The billionaire presidency is here. How's the 99 percent feeling?

Washington Post

16-04-2025

NEW YORK — On a Friday night in late March, about 50 people, in costume as members of the 1 percent, arrived at an 'anti-billionaire bash' at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture in Park Slope to playact as plutocrats. The name of the game was 'Billionaire Uh-Oh!' The host, Marcela Mulholland, stood at a lectern and read hypothetical scenarios in which uber-wealthy people got into trouble, and three teams crafted ways out of sticky situations. For instance: Your son hits an elderly woman with his Audi. How do you make sure he still gets into Dartmouth?
The groups mirthfully discussed the possible 'solutions.'
Say she wasn't on the crosswalk!
Say she was crazy!
Find a homeless man! If he's not drunk, get him drunk — and have him hit her!
Another problem: Your wife was overheard singing a racial slur while showering post-SoulCycle. How do you keep her upcoming birthday party in the Hamptons from turning into a bust?
Get the same homeless man — sorry, person experiencing homelessness — to change his gender identity and take the blame!
This was a night of Dada, an attempt by the partygoers to cope with the fact that the billionaire president and his astronomically wealthy advisers are seizing the levers of government, purging civil servants and generally manifesting nightmares for mainline liberals and Bernie Bros alike. Since reclaiming the White House, President Donald Trump has empowered Elon Musk and his U.S. DOGE Service to recommend dramatic cuts to the federal workforce. The Senate has confirmed several mega-rich people to Trump's Cabinet — including Linda McMahon, who is presiding over the administration's bid to dismantle the Education Department, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a pair of Wall Street veterans who have championed the president's combative approach to global trade.
The anti-billionaire party was happening seven subway stops from Zuccotti Park, where Occupy Wall Street activists protested economic inequality in 2011, and just a few blocks northwest of Prospect Park, where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), in 2016, had welcomed a massive crowd to a 'political revolution' that vilified corporate executives, not federal workers.
Suffice to say, America has gone a different way.
'The wealthiest people have nevah, everrr, in the history of our country, had it so good,' Sanders declared at a March rally in Nevada.
He wasn't waving a white flag: The theme of the rally — and similar ones in Colorado, Arizona and California, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) — was 'Fight Oligarchy,' and backstage the senator from Vermont seemed to be holding hope that the president would notice the large crowds at these events and have a change of heart. 'He's gonna look at that,' Sanders told The Washington Post, 'and say, 'Mmmmmmmm.' You know, 'Hey, guys, hey, Elon, calm down a bit. Maybe the American people don't like what we're doing.''
At the Brooklyn anti-billionaire party, Mulholland wasn't holding her breath. She was very much a Resister during the first Trump term and later the political director of polling firm Data for Progress. Now?
'It feels so futile,' says Mulholland, 27. 'You're like, oh, donate to this, or like, go to the rally or sign this petition. And it's like, I don't actually know that I believe in the theory of change for a lot of those.'
'But at the same time,' she added, 'I feel like something in you dies if you watch injustice happening and you do nothing.'
The party was something. A pop-up sketch comedy show? A solidarity exercise? A flier encouraged guests to donate $10 per drink — vodka-cran labeled 'Theranos juice' was on offer — to a union organizing group. 'Pronouns prohibited,' the invitation read. 'BYOSSRIs. All proceeds to the woke mind virus.' People dressed as Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Tiger Woods, Elon Musk.
Katie Mackall, a 27-year-old clinical research coordinator from Bushwick, came as 'Elon Musk's dad's emerald mine.' She wore glittery green eye shadow, sequins and fishnet sleeves, plus a green hard hat with a headlight. (Errol Musk has said he owned a small portion of such a mine in Zambia, though Elon has in recent years questioned the mine's existence.)
Mulholland dressed as Lauren Sánchez, the helicopter pilot, philanthropist and fiancée of Amazon founder (and Post owner) Jeff Bezos. There were a few fake Bezoses, too, mingling in dark shirts and puffy vests. Did they care to comment — in character, of course — on criticisms that they'd been making nice with the Trump administration?
'I think we do business with whoever the American people choose to elect into office,' said one ersatz Bezos, a comedian named Simon Bloch. 'We don't take sides. We just want to do good business and deliver better for our customers, honestly.'
'People are jealous,' said another, a campaign consultant named Guido Girgenti. 'I built some s--- that everybody can use, right? If you did that, you'd be a billionaire.'
Do Americans resent rich people, or idolize them?
The answer is yes.
'We've always been an aspirational society, since the beginning,' says Jonathan Taplin, the Los Angeles-based author of a book on powerful tech billionaires. 'And the notion for immigrants … that the streets of America were paved with gold, and all you had to do was get past Ellis Island and you, too, could become a millionaire — that's been around for a long time.'
Over the years, the public and its servants have tried to break up monopolies and levy steep taxes on the rich to prevent them from accumulating too much power. But something seems to have changed in recent years, says Guido Alfani, an Italian scholar and the author of a history of the rich in the West. 'Many presidents have been accused of being too close to extreme wealth, and so forth and so on,' he says, 'but no other country has ever got as close as the United States is today to being actually run by the super-rich.'
How did the billionaire(s) win this time? With a crucial boost from the working class. Fifty-six percent of voters without college degrees went for Trump, according to exit polling by Edison Research. Sixty-nine percent of White men without college degrees voted for the president in the same poll. White men without degrees have continued to support Trump overwhelmingly, as of a poll conducted early last month by NBC: 69 percent viewed the president positively. (Musk seems to be reaping the benefits of his association with the Trump administration with that same group: Among all White voters, NBC found, only men without college degrees held a positive view of the world's richest man.) In addition to the White working-class voters who have favored him for a while, Trump's winning coalition last year was buoyed by increases in support from heavily Latino, working-class communities: Pennsylvania factory towns and the Texas borderlands, among others.
Eddie Padron doesn't see Trump and Musk as snooty people with their noses up in the air, but as hard workers trying to build a company — sort of like him.
Padron, a precinct chair for his local Republican Party, has been in the locksmithing business in Brownsville, Texas, for 44 years. About a decade ago, he says, he got a call to drive out to a community about 20 miles outside of town. At a small apartment complex that had been foreclosed on, there were two men asking him to rekey every front and back door. They had one instruction: Put all the locks on the same key. 'And that,' Padron says, 'was our first taste of SpaceX.' Musk and his space technology company were moving in, buying up more and more property, which meant more business for the locksmith.
Padron sees it like this: There's the way business works, and then there's the way government works. If the cashier at your H-E-B supermarket is giving you attitude, you talk to the manager, and they make it right so they can keep getting your dollar. 'For the first time in the history,' he said of Musk's partnership with Trump, 'you have a manager who's taking care of business.'
(Musk recently estimated that his DOGE cuts will save the government $150 billion in the next fiscal year, although some analysts say such savings could be offset if staff cuts at the IRS hamper tax collection.)
The federal bureaucracy can feel sluggish — less responsive to people's needs than the corporations they associate with next-day shipping, on-demand streaming, instant search results, the world in their pocket.
'The reason the government gets blamed and has so much worse popularity and polling than Amazon as a company is because Amazon does what [you expect it to do],' says Corbin Trent, a former adviser to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez who now runs a home remodeling business in Tennessee. 'The government doesn't do what we expect it to do, which is function for us,' he added.
'What Trump did very intelligently is, he said: 'The system is broken, right? I'm going to smash the system,'' Sanders told The Post.
Some working-class voters may not have seen a vote for Trump as a vote for the billionaire(s). Some may have seen it as a vote for the guy who takes care of business, even when that means smashing things.
Andrew Macey, a mechanical repairman in Clairton, Pennsylvania, voted for Trump in November. It was the first time he voted for a Republican. His union, U.S. Steelworkers Local 1557, had endorsed the billionaire, and although Macey knew wealthy men had different concerns — stock portfolios, not the cost of eggs — Macey had shaken Trump's hand at a rally, and he had faith that the former and future president would use the government to protect the steel industry and make things cheaper for him and his fellow workers.
'He told everybody, no matter what party [they were] in, that it was going to be better his first day in office,' Macey says. 'But the exact opposite has happened. Prices rose. The stock market is in shambles, and the prices are going to go up even higher because of these, you know, across-the-board tariffs.'
Trump's tariffs, which his administration has characterized as part of an effort to protect the jobs of America's working class, have worried some of the president's richest allies. Arguably the president's trade policies represent a willingness to buck corporate interests in favor of a worker-focused agenda, but critics have said his strategy would drive up retail prices and suffocate the economy, resulting in hardship for everybody. Trump has since pressed pause on many of the levies while escalating his trade war with China.
Smashing systems isn't the same as fixing them. It remains to be seen whether the president will stay in the graces of their working-class supporters if his government cuts and economic policies start to make things feel more broken than before.
Michael Rivera, a Republican commissioner in Berks County, Pennsylvania — where Trump saw a surge in support in the heavily Latino city of Reading — says he has been getting questions about the government cuts at his town hall meetings. 'They're like: 'What's going to happen to Social Security? What's going to happen with Medicare? How is this going to affect our jobs here in Berks County?'' Rivera says.
Could the left beat billionaires in the future, with the help of the working class? It's at least healthy if people criticize them, says Hasan Piker, a Twitch streamer and leftist commentator. 'A lot of people yell at me,' Piker says. 'I'm now a very successful content creator, and I have a nice house. I bought it so I can live there with my family. And, you know, I leased a Porsche. People always yell at me for these things. They say, 'You're rich, too.' And I always say it's good. It's good that you hate me for that reason.'
At the Brooklyn party, the imaginary way back to the Bernie timeline was paved with irony. The costumed 'billionaires' flew paper airplanes in a contest to emit the most carbon. They made tiny babies out of Play-Doh, an allusion to pronatalism.
Something to do.
'It's very easy to feel like you can't do anything,' said Anya Schulman, 29, a writer and content creator from Fort Greene who was dressed as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes. 'These problems are bigger than us, than somebody even living in New York, working like me with a six-figure salary. Like, I'm barely making my rent. How can I do anything? I think events like this are very important to remind us that productive action is actually very doable on a personal level.'
In the end, the group raised about $1,000 for the union organizers. After the games were over, they ate cake — specifically, a Costco slab iced with an edible image of Luigi Mangione.