The Billionaire Betrayal: How America's Richest Abandoned Democracy for Trump's Promise

In February, the billionaire investor Nelson Peltz convened two dozen of the country’s wealthiest Republicans for a dinner at Montsorrel, his $300-million oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago.

During the 2020 campaign, Peltz had hosted a lavish fund-raiser for Donald Trump at the mansion, which took in $10 million. But, in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Peltz, like many Republicans of all income levels, had publicly denounced the President. In an interview with CNBC on January 7th, he apologized for his vote and said that Trump would always be remembered for that day’s “disgrace.” “As an American,” he added, “I’m embarrassed.”

Trump, the richest man ever to serve in the White House, is himself a billionaire, though the extent of his wealth has long been in question. (As of mid-October, with stock in Trump’s social-media venture, Truth Social, experiencing a pre-election bounce, Forbes estimated his net worth at about $5.5 billion.) In 2016, Trump hardly bothered to court big donors. He was shunned by much of the G.O.P. élite and largely self-funded his Republican primary campaign. He lambasted Jeb Bush, the brother and son of Presidents, as a tool of the moneyed class. “Super PACs are a disaster,” Trump said in a 2016 debate. “They’re a scam. They cause dishonesty. And you’d better get rid of them, because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people.”

Sean Wilentz,…   a historian at Princeton University, offered another key distinction. Trump’s billionaires—many of whom have made their fortunes as hedge-fund managers, activist investors, and corporate raiders—tend to be highly motivated ideologues and individual operators. “It’s transactional, but their end of the bargain is a lot different than just having access to the President of the United States,” Wilentz told me. “They see Trump as their instrument. This is an investment for them to take power.” Wilentz noted that, unlike the “traditional corporate conservative élite” dating back to the Gilded Age, this new “class of the super-rich” appears both more numerous and less civic-minded. “The other guys might have been robber barons,” Wilentz said.

“These guys are oligarchs.”