as an organizing function. You know, the hollow party is the way that people describe it today. And in the end, the explanation, the underlying meaning.

under tow for why that has happened is because the power is the money and the money has moved out into the hands of these individual candidates. Susan, you mentioned earlier that you'd covered this in an earlier chapter when you were at the Washington Post. As you try to put these two things together,

into some juxtaposition, what do you think the ultimate effect has been on our politics writ large to see essentially the rise of what you call in this piece the MAGA mega donors? Yeah, I think that's really an important observation, Evan. You know, Tom Davis, who was, you know, really savvy inside player, Republican congressman, he ran the party's Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, so he was very familiar with fundraising of a previous era. He pointed this out, that this

Supreme Court decision and what's happened since then essentially cemented the demise of the political parties. And it distributed power because it distributed money out to the ideological margins of super PACs on both the left and the right. And so one of the structural reasons...

for the incredible divisiveness and perpetual outrage machines that we're seeing on both the right and the left is that that's where the money lies right now. It lies not in the center, but in the margins. It doesn't have the filter, really, of the parties anymore. Those were hollowed out such that Donald Trump was able to take over, essentially, the Republican Party. Remember, the party elite hated him in 2016. They were almost...

Completely united against him. He didn't actually take any real super PAC money in the Republican primaries in 2016 because it wasn't on offer, you know. And then what happened? It was a hostile takeover, as his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, put it to us once. And it was able and available for takeover because it had been hollowed out. So I just think that that's one of the most important things.

Often hidden factors is this money and why our politics is so divisive. But another point, we're just a couple weeks away from an election where Donald Trump might actually win. He might actually come back to the White House. And so one of the things I wanted to do in this piece was to look at what was his history when he was in the White House for four years of giving access to.

to big Republican donors, to giving special status to them. And what I found in looking back at this is that he's already done many of the things that had anyone else done them would have been unbelievable, huge,

headlines, scandals, and I'm not even sure people are aware of what Trump did in the White House with his big donors. You're absolutely right that it's one of the reasons that politics is so divided and so polarized and particularly so extreme. I also think it's one of the reasons, though, that democracy seems broken. And if you look at the priorities of the public, according to public opinion polls, they are not the same priorities as these gigantic donors.

Vast numbers of people, to begin with, do not like the idea of billionaires controlling American politics on both the left and the right. They hate Citizens United and want to stop this. OK, that's one difference. Another is that vast numbers of Americans favor more redistributive programs in terms of income. They want to see a better social safety net

Not a worse one. And I don't think that's what Elon Musk is thinking about. I hate to say it. And they want to see higher taxes on the super rich. Very, very few super rich people want to raise their own taxes. And I think you've gotten us to this important recognition that one of the stakes, one of the things that is on the line here in this election is that there are a generation of younger voters, especially who are

baffled, perplexed, mystified, and ultimately on the verge of despair about exactly the kinds of things you just talked about, Jane. Let's be clear, there are big donors on Harris's side as well. But the huge fundraising advantage she has is because of this dramatic advantage of small donors and the number of people that have come out who have poured money in, particularly in those early weeks after she got into the race. And I think if

She is able to win with that. It is even beyond just the mechanical power of having that money in her coffers in order to run with it. It is also has a demonstration effect to people that actually being involved in politics on an individual on a small basis.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think you're exactly right, Jane, that it's precisely in the ability of a small handful of the wealthiest people in the country to gain access through their enormous contributions and to impose their own agendas that they can actually gain access to this oligarchic form of power.

on a political party that poses really kind of a basic threat to the system. It's also true that it's great politics for Democrats to talk about the billionaire tax cut that Donald Trump wants to impose. Kamala Harris, she had a line actually in her convention acceptance speech. She said, you know, Donald Trump doesn't have your interests at heart. He just wants to hang out with his billionaire friends.

is what she pointed out. Now, it's off message for the Democrats. They do not want to draw attention to the fact that actually they have more billionaires supporting them than Donald Trump does. And by the way, Donald Trump also does not want to call attention to that fact because he feels that no matter what his populist rhetoric is, like,

Just he seems to be personally outraged at the idea that Harris has these wealthy supporters. Just a few weeks ago, he was, you know, posting on his true social, any rich person in America who supports Kamala Harris, you are, and he wrote in all caps,

for supporting Kamala Harris. I just think he's offended at the idea that, you know, rich people wouldn't support him. But interestingly, Evan, I want to know what your friend from Silicon Valley said, because in the last few weeks, we have seen a little bit of a difference between

the Biden presidency and campaign and Kamala Harris, who comes, after all, from California. You can't be a politician in California without having spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley raising money. She has relationships there that Biden didn't have. And there's a little bit

bit of a sense that she may actually be more friendly to these folks. People in that world took note when one of the big venture capitalists a few weeks ago, Ben Horowitz, he's part of the big venture capital firm out there that had shocked this world this summer by actually endorsing Donald Trump and giving money to him. But Horowitz said a few weeks ago, actually,

I'm a longtime friend with my wife of Kamala Harris, and my wife and I are going to give her a significant contribution. He undid his endorsement of Donald Trump. I also spoke with a major Democratic donor here on the East Coast who told me that he had also spoken personally with Harris.

since she had become the candidate and that he felt she was making outreach to the business community that Joe Biden had never tried to. Yeah, I do think there is a difference between how Biden thinks about business and how Harris does. And she comes from California, meaning that when she was attorney general, she was called upon to make judgments about where she was going to position herself with regards to things like

labor issues or market access. And ultimately, she was perceived as being more or less friendly to some of her big constituents in the state, Meta, Alphabet, these big tech companies. And that ultimately may be politically important because she

As somebody very close to Biden once said to me, look, at the end of the day, he may be from Delaware, which is the corporate state, but he's never been comfortable around money. It's just not his natural habitat. He doesn't particularly understand it. He can't speak to it politically. Ultimately, that's Trump's kind of perfect pitch is he knows how to talk to and about money.

That ultimately may be helpful to Harris because she is not generating the antibodies in the business community that Biden did. But on the other hand, it may really alienate some of the very progressive parts of the Democratic Party. They're going to be behind her for the election, I'm sure, to a large extent. But The New Yorker had a wonderful piece recently about the Bitcoin lobby and how powerful it is.

And who's running it? A former Al Gore person, Chris Lehane, a big Democrat. The lines are not clear, really, 100% when it comes to super money, especially in Silicon Valley. And it's something...

to keep an eye on. All right, guys. Well, we're going to have more to talk about in the future on money and politics. But for the moment, folks, go out, read Susan's piece. This is going to open your eyes to things that I think even the savvy reader didn't know was happening. Susan, Jane, terrific to be with you. Great to be with you both, too. No, thank you, guys. It's wonderful to be able to sit and talk about it.

This has been the political scene from The New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex D'Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter and our editor is Gianna Palmer. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's head of global audio. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thank you so much for listening. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for The New Yorker. I...

focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

You know, for us at In the Dark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling. And we felt a real kinship with The New Yorker, like the combination of the deeply reported stories that The New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to The New Yorker, it would be... Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but...

I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker. You know, like you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned like

the other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe. And so to me, it's like I can't imagine not reading these writers.

You can have all the journalism, the fiction, the film, book, and TV reviews, all the cartoons, just by going right now to newyorker.com slash dark. Plus, there's an incredible archive, a century's worth of award-winning work just waiting for you. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And thanks.