“We are a government of billionaires.” Donald Trump started selling the illusion of exclusivity half a century ago. Now his second Administration is selling access to the White House. Evan Osnos reports. Plus:
The White House’s exchange of influence for money is so frank that one lobbying veteran called it “outer-borough Mafia shit.”Photo illustration by Ricardo Tomás
Ian Crouch
Newsletter editor
Last week, the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, explained his lack of concern about mounting allegations of corruption inside the White House. “President Trump does everything out in the open. He’s not trying to hide anything,” he told CNN. “He’s putting it out there so everybody can evaluate for themselves.” It was perhaps less a defense of Donald Trump than an indictment of the rest of us: How are we holding this President accountable?
“In a matter of weeks, the flood of cash swirling around the White House swamped whatever bulwarks against corruption remained in American law and culture,” Evan Osnos writes, in a deeply reported piece, from this week’s issue, on the new rules of buying influence in Trump’s Washington. Part of the strategy has been sheer brazenness, what one lobbying veteran describes as “outer-borough Mafia shit.” Another part, Osnos notes, has been speed: “Trump has sold influence so briskly that the political machinery cannot keep up.” The result, for many, has been a feeling of helplessness. But not everyone is giving up. Osnos introduces us to the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans dedicated to fighting inequality, and he follows along on the barnstorming tour led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which attracted record crowds. “It’s one thing for me to talk about oligarchy as an abstraction,” Sanders tells Osnos. “Trump has made it clear. He has said it loudly and clearly: we are a government of billionaires.”
We have now reached a critical moment of choice. “The open practice of crony capitalism is pushing America toward a reckoning between two paths,” Osnos writes, “one in which oligarchy comes to be seen as normal and one in which it does not.”
Read “Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder” »
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P.S. Harvard has revoked the tenure of Francesca Gino, a professor at the business school who’d been accused of manipulating her research on honesty and ethical behavior. Revisit Gideon Lewis-Kraus on whether her work was all a lie.
Erin Neil contributed to this edition.