Above all, Trump extended the equation of wealth with magical powers to members of his own dynastic family, bestowing on son-in-law Jared Kushner (a real estate developer born a multimillionaire) a portfolio so overstuffed with weighty responsibilities it rapidly became a media joke. Tallying up the duties so far—brokering Middle East peace, planning the Mar-a-Lago summit with China, monitoring US activities in Iraq, ordering drone strikes on Yemen, making government run more like a business—New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wondered, “Why don’t we just stitch him a red cape, put him in spandex, affix a stylized ‘S’ to his chest and be done with it? SuperJared has taken flight.”
It would be reassuring if we could pin this billionaire-as-savior complex on Trump’s Twitter-addled brain, or on his advisers at the Heritage Foundation, with their Ayn Randian worship of “free enterprise” and men who build tall things. But the fact is, Trump and Kushner are not the first to imagine that their great wealth endows them with Marvel Comic-like superpowers, nor the first to be encouraged in their delusions.
For two decades now, elite liberals have been looking to the billionaire class to solve the problems we used to address with collective action and a strong public sector—a phenomenon sometimes called “phila-nthro-capit-alism.” Billionaire CEOs and celebrities—Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Michael Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah, and always, for some reason, Bono—are treated less like normal people who are gifted in their fields and happen to be good at making a great deal of money, and more like demigods. Business Insider ran a listicle in 2011 headlined “10 Ways Bill Gates Is Saving the World”—a perfect distillation of the enormous powers and responsibilities being delegated to, and projected upon, this tiny clique and their charitable foundations.
The Gates Foundation alone is worth $40 billion, making it the largest charitable organization in the world. In key sectors including agriculture in Africa, infectious diseases, and the US education system, the foundation’s power rivals that of major United Nations and US government agencies. And yet, despite this unprecedented influence, the foundation’s inner workings are notoriously secretive, with key decisions made by Bill, his wife Melinda, his father William Gates, and fellow multibillionaire Warren Buffett (a nepotistic hiring policy worthy of the Trumps). And it’s worth remembering that Gates was not always seen as a world savior. Indeed, in the 1990s, Gates was widely regarded as a corporate villain, known for exploitative employment practices and for building what looked like a predatory software monopoly. Then, with Flash-like speed, he reinvented himself as a global superhero, one who could single-handedly fix the most intractable of social crises. Never mind whether Gates has any specific expertise in the areas in question, or that many of the Gates Foundation’s silver-bullet fixes have backfired badly.
Gates and his fellow world-saving billionaires are part of what has come to be known as “the Davos class,” named for the annual World Economic Summit held at the top of a mountain in Davos, Switzerland. This is the hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are cozy with those interests, and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous. At Davos’s 2017 summit, for example, Shakira spoke about her charitable work on education in Colombia, and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver discussed his plan to fight diabetes and obesity. Gates featured prominently, as always, announcing with other partners a new $460-million fund to fight the spread of infectious disease.
The power of the Davos class exploded in the 1990s, with US president Bill Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair as charter members. Once out of office, both Blair and Clinton continued their involvement. The Clinton Foundation established the annual Clinton Global Initiative, a kind of “Davos on the Hudson” featuring a continuous parade of oligarchs who, rather than pay their taxes at a fair rate, publicly shared their plans to fix the world out of the goodness of their hearts.
For many, the Clinton Foundation was the embodiment of the public merger of the Democratic Party—the traditional party of workers and unions—with the wealthiest interests in the world. Its mission can be summarized like this: there is now so much private wealth sloshing around our planet that every single problem on earth, no matter how large, can be solved by convincing the ultrarich to do the right things with their loose change. Naturally, the people to convince them to do these fine things were the Clintons, the ultimate relationship brokers and deal makers, with the help of an entourage of A-list celebrities.
For those involved, it no doubt seemed righteous. And yet for multitudes around the world, the whole Davos class came to symbolize the idea that success was a party to which they were not invited, and they knew in their hearts that this rising wealth and power was somehow connected to their growing debts and powerlessness, and the increasing precariousness of their children’s futures. The fact that politicians who promised to protect working people’s interests were so entangled with the Davos class only increased the rage. The debate over Barack Obama accepting $400,000 for a speech to a Wall Street audience needs to be understood in this context.
Trump didn’t run with the Davos crowd (indeed, he tapped into the rage against it). And many from that glamorous, liberal-leaning world are horrified by the Trump presidency. Yet the precedents set by mountaintop do-gooderism are part of the reason it became fathomable for Trump to run in the first place, and for millions of Americans to vote to hand over their government directly to a man whose sole qualification for the job was his wealth. This is not just about those who cast ballots for Trump. A great many of us who would never have voted for him have grown numbly accustomed to the notion that the mere fact of an individual having a large bank account (or many bank accounts, lots of them hidden offshore) somehow means they have bottomless expertise. Indeed, governments of all stripes have been happy to hand over more and more of what used to be seen as public policy challenges to a tiny group of very high-net-worth individuals.
Trump’s assertion that he knows how to fix America because he’s rich is nothing more than an uncouth, vulgar echo of a dangerous idea we have been hearing for years: that Bill Gates can fix Africa. Or that Richard Branson and Michael Bloomberg can solve climate change.
The Breaking Point: Bailing Out the Banks
The divide between the Davos class and everyone else has been widening since the 1980s. But for a lot of people, the breaking point came with the 2008 financial crisis.