Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘In July, Trump flew to Nashville for the Bitcoin 2024 conference, where he spoke shortly after one of his top fund-raisers, Howard Lutnick. Lutnick, the C.E.O. of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has become a leading public proponent of the crypto industry; at the conference, he announced a plan to lend $2 billion to crypto investors, allowing them to use bitcoin as collateral. Onstage, Trump said that his Administration would permit the creation of so-called stablecoins, which, he promised, would “extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers around the world.” Trump also promised to fire Gary Gensler, Biden’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose pro-regulatory positions on crypto have outraged bitcoiners. The United States, Trump vowed, “will be the crypto capital of the planet.”

Lutnick, who has known Trump for thirty years and who once made a guest appearance on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” supported Trump’s previous campaigns. But he has significantly increased his giving in 2024. According to Bloomberg, Lutnick and his wife donated $30,200 to Republicans in 2016 (though he also gave $1 million to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration committee), $1.3 million in 2020, and $12.1 million so far this year. In May, during the former President’s trial in Manhattan, Lutnick hosted a fund-raiser for him at Lutnick’s apartment in the Pierre hotel. In early August, he held another event at his forty-acre estate in Bridgehampton, which brought in $15 million; seats for a roundtable with Trump in Lutnick’s dining room went for $250,000. The following Monday, maga Inc., a pro-Trump super pac, recorded a $5-million donation from Lutnick, the largest individual political gift he’d ever made.

After the Bitcoin event in Nashville, Trump brought Lutnick on board his plane, Trump Force One, to a campaign stop in Minnesota, where Lutnick introduced Vance. Lutnick later told an interviewer that travelling to a rally with the former President was like “going to a rock concert with Mick Jagger.” During the trip, Lutnick said, Trump offered him a formal role as co-chair of his Presidential transition team. The decision was announced a few weeks later, after the fund-raiser at Lutnick’s Bridgehampton home. Another co-chair is Linda McMahon, the former head of the Small Business Administration in the Trump Administration. She, too, is a wealthy donor who, according to federal records, has given more than $10 million to support Trump in 2024. That same month, Trump announced that he and his sons Don, Jr., and Eric were getting into the crypto business themselves…

Trump’s courting of billionaires has been an explicit part of the Democrats’ campaign against him. At the Democratic National Convention, in August, Harris said that the ex-President’s populist rhetoric did not match the reality of a man who “fights for himself and his billionaire friends.” But the talking points miss an uncomfortable fact for both parties: during the Trump era, it’s the Democrats who have enjoyed a clear advantage with the nation’s wealthiest political donors. According to OpenSecrets, big donors—those who gave $100,000 or more to just one party—contributed $5.2 billion to Democratic causes and candidates in the last election cycle, and $3.3 billion to Republican ones. Despite Trump’s cultivation of the crypto bros and Wall Street money, his online chats with Musk and his Mar-a-Lago fund-raisers with Big Oil executives, that trend is on track to continue this year. A recent Bloomberg survey of billionaires showed Harris receiving support from twenty-one of the country’s richest people, compared with fourteen who were backing Trump. The difference, though, is that Trump had taken in millions more from these supporters. His campaign is far more dependent on its shrinking segment of the ultra-rich.’ (from the New Yorker)

This long piece was published before the election, but it doesn’t exactly get out of date. We will see how this manifests in the next administration, but to me this encapsulates everything that has been wrong about American politics for decades, and is a fundamental part of voter alienation.