The gradual erosion of the Middle Class has been a unifying factor, driving both sides of the political spectrum to upset this hostile takeover by the richest members of our society. The top 10% of the United States own roughly 70% of the country’s wealth, up by over 25% from the early 90s.
Democrats and Republicans have taken stands against this monstrous consumption of GDP held by presumably corrupt corporations and businessmen. Our current President, Donald Trump, has used this in his rhetoric to justify his government realignment and has made claims of a ‘deep state’ owned entirely by the wealthiest billionaires. Now that he is President, he has claimed he has won and defeated the corrupt, signaling a ‘golden age for America.’
However, these claims lie far from the truth, most of which he does not even care to hide.
Donald Trump’s recent biggest supporter has been South African Tech Billionaire Elon Musk, whose net worth increased by 80% after Trump won the election in early November. His worth peeked at a staggering $486 billion, making him the wealthiest human in all of history, even more than Mansa Musa, who was believed to have owned up to only $400 billion.
To put this number in perspective, we can use simple math to determine how long it would take for the average worker to achieve this. Let’s have our person work 5 days a week, $18 an hour, 8-hour shifts, with no vacation or breaks. It would take this person 12,945,195 years to earn equal to Elon Musk’s net worth. (5 × 18 × 8 × 52.1429 = 37542.888, 486 billion ÷ 37542.888 = 12945194.8396)
Musk donated $288 million to Trump’s campaign in 2024 and used the media platform he bought, Twitter, as an ad space to promote Trump’s rhetoric. We can go back further, to before Donald Trump first got into the large political spheres, and find how billionaires created the Far-Right as it exists today.
When the housing market crashed in 2007, the economic blowback was felt worldwide, millions were driven into property and lost their entire livelihoods. What was left were angry people throughout America, screaming for change and begging questions to stop something like this from happening again.
It was at this time in the Republican party when the Tea Party movement started to emerge, a conservative political movement focused on reducing the size of the government and deregulating numerous industries, claiming the government was at fault for the current crisis.
Key political commentators cited the Tea Party as a grassroots movement, a smaller organization comprised of volunteers with a bottom-up organization rather than larger economic motivators. But behind the scenes, this was the furthest thing from the truth.
The Koch Brothers, who own the second-largest private company in America, founded different businesses and groups to have the power to manipulate government. By using their $70 billion wealth, they started pushing ads, tricking voters and homeowners into fighting for their own corrupt corporate agenda.
Suddenly, democrats and moderate republicans were painted as communist dictators who wanted to squeeze the money out of the common man and put it towards an evil welfare state. Members of the Tea Party called for deregulation and tax breaks that would significantly help the Koch brothers, who just so happened to own healthcare and oil businesses.
Billionaires tricking voters into fighting for the rich became a trend in the Republican party. The Tea Party movement laid the far-right bricks that would slowly build up to become the modern-day Trump-controlled Republican party.
Acting out of interest in companies, Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 skewed heavily toward the rich and damaged the economy after lessening consumer trust. Now, the President has charged Elon Musk with heeding expenditure cuts to the federal government, mostly by deregulating industries many of his friends are in.
The three richest people in the world attended Donald Trump’s inauguration day; estimates say the net worth of all the attendees sized up to over $1 trillion.
