Considering the attendees who helped Donald Trump plan
his attempted coup four years ago, allowed him to escape legal and political
punishment for it, or financed his return to the Oval Office, the parties after
this week’s transfer of power might have been termed “The Night of the Finks.”
Viewers were informed, at noon on Monday, that “a
golden age for America begins right now.”
Well, the newly inaugurated President got the letter
“g” right in the key word in that sentence, but that’s about it. The correct
word was “Gilded.”
You might recall “The Gilded Age” as the title of an
HBO series about the filthy rich in New York following the Civil War. It took
its name from an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that
satirized greed, political corruption, and conspicuous consumption in that
period.
Alas, the book’s subtitle has a lasting significance
that its collaborators could never have imagined: “A Tale of Today.”
Much like our time, the innovations in technology and
finance introduced 150 years ago gave rise to fortunes of staggering proportions
and equally vast inequality. The possessors of these riches, memorably dubbed “robber
barons,” were—and are—not shy about crushing union and safety activism, buying legislators,
and subverting attempts to regulate their businesses even while flaunting their
wealth and influence.
Taking note of the assembly of the well-heeled on hand
after the oath of office—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, LVMH CEO Bernard
Arnault, Alphabet Inc. co-founder Sergey Brin, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—one person
on LinkedIn hailed “businesses and government [that] run their companies or
departments like sports teams who put the best on the field.”
So much depends on the eye of the beholder. He saw
business all-stars; I saw successors to the 1933 Weimar businessmen determined
but unable to control the twitchy guy who’d taken over their country.
Some of them proceeded cheerfully, others nervously,
but all optimistically to congratulate a fellow billionaire who, unlike most of
them, was born into wealth, then saved by his father from falling off several
financial cliffs in the early 1990s.
If they felt any jealousy over his inherited fortune,
they gave no sign of it as they greeted the newly sworn-in President and
recently convicted felon. It was more important that he help them maintain
their privileged perch—the tax cut that has disproportionately benefited them, the
government regulations from which they beg relief.
What they all share is, in the apt phrase of The
Atlantic’s Franklin Foer, “a playbook for exploiting public office for private gain.”
Somehow, they all managed to stifle their guffaws over
the new President’s hobbyhorse about renaming the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America.” Maybe they didn’t realize that the true “Gulf of America” was what
now separated them from the poorest, most desperate citizens of their country.
They wouldn’t have found that out from the wall-to-wall,
breathless media coverage surrounding the inaugural, which did not constitute
political journalism or even fashion reporting so much as plutography—an obscene
depiction of the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
Stepping to the front of the line to make the most of
their relationship with Trump have been Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk, until
recently the co-heads of the President-elect’s new Department of Government
Efficiency—an advisory commission that, Musk blithely assured the public
in November, could find $2 trillion in federal spending cuts.
With Musk more recently suggesting that $1 trillion might be more feasible, that hope didn’t make it to the inauguration.
Neither,
as it happened, did Ramaswamy, the biotech and finance entrepreneur who auditioned
as Trump’s most shameless Mini-Me in the GOP primaries, a candidate utterly
unable to articulate a single point of difference with the eventual nominee.
Late last week, having already royally ticked off
transition team members with his arrogance, Ramaswamy gave his rapidly growing
army of enemies the only weapon they needed with his X post on H 1-B visas. Tech
companies, he claimed, hire foreign workers in part because of a mindset in the
country that has “venerated mediocrity over excellence.”
With immigration-conscious MAGA believers suitably inflamed, that was all Musk needed to elbow him out of co-leading the commission, according to a Politico report.
Now, Mini-Me is
consoling himself by contemplating a campaign for governor of Ohio, a state
that has already inexplicably propelled another former tech finance guy, J.D.
Vance, into the political stratosphere.
Not that Musk didn’t cause some head-scratching
himself. On Monday night, exuberant over his newly exalted position, the X-Man
pushed his arms upward and outward from his chest in a way that the Anti-Defamation
League charitably characterized as an “awkward gesture” but that more than a
few saw as a Nazi or Fascist salute.
Given Musk’s full-throated support for the far right
in Europe (“Only AfD can save Germany, end of story"), his straight-arm
gesture the other night looks a lot like Dr. Strangelove’s impulsive “Mein
Fuhrer, I can walk!"
Throughout the day and night on Monday, you couldn’t
help noticing Melania Trump’s navy blue boater-style toque. The past
and present First Lady adored it so much that she kept it on even after she
stepped inside the Capitol and watched her husband take the oath of office again.
The hat was really expansive. Could she have
been concealing the expression in her eyes from a curious public? Moreover, the
President’s niece Mary spoke for many in saying that the headgear was Melania’s
ingeniously convenient device for preventing her husband from kissing her.
Much remains to be seen for Trump’s return to power,
but in terms of the First Lady’s hat, one can already conclude: Mission
Accomplished.
“The robber barons probably looked in the mirror and thought
they were God too,” noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in an interview with The
Financial Times this past weekend.
As they look in the mirror, how many of these contemporary
fat cats must wonder, “If a know-nothing like Trump can get to the White House,
why can’t I?”
Just imagine: Even now, as one billionaire after another
waltzed around the inaugural ball, at least one—not unlike Yeats’ “rough beast,
its hour come round at last” in “The Second Coming”—might have imagined fitting
into the MAGA mold of a White House plutocrat in populist’s clothing.
(The image accompanying this post shows the new-money
Gladys, George, and Bertha Russell of New York in the Season 2 premiere of The
Gilded Age.)
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