Inequality Will Explode in Trump’s Second Term

The wealth of the world’s very richest people — a list dominated by U.S. billionaires, many of whom backed President-elect Donald Trump — has soared to record levels since the election. Billionaires’ investments to elect one of their own in Trump is paying off as Wall Street cash floods into the companies they control.  

Already, data shows that the ultra-wealthiest segments in the U.S. control a greater share of wealth than during the Gilded Age. Since 1989, the top 0.1 percent got over $14 trillion dollars richer than the entire bottom 50 percent of America, whose share of wealth has actually fallen.  

I closely track inequality in the U.S. and around the world. Americans should brace for an explosion in inequality under the next Trump administration. The Republican Party is preparing gigantic tax cuts for billionaires and corporations; in 2017, then-President Trump gave the top 0.1 percent a tax cut 277 times larger than the middle-class. Tariffs would burden the poorest. In the firing line are workers’ rights. Our trend data had expected the first trillionaire to arrive within a decade; expect him — and it will be him — to get here sooner.  

The United States and the world would be wise to also brace for a greater threat to freedom from extreme wealth. An oligarchy now has democracy in its grip. Their weaponization of racism and sexism has served them well, dividing the working-classes and pitting neighbors against one another — as they plunder more wealth. Consider the horrors of the mass deportation that Trump has planned, and the chaos that would ensue. 

I use the word oligarchy, usually associated with rogue states, intentionally. Oligarchs are “those empowered politically by massive wealth.” Today’s very richest Americans have not only amassed such startling levels of wealth but also power — concentrating their monopoly control across industries, the media, and politics — that to call them billionaires feels insufficient. It turns out they’ve bought a couch, if not a seat, in the Oval Office. Trump has already given a big job to Elon Musk, a man who bankrolled his victory, to oversee “drastic change” in a government that funds (and investigates) his companies. Who’s in charge?  

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The Republican Party deserves the spotlight for fueling astronomical wealth — yet it would be a mistake to assign blame only to one party’s doing. This moment is the long triumph of a bipartisan embrace of oligarchy over our politics. 

This path was chosen. For 40 years, Republicans and too many Democrats let the wealth of corporations and the ultra-rich rip: slashing taxes, deregulating labor markets,  stagnating wages, subjugating public goods, and offering subservience to the power of monopoly and of capital.  

The future of our politics must reckon with uncomfortable truths. It is customary to lament the role that Ronald Reagan and other right-wing figures played in fueling inequality. But it’s also important to analyze, objectively, how Bill Clinton shredded the country’s social safety net, and how billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk saw their corporate power grow under Barack Obama. Or how the Obama presidency was able to bail out the banks but not some 10 million Americans who lost their homes. 

This path was also paved by compelling, if fictional, stories. We’re still being told wealth trickles down (it does not), and that only big corporations innovate (the public often has a critical role). Such fictions undermine efforts to tackle poverty, and flow wealth upwards. When Sen. Joe Manchin gutted an expanded child tax credit — that cut child poverty in half — he assured the nation, “We all have to do our part. The federal government can’t run everything.” So that’s how you justify pushing millions of children back into poverty. 

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Often, fables are told by the liberal economics establishment — as when it first denied, then reluctantly came to recognize, the role of big corporations’ price gouging in driving inflation that made life for ordinary families even less affordable. It’s worth imagining where we would be had we enacted windfall taxes on extreme profits and targeted price controls. 

Above all, the path of oligarchy has been about power, acting as the ultimate special interest group. Corporate monopolies are spending more than ever on federal lobbying. But big money countered not just policy but people-powered efforts — be it labor unions, grassroots economic movements, or organizers for public housing and health care who fought against inequality. As Sen. Chris Murphy describes, so often they were “shunned as dangerous populists.”  

Still, advocates and activists carved out an interregnum from neoliberal economics as the anger against inequality became unavoidable. The Biden administration attempted new economic approaches, for a time. Workers chalked up victories. Anti-monopolists began to recast public policy against corporate concentration in favor of workers and small businesses, taking on non-compete clauses for example. Policymakers prepared proposals to, finally, tax billionaires.  

But even these limited attempts for a new economics have been fought tooth and nail by monied elites. A telling example of the bipartisan approach in action was seen during the election campaign when Democratic billionaire surrogate Mark Cuban and Republican billionaire surrogate Elon Musk both wanted the anti-monopolist chair of the Federal Trade Commission fired, and when both opposed proposals to make the tax system fairer. Heads they win, tails you lose. 

The capture of our political economy by a few is relevant to every question in our society. It includes the platforms we get our news from, many of which have been decimated by tech companies and deprived of independent voices. It includes war: The working-class know too well an establishment that is too broke to tackle rising hunger at home but rich enough to fund U.S. bombs that kill many thousands of children in Gaza. Who can blame working folks angry at elites for making a world that put them on the scrapheap? 

A generational contest for an economic vision that’s different to the past 40 years is on. President-elect Trump and indeed Vice President-elect J.D. Vance (known for “opposing Milton Friedman-backed policies”) seem to grasp the anger that the working class feel — even as all signs point to an actual policy agenda right out of a billionaire’s playbook. Their rush to deliver more tax cuts for their ultra-wealthy friends shows whose side they are on. 

The time is for choosing. An anti-oligarchy economics is due: one that serves multi-racial working-class interests and can address everyday financial issues. An economics that listens to people from the ground up — backing the workers, innovators, and small businesses that make our economy tick — as it breaks with big capital from above.  

Oligarchs look strong, but their self-centeredness is exposed when faced by popular and sensible politics that benefit ordinary folks, like strong unions; public goods like universal health care that make life affordable; bold climate action; taxing extreme wealth. Resistance is inevitable. 

But Franklin D. Roosevelt’s words, taking on big money, instill fortitude: “They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

Nabil Ahmed is an anti-inequality advocate and Director of Economic and Racial Justice at Oxfam America.