Donald Trump Is Back to Usher In the Second Gilded Age
When President-elect Donald Trump takes office at the stroke of noon on January 20, the government will not collapse outright. Congress will continue to pass laws, and the Supreme Court will continue to decide cases. The Constitution will not disappear immediately. All of the various agencies and machineries of state will continue to function.
In another sense, however, Trump’s second inauguration will mark a break in the political traditions that date back to the nation’s founding. Americans have elected, by majority vote and electoral vote alike, a president who does not even pretend to believe in the American tradition of civic republicanism, who is openly contemptuous of ethical and legal constraints on his power, and who is more than willing to use public office for private gain.
Trump will be the first president in American history who is effectively above the law. The Supreme Court’s fateful immunity ruling last summer allows presidents to sell pardons for cash, to exchange ambassadorships for personal favors, to take bribes and kickbacks for a variety of things so long as it can be tied to an “official act.” Congress could theoretically impeach Trump for any of this, but the experience of his first term suggests that it won’t. His subordinates are demanding loyalty to the president as a guiding principle for the executive branch for the next four years; Republican lawmakers are eagerly pledging their fealty to him.
In exchange for their crucial support in last year’s presidential election, the president-elect has also given his blessing to a small coterie of right-wing Silicon Valley oligarchs who bankrolled his reelection as they seek to purge and reshape both the federal government and American democracy in their shared image. He is also giving them de facto control over policy decisions that could help enrich them even further. This government will be for billionaires, of billionaires, and by billionaires.
Americans chose the first Trump administration almost by accident in 2016; they chose it willfully in 2024. It is easy to be cynical about the Constitution and the Framers and their relevance to contemporary American life. “This will truly be the golden age of America,” Trump told his supporters in his victory speech in November. What it will likely be instead is a second gilded age, and the country may be unrecognizable by the time it ends.
First, it’s worth noting that the Constitution itself is an anti-corruption document. At the great convention in Philadelphia, the Framers feared that the United States would someday follow the path of classical and medieval European republics. Some of them, like Greek city-states and ancient Rome, abandoned their republican virtue in favor of oligarchy and dictatorship. Others, like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, fell under the sway of foreign powers who were able to bribe and ply them into betraying their own country.
“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society,” James Madison explained in Federalist 57, “and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”
To that end, much of the Constitution’s framework revolves around reducing the risk of corruption. The separation of powers into three coequal branches makes it harder for one person or group of people to gain total control. Public offices are not hereditary; they are either held by elected officials or staffed by their chosen appointees. Various clauses, now seen as archaic relics, forbid state and federal officials from granting titles of nobility to Americans or receiving payments, honors, or titles from foreign rulers.
Presidents are barred from salary increases while in office; they cannot lawfully take any other payment from the federal government or the states. “They can neither weaken his fortitude by operating on his necessities, nor corrupt his integrity by appealing to his avarice,” Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 73, referring to Congress. Nor can lawmakers increase their own salaries or take new offices that they voted to create; nor can Congress reduce the salaries of federal judges or kick them out of office, except through impeachment.
These concerns were articulated against “factions.” A common modern assumption is that the Framers used this term to describe what we now call “political parties,” but that is not quite accurate. “By a faction,” Madison wrote, “I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
Corruption, the Framers understood, was the enemy of republican self-government because it prioritized private interest over the public good. An educated, informed citizenry was best poised to ensure that government officials maintained their civic virtue through regular elections and other tools. Describing these principles feels like a return to grade school; these are supposed to be the values that every American learns from the moment they can understand them.
Those cultural and political norms have faded, especially in recent years. One can see their disappearance in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States last summer. It is hardly novel to point out that Trump does not care about these norms. Far more alarming is the high court’s disinterest in them. The court’s conservative majority, who often claim to be seeking the Framers’ original meaning, concluded that the president can commit crimes while carrying out his “core constitutional duties” without fear of arrest, indictment, or prosecution.
“The hesitation to execute the duties of his office fearlessly and fairly that might result when a president is making decisions under ‘a pall of potential prosecution’ raises ‘unique risks to the effective functioning of government,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. This is, of course, nonsense. The republic endured for nearly 250 years with presidents knowing that they could be prosecuted if they abused their office or acted corruptly.
I am not sure if the chief justice even believes in corruption on a conceptual level. By this I do not mean to say that Roberts himself is personally corrupt—to the contrary, he appears to have been a Boy Scout for the last 20 years. What I mean is that Roberts appears to take the opposite view of the Framers: that corruption is an inevitable feature of the elected branches, the First Amendment requires it to flourish, and the greater evil is acting too strongly to stop it.
To that end, he and his fellow conservatives have spent the last two decades gutting campaign-finance laws, rejecting the premise that Congress can regulate independent expenditures and other vehicles for influence to reduce the appearance or reality of corruption. They have also embarked on an audacious effort to curb prosecutions of public officials for corruption, overturning guilty verdicts in cases involving honest-services fraud in New York and gratuities in Illinois in recent years. The justices set themselves to this task shortly before Trump emerged on the scene; the resulting erosion of standards perhaps made the rise of an ethically unmoored president inevitable.
Roberts’s use of the phrase “a pall of potential prosecution” in the immunity ruling, for example, is a quotation of his decision in McDonnell v. United States in 2016. He led a unanimous court to hold that federal prosecutors could not use the federal bribery statute against a former Virginia governor who took Rolexes and luxury clothes from a businessman in exchange for setting up meetings and wielding his official influence on his benefactor’s behalf. The chief justice saw no difference between tens of thousands of dollars of gifts in McDonnell’s case and normal interactions between constituents and elected officials in hypothetical scenarios he raised, like a union official who worried about plant closures or homeowners who wanted disaster assistance.
“The government’s position could cast a pall of potential prosecution over these relationships if the union had given a campaign contribution in the past or the homeowners invited the official to join them on their annual outing to the ballgame,” Roberts wrote. “Officials might wonder whether they could respond to even the most commonplace requests for assistance, and citizens with legitimate concerns might shrink from participating in democratic discourse.” What does it say about democratic discourse that a few Rolexes or fur coats can now help you bend a governor’s ear?
That question is even more urgent as Trump’s second term takes shape. Conflicts of interest will abound. At least 13 billionaires are planned to join his Cabinet so far. Elon Musk, who has been tasked by Trump to run a “Department of Government Efficiency,” is the world’s wealthiest person and the frequent recipient of government contracts. Musk hopes to cut or eliminate an unspecified number of federal agencies and slash regulatory efforts in the ones that survive. This purported cost-cutting effort may ultimately be a boon for his many companies and the regulations they must abide by.
Musk is merely the tip of the spear for Silicon Valley’s newly congealed tech oligarchy. It goes without saying that wealthy Americans have long played an outsize role in shaping public policy, either through campaign contributions or personal connections. Even by those standards what the tech billionaires have planned is superlative. Musk, for example, will be getting coveted space in the West Wing for his ambitions. Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, a longtime Musk associate, will be the Trump administration’s “AI and crypto czar,” with a mandate to help it flourish with as few regulations as possible.
Sacks, Musk, and other right-wing Silicon Valley figures poured millions into Trump’s reelection campaign, helping it stay afloat while Democrats raised record hauls. That they funded Trump in expectation of personal benefit is no secret or mystery. If anything, they are more than happy to admit it. In an interview with New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat last week, top Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explained that his support of Trump came, at least in part, because he thought a Harris administration would not benefit the companies in which he and his firm had invested.
“They just ran this incredible terror campaign to try to kill crypto,” he told Douthat, referring to Biden-era regulatory efforts. “Then they were ramping up a similar campaign to try to kill A.I. That’s really when we knew that we had to really get involved in politics. The crypto attack was so weird that we didn’t know what to make of it. We were just hoping it would pass, which it didn’t. But it was when they threatened to do the same thing to A.I. that we realized we had to get involved in politics. Then we were up against what looked like the absolutely terrifying prospect of a second term.” Though Andreessen made ample references to other, broader public interests in the interview, his direct financial stake in the matter still stands out.
In some ways, Trump’s plans for his second term are more ambitious than his first. He hopes to wield the Justice Department and the FBI against his political foes, staffing them with loyalists and his personal attorneys. How far this will go is far from clear: Trump made similar threats last term that ultimately went nowhere, but that was before his stated plans to end the Justice Department’s independence bore fruit.
Trump’s untrammeled power is already having chilling effects in the news media. The owners of multiple major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, blocked their staffs from endorsing Kamala Harris because of potential blowback from Trump. Mark Zuckerberg, the mercurial owner of Facebook and Meta, has reinvented himself in recent weeks by jettisoning diversity initiatives and disinformation detectors, claiming that companies need more “masculine energy” while appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and reportedly blaming past policy differences on Sheryl Sandberg, who resigned from the company two years ago.
Those who challenged Trump in the past may have good reason to worry. The president seems more than interested in using public power for private revenge. In recent years, he threatened to use the Federal Communications Commission to strip major news networks of their licenses to use public airwaves over broadcasts that he disagreed with. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Paramount executives are considering settling a weak lawsuit filed by Trump last year in hopes of pleasing him ahead of a planned merger review.
Corruption also encourages corruption. New York City Mayor Eric Adams journeyed to Mar-a-Lago last week to discuss “New Yorkers’ priorities” with the president-elect. Federal prosecutors indicted Adams on corruption charges in September, and the beleaguered mayor soon began to inch toward Trump for political support. Trump suggested last month that he would “look at” a pardon for Adams, while also alluding to Adams’s potential help in identifying and deporting undocumented immigrants in New York City.
He would not be the first public official with a corruption case who sought Trump’s help. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who was infamously caught on tape trying to “sell” Barack Obama’s Senate seat after his election as president in 2008, launched an unsubtle campaign to elicit a pardon from Trump as a rebuke to federal prosecutors during the Russia investigation. It succeeded when Trump commuted Blagojevich’s prison sentence in 2020. Trump’s willingness to liberally pardon his allies, particularly those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, will likely define the early days and weeks of his presidency.
There are smaller indignities toward the public good as well. Trump pardoned Charles Kushner, his eldest daughter’s father-in-law, toward the end of his first term. The president announced last month that he now plans to nominate him to be the nation’s ambassador to France. Kimberley Guilfoyle, the ex-girlfriend of Don Jr., is slated to be the next ambassador to Greece. None of Trump’s children are slated to take official roles in the upcoming administration, marking at least one improvement from his first term. But it is only a single drop in an ocean of nepotism.
Against that tide, the only comfort is history. Trump may be an extraordinary figure in American history, but this is also not the first time that the nation’s political system has been undermined by widespread corruption and relentless, virtueless self-dealing. America’s first gilded age in the late nineteenth century saw the rise of graft-filled urban machines and the political muscle-flexing of industrial trusts. Just as that era gave way to the progressive reforms of the early twentieth century, so too may these years eventually lead to a renewal of the reformer spirit—and a recommitment to basic republican ideals.