Too often, when we observe a phenomenon, we forget to ask ourselves two essential questions: Is it new? Does it exist elsewhere? And yet, comparisons in time and space make an enormous contribution to forward-looking analysis. For example, we can’t judge what happened during COVID in France without knowing how past epidemics have been handled, and how this one has been handled elsewhere; we would then realize that South Korea had taken the right measures by early December 2019, and that it was they whose example we should follow, and not China, which was lying and panicking.
Similarly, today, to be surprised by the presence of billionaires around the American president is to know nothing of the past or the present.
In the past, there have been billionaires close to power in countless countries, and some have even held political office themselves. The Medici in Florence, the Dandolos in Venice, the Borgias in Rome; the Cavendishes, Churchill-Spencers and Rothschilds in England; the Fouquets, Colberts, Neckers, Pereires and Schneiders in France; the Fuggers, Warburgs, Krupps and Thyssens in Germany; the Soongs in Chiang Kai Chek’s republic; the Manikongos, Askias, Agoli-Agbo, Shakas and Keitas in Africa; and all the ruling families of the oil monarchies. In the United States, the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans were all involved, and the influence of the military-industrial complex was denounced a thousand times, particularly by President Dwight Eisenhower when he left the White House on January 17, 1961, to hand it over to John Kennedy, himself heir to a very wealthy family.
Other families, who came to power as poor men, went on to become permanently rich and influential, such as the Bonapartes in France, the Bragances in Brazil and the Tokugawas in Japan.
Today, dictators are very often among their country’s leading fortunes, as is Vladimir Putin in Russia and so many others elsewhere. Similarly, in today’s democracies, including France, the very rich are not without political influence, either directly or through the media. In the United States, in particular, banks and companies with close ties to the military and the oil industry still call the shots. To the point of dictating foreign policy and defense posture.
The dialectic between the rich and the powerful is virtually always the same: the rich support the powerful as long as they reap the benefits, in the form of public contracts, favorable regulations, tax privileges or access to coveted targets. The powerful, on the other hand, rely on the rich to gain access to power, enabling them to become rich themselves and to confront the rich to the point of belittling them (like the Chinese billionaires, including Jack Ma), putting them in prison (like Fouquet or, more recently, the Russian oligarchs, such as Khodorkovsky) or seeing them fall unluckily from a balcony.
There’s nothing original about what’s happening in the United States today: billionaires are backing a candidate who himself has become a billionaire through his first stint in power. These billionaires expect this president to serve their interests, in the form of government contracts, favorable regulations and taxation, and a threat to other countries if they wish to harm their interests. We’ll see this president threatening his European and Asian allies if they want to regulate Musk and Zuckerberg’s companies. In exchange, he expects these supporters to serve his power, enabling him to realize his dream of world domination. For the time being, he is far more powerful than they are: while the top eight US companies weigh the equivalent of 20% of global GDP on the stock market, their profits, the only comparable figure, are less than 1% of global GDP.
Precedents, both in time and space, suggest that these billionaires are going to get richer and richer, and that they will demand from the President a domestic policy, public procurement and foreign policy at their service. That they will oppose measures that are in their way (on the migrants they need, on the electric cars they sell, on the countries they want to trade with). That this president will do anything to become richer than they are, and to bring them down when the time comes. He’s already started by creating his own bitcoin under the name $Trump, from which he hopes to make hundreds of billions.
Who will prevail? At first, President Trump will be the master, and will be content to rely on these billionaires. Some of them will ask him to stay in power longer, to serve them, explaining that democracy is a worse form of government than business, especially when the boss owns it.
If Trump succeeds in extending his power beyond four years, or in installing one of his sons in his place, which seems unlikely (despite the Bush precedent and the Kennedy attempt), he will do as all dictators do and get rid of those who brought him to power and who thought they could make him their puppet.
More likely, he won’t succeed, although I’m convinced he’ll try.
The fate of the world will be different depending on whether President Trump will have been powerful enough, over the next four years, to master them; or whether they will have managed to escape him because their hunting ground is global, and because they will be less dependent than their predecessors on public orders.
In the first case, other oligarchs will replace them with the next president, no doubt once again linked to the military and cyber-defense in particular. In the second case, today’s oligarchs, now more powerful than any American president, will want to be the masters of Washington and the world.
Although many other parameters will complicate this equation, we must not lose sight of this dilemma: The world will soon have the choice between a Trump dictatorship or a dictatorship of the American oligarchs. The two being, one day soon, engaged in a fight to the death. And with these people, you don’t negotiate. We confront.