What drives a member of America’s elite to aid and abet a regime like Donald Trump’s second term? “Sheer greed can never be underestimated — whether the profits are personal or corporate,” writes Frank Rich.
What is more intriguing than the thugs, mad dogs, buffoons, and rabid ideologues like Hegseth, Miller, Patel and RFK Jr. who have enlisted in MAGA Republicanism are the elites who did have some reputation of probity, independence, or at least sanity, before: Cabinet members like Todd Blanche, Scott Bessent, Doug Burgum, and Jay Clayton and Trump’s billionaire cheerleaders on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. “These guys — they are mainly guys — used to be thought of as the adults in whatever room they occupied (with the exception of Elon Musk, that is). You’d think they would have wanted to protect the good names they had once worked hard to build,” Rich writes.
Instead, Trump’s billionaires have joined his cause for tax breaks and deregulation, for federal contracts, for lax antitrust enforcement, and for any other goodies they could grab — not for the gutting of the Constitution. Busy fattening their bottom lines, they remained onboard for the rest: the bigotry, the ICE shootings of American citizens and innocent “aliens,” the assault on public health, the betrayal of America’s friends, and the cozying up to the American adversaries China, Russia, and North Korea. “The problem for these tycoons,” writes Rich, “is that you can’t pig out on column A and then pretend column B wasn’t included in the menu.”
Read his full essay on why the cronies of Trump 2.0 are heading for a harsh comeuppance:
nymag.visitlink.me/wsXaSz