The corruption........

Trump’s Billionaire Cabinet Is Unprecedented 

But there’s one ominous parallel for how it could turn out.

Tim Murphy

Let’s just get it out of the way upfront: Donald Trump is assembling a government of billionaires, the likes of which the United States has never seen. The president-elect has tapped five reported billionaires for cabinet posts: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum for interior secretary, hedge funder Scott Bessent for treasury secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick for commerce secretary, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for education secretary (I know, just roll with it), and former Sen. Kelly Loeffler—wife of New York Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffrey Sprecher—for small business administrator.

But those appointments are almost normal compared to the billionaires Trump’s installing everywhere else. After Elon Musk spent a quarter-billion dollars to get him elected—$40.25 billion, if you count the in-kind acquisition of Twitter—Trump made the world’s richest man co-chair (with maybe-billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy) of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency. There, one of the government’s largest contractors will be tasked with trimming about $2 trillion from the federal budget. Or maybe they’ll just harass civil servants until they quit; it’s not really clear what DOGE will be, beyond a dead joke about an internet meme from 2013.

They’re joined in the administration by Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks, whom Trump announced would serve as his “AI and Crypto Czar”—whatever that means. Steve Witkoff, a New York City real estate billionaire who’s deeply enmeshed in the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf petro-states, will be Trump’s Middle East envoy. Tech billionaire Jared Isaacman—a Musk ally who moonlights as a commercial astronaut on SpaceX flights and holds the distinction of being the first person to place a bet on a professional sporting event from space—will run NASA. Private equity mogul Stephen Feinberg, whose firm owns the company that trained journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killers, is Trump’s pick for deputy secretary of defense. Fiserv President Frank Bisignano (worth just shy of $1 billion—for now—according to Axios) is on deck to run the Social Security Administration. Massad Boulos, who is slated to be a Middle East adviser and is also Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law, was frequently described in the press as a billionaire until a New York Times story revealed that he actually just ran a Nigerian trucking business and once tried to sell a kind of “erotic” energy drink called Tantra Beverages.

It’s a bit more commonplace to hand out ambassadorships to ultra-wealthy allies, but even by that measure, it is rare to send someone overseas who is barred from practicing law in New Jersey. Charles Kushner, Trump’s pick for ambassador to France, is family, though, and it’s hard to say at this point that the crimes of the father—which included hiring a prostitute to help blackmail his brother-in-law to avoid a conviction for tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions—do not, on some deeper level, represent the United States with some accuracy. Arkansas billionaire Warren Stephens, Trump’s choice for ambassador to the United Kingdom, is by those standards fairly anonymous—but it’s notable that he’s filling the seat held in the first term by another billionaire, Woody Johnson. Meanwhile, private equity mogul and Trump business associate Tom Barrack—who was recently acquitted of charges of illegally lobbying for the United Arab Emirates—will be the president’s man in Turkey.

All told, there are 15 reported billionaires slated for jobs in the administration—16 if you count the Big Guy himself. And then there are the billionaires with no formal role who have nonetheless been invited to advise the incoming president behind the scenes, or who have been widely reported as having Trump’s ear. Guys like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a cheerleader for “effective accelerationism,” who, I feel required to point out, is currently trying to build a new model city from scratch in California; Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale; and hedge funder John Paulson. This is an incomplete list. Every time I set out to compile it, a new name would percolate—some mogul you’ve never heard of who’s tied up in useless tech and worth more than Rhode Island.

Elon Musk greets U.S. President-elect Donald Trump ahead of the launch of the sixth test flight for the SpaceX Starship rocket on November 19, 2024, in Brownsville, Texas.Brandon Bell/Getty

It’s hard to overstate just how unprecedented it is to have this many ultra-ultra-wealthy figures working inside an administration. Overall, Axios projected that the net worth of the cabinet—just the immediate cabinet—was about $10 billion, which would make it roughly 100 times richer than President Joe Biden’s cabinet—and more than three times richer than Trump’s first-term cabinet, which was itself so historically wealthy that people couldn’t stop writing articles about it.

Prior to the first Trump administration—which featured both McMahon as Small Business Administration chief and billionaire Betsy DeVos as education secretary—only a handful of billionaires had ever received major non-ambassadorial jobs in an administration, even adjusting for inflation. Penny Pritzker, scion of the Hyatt hotel dynasty, spent one term as Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce. Henry Paulson, the George W. Bush treasury secretary who got down on his knees to beg then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass a bank bailout during the 2008 financial crisis, would have passed for a billionaire in today’s dollars. And at the time Gerald Ford tapped Nelson Rockefeller to be his vice president, after Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the New York governor was worth a little more than $1 billion in today’s dollars based on his own assessment of his wealth.

Rocky’s confirmation process speaks to how unusual the prospect of a billionaire in the White House (or at least the Old Executive Office Building) really was. It was not viewed as normal; it was viewed, in some corners, as a possible threat to the national interest. Although he had already spent years in public service, Congress spent four months poring over and debating the extent of his wealth and the layers upon layers of conflicts it might present. This was a guy who had given Henry Kissinger a $50,000 check as a gift, who had showered friendly politicians with cash over the years, and who had a vast family fortune tied up in an industry—oil—that was vital to the nation’s future.

“It begins to seem easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Vice Presidency of the United States by way of the 25th Amendment,” the New York Times quipped as the congressional proceedings dragged on. One California Democrat put the question at hand simply: “Can Nelson Rockefeller serve two masters—the public and his own interests?” But Rockefeller’s supporters had the votes, and a sense of righteousness of their own; one Republican congressman even argued that opposing Rockefeller on the grounds of his wealth violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The 14th Amendment applied to plutocrats, too.

You can find a few more inflation-adjusted billionaires in key posts if you go back further. A MarketWatch piece from 2013 dredged up Averell Harriman, the railroad heir who served as Harry Truman’s commerce secretary, and also Jesse Jones, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s final commerce secretary. FDR’s choice to helm the Securities and Exchange Commission would have been a billionaire, too—Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., who is, of course, the grandfather of Trump’s worm-eaten choice to run the Department of Health and Human Services. But these were scattered appointments; there was no real pattern there. It was nothing, in other words, like today.

There is a tendency to say that we are in the middle of a new Gilded Age. I recently argued as much in a Mother Jones cover story. But whereas the robber barons really did make a lot of stuff, many of the ultra-wealthy moguls meddling in politics today are caught up in a sort of negative creation, burning through vast sums of energy in pursuit of fake money and AI slop. If only they built railroads. This is an age, above all, of hustlers and their henchmen, and to find a parallel for this particular combination—this sense of opening the doors of the government to both big business and a whole lot of people who might flunk a background check—you have to go back to a different era. I’m talking about Warren G. Harding and the Republicans who ran Washington throughout the 1920s.

The Harding administration had it all. There were sleazy billionaires (again, I’m using today’s dollars) looking for sweetheart deals on public assets—guys like oilmen Harry Sinclair and Ed Doheny, the model for Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. There was, in Interior Secretary Albert Fall, a militant border hawk with a wealth of personal conflicts of interest who assumed office despite rumors that had once had a political rival whacked back in New Mexico. The attorney general, Harry Daugherty, chosen for his personal loyalty, was a crook who kept his own bagman as a special assistant. William J. Burns, Harding’s pick to run the Bureau of Investigation (today’s FBI), used his power to spy on and intimidate political rivals while covering up the personal transgressions of the president and his inner circle. (Laton McCartney’s 2009 book on the Teapot Dome scandal described one particularly grisly Justice Department cleanup job: Harding and Daugherty both attended a party at the home of the Washington Post publisher in which drunken guests killed a “chorus girl” by throwing kitchen implements at her.) Harding’s Veterans Bureau director was on the take for private contractors. His commerce secretary was a millionaire from the Bay Area. 

How, you might ask, did Harding’s cabinet make it through the confirmation process? They didn’t. Per McCartney, Harding colluded with a friendly Senate leader to skip advise-and-consent entirely. So men like Fall were approved without hearings, via one big acclamation vote—not too unlike Trump’s nixed plan to sneak unqualified nominees in via recess appointment.

At the center of it all was the richest man ever to serve in a presidential administration—financier Andrew Mellon, who built a fortune so vast his dilettante grandson, Timothy, could one day spend nine figures to elect Trump. Mellon, who held the job of treasury secretary over three successive Republican administrations, embodied the ethos of the era, of a party of, for, and by big business. As Matt Stoller explained in his 2019 book, Goliath, Mellon took the job after his bank had loaned Harding’s campaign $1.5 million, and he had so many financial conflicts that his appointment was “probably illegal.” In office, he weaponized the Bureau of Internal Revenue to investigate critics while delivering huge bonuses to corporations and their leaders—including himself. This is what you got when you put a one-man nation-state in charge of the national economy:

Mellon could also see to it that his industrial empire flourished in the era through other mechanisms. He blocked antitrust action against [his aluminum company] Alcoa. The FTC didn’t bother to look into Gulf Oil, or any of Mellon’s other vast holdings. Mellon didn’t just ward off attacks, but negotiated with foreign leaders for oil concessions for his own oil company, both in Colombia and in Kuwait. And the great tax reductions he pushed through Congress, which slashed his own tax bill, ended up slashing into the stock market, pushing up the value of the stocks he held.

The Harding administration did not, in the end, work out particularly well either for most of the men who sought to weaponize it or for the nation caught up in its chaos. The president had a heart attack and died while his wife was in the middle of reading him a positive press clipping. The interior secretary went to prison, along with one of his billionaire patrons. The attorney general barely avoided it. The Bureau of Investigation director resigned in disgrace. The commerce secretary, Herbert Hoover, eventually became president himself and watched the entire global economy collapse at his feet. Republicans would lose control of Congress for most of the next 60 years. And eventually, after the stock market crash, Mellon was driven from office, too, exiting just ahead of impeachment proceedings into his decade of oligarchic corruption.

Republicans learned then what they may come to understand once again: It was no way to run a country—but for a beautiful moment in time, they created a lot of value for shareholders.