Donald Trump, champion of the people against the “elites,” is packing his administration with billionaires. Thirteen of them have been selected so far. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, helped to buy Donald Trump his victory and now is set to have offices in the White House complex, where Musk can continue spreading lies about regulatory watchdog agencies and plotting ways to gut the social safety net. 

Meanwhile, other billionaires and giant corporations are sucking up to Trump, with Amazon and Meta donating $1 million each to Trump’s “inaugural fund.” (Could there be a less worthy cause imaginable than contributing to fund the power accession ceremony of one of the world’s wealthiest people?) Coca-Cola’s CEO has presented Trump with a special commemorative Coke can. Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have taken clear steps to make sure they’re on Trump’s good side. Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and went to kiss Trump’s ring at Mar-a-Lago. Amazon paid $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump. Zuckerberg, once threatened by Trump to be thrown in prison for “the rest of his life,” has quickly made much more MAGA-sympathetic rhetoric, getting rid of fact-checking on Facebook and eliminating the company’s diversity team. Zuckerberg said the election results “feel like a cultural tipping point,” and a lot of his fellow CEOs feel similarly. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that, thanks largely to Trump’s election, corporations are backing off on diversity and climate change initiatives, and “America’s corporate bosses aren’t waiting for the Jan. 20 inauguration to start conforming with views favored in the Trump 2.0 universe.” “Corporate America is seeing an opportunity,” they quote one businessman saying. Companies “seeking Trump’s favor have plenty to gain” and so they’re doing their best to adopt policies he will like. “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social. The Journal explained that:

Trump’s election provides cover for CEOs to change policies without a public backlash, corporate advisers said. JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Bank of America recently withdrew from an ambitious pandemic-era, U.N.-backed climate coalition designed to help businesses reduce carbon emissions. That followed exits from the coalition by Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. BlackRock, the New York-based asset manager, announced Thursday it was quitting a similar U.N.-backed climate group. 

The Journal says that while companies never wanted to adopt climate and diversity initiatives, they felt pressured to in the political climate of 2019-2020, but now that the winds are blowing in the other direction, they’re dropping any pretense that they ever cared about the climate, racism, or anything other than making money. Notably, Trump’s election isn’t the only factor here. The Journal observes that “Trump’s win also coincided with a softer labor market, which shifts some power away from workers” and “corporate bosses say that with jobs tougher to come by, they don’t have to worry as much about losing employees upset over corporate responses—or silence—regarding political matters.” In other words, workers are more afraid to lose their jobs, which means they have less power at their companies, and because corporations are dictatorships, the oligarchs who rule them feel no need to give the workers a say in what the values of the institution should be. So now, the Journal says, the “bosses are back in command.” (I’ve always considered the Wall Street Journal America’s most Marxist newspaper because it admits outright the existence of a class struggle—it’s just on the side of the capitalists against the workers.) 

A few important facts about how the world works can be gleaned from these recent events. First, the right-wing idea of the “woke corporation” was always based on a faulty understanding of what corporations are doing when they issue big public pronouncements on their commitment to diversity, slather themselves in rainbows, and donate to racial justice organizations. Corporations do not have moral values. In fact, in some cases it is arguably illegal for a corporation to consider questions like, “Will our actions help destroy the planet?” These companies are not deeply penetrated by some woke Marxist ideology. Executives saw that the public supported racial justice protests, and so they claimed that they, too, supported racial justice protests. (Public support for Black Lives Matter approached 70 percent at its peak.) 

We can see here, too, that companies are very sensitive to worker power. The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the bosses, tells it like it is: when workers have the power to quit, their voices are more likely to be heard. When workers are afraid, the executives disregard them. That’s why workers need unions: when they band together, they can dictate terms to employers who otherwise will ignore them. 

Observe as well that we have a nice demonstration of the fraudulence of right-wing populism, a topic I have returned to frequently in the pages of this magazine. I was recently attacked on Twitter (X) for an old column I wrote arguing that “right-wing populists” tend to be men of immense wealth who are born to privilege, have no interest in disrupting the economic status quo, and present themselves as part of a crusade against “elites” that is entirely phony. This crusade ends up classifying schoolteachers, librarians, and baristas as part of the elite, while billionaires like Trump part of the “people.” My critics pointed out that J.D. Vance did not grow up with substantial advantages (although he has certainly manipulated people into thinking he was more disadvantaged than he actually was). But I am pointing out tendencies, not hard and fast rules, and I happen to be right about the tendency here, as we can see if we examine the backgrounds of the leading “right-wing populists”:

Again, a tendency, not a hard and fast rule. And before you point out that I, myself, went to fancy schools, I’d note that I do not have wealth (I am in fact still in a great deal of student debt), but also that you should be suspicious if the left did not have any workers in its leadership.

It is very important to understand what is going on in the country right now, because it is going to be portrayed by the right as an attempt to restore Truth and Reason after the period of Woke Left Madness. Peter Thiel, writing in the Financial Times, goes so far as to invoke the period following apartheid in South Africa, suggesting we need something like a truth and reconciliation commission. (Boy, nobody feels as persecuted as a rich man! Also note that in Thiel’s mind we need a truth and reconciliation commission for Woke but not for, say, slavery and Jim Crow.) Thiel says the “ancien régime” is about to be exposed and that we will finally discover how the COVID pandemic started and who killed JFK. (Really.)

The culture warriors like Christopher Rufo will present this as a moment in which bad dangerous lefty wokeness has finally been beaten back so that America can be made great again. The reality of that cultural shift is a lot uglier. As the Financial Times reports, in the business world, bankers “say that Trump’s victory has empowered those who felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people.” What is it they were “self-censoring”? Well, the Times quotes one “top banker” saying “I feel liberated… We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.” Wow, a new dawn, where you can comfortably use slurs again without people being offended. (Or rather, without having to listen to them saying they’re offended, because they know you can fire them.) 

What is actually going on is not the liberation of the country from the shackles of woke oppression. These powerful people have always been able to say what they wanted. They’ve been doing it nonstop for many years. They are very loud and not at all silenced. The more important thing to pay attention to is the way that the U.S. government is becoming an outright oligarchy, with billionaire business leaders gathering around the billionaire Trump. Linda McMahon will work to privatize the public school system. Vivek Ramaswamy will make sure his fellow fraudsters don’t end up in prison. And you, the non-billionaire, will end up being screwed by those who present themselves as the champions of the people.

The rule of oligarchs is especially alarming given the urgency of the climate crisis. We have a class of people in charge who would never, ever do anything to impede the ability of fossil fuel companies to maximize profits, right when we are seeing the beginning of the worst effects of the crisis. The Trump administration is likely to undo as much of Biden’s (very limited) climate policy as it can. The catastrophe will escalate, and as it does, you can expect the Trumpian right to blame the problems on DEI in the fire department rather than on the climate criminals who have actually landed us in this mess. When the disasters become so severe that emergency responders and local officials can’t be blamed, we’ll probably see Christian nationalists claiming that natural disasters are punishment from God for allowing transgender girls on middle school sports teams.

I am concerned that we may see less resistance to Trump this time around than we did during his first term. That term sparked massive popular movements from the Women’s March to the airport protests to the uprisings in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. These movements may have restrained Trump’s worst excesses. Now, I sense a general weariness, a disinclination to take to the streets. Once-fiery figures like AOC have been tamed, once-promising populists like John Fetterman have become MAGA-sympathetic (and, in his case specifically, an apologist for the mass murder of children). Trump may be much more popular this time around than he was the last time, especially if he scores some early political wins by helping force a ceasefire on Gaza, achieving a diplomatic resolution to the war in Ukraine, and perhaps even saving TikTok and thereby earning the undying loyalty of a good part of Gen Z. But Trump is still a climate-denying, anti-immigrant, authoritarian plutocrat who will consolidate an oligarchy rather than moving us toward an authentic democracy. You will not have more power in your workplace at the end of a Trump term. You will be facing much worse climate disasters. People you care about may be deported. The cops will act with impunity. The military may be deployed to quash protests. It is not going to be good, but it may be met with widespread passivity and tiredness. 

Not here, of course. Current Affairs will continue to expose propaganda and keep focused on the issues that matter most. We are not like the New York Times, which can cover a climate-fueled disaster without ever mentioning fossil fuels. But we are small, and worryingly, most information channels are controlled by the fabulously rich, the people who now want to suck up to Trump. Elon Musk, of course, owns Twitter (X), and can manipulate its algorithm to suit his whims (such as by boosting his many idiotic falsehoods in everyone’s feeds). Multiple people have quit the Washington Post recently, arguing that its owner, Bezos, is betraying its mission to hold the powerful to account. (Indeed, the Washington Post editorial board has just put its stamp of approval on most of Trump’s cabinet appointees!) We simply cannot rely on the liberal media to provide any kind of robust opposition to Trump’s worst policies—in fact, just today the New York Times ran a disgraceful opinion column arguing that the U.S. should illegally invade Venezuela and depose its government, showing that the paper has learned nothing from its embarrassing performance surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq. 

I do not mean to make every article about why you need to support independent media outlets like Current Affairs, but the next four years are going to require voices that can cut through propaganda and give people a real understanding of what is going on around them. They’re going to be barraged with nonsense, whether it’s Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson telling them that Ivermectin will cure cancer or right-wing pundits insisting that the wildfires menacing their houses have absolutely nothing to do with climate change. Sound information from non-corporate sources like The Lever, Drop Site News, Zeteo, The Intercept, Novara, Jacobin, and Yellow Dot’s Extreme Weather Report will become ever more crucial. The oligarchy is in the process of consolidating, and we must prepare to fight back.