The alpha-male d--k-measuring contest between Trump and Musk isn’t entertainment: it’s the inevitable outcome of America’s complete surrender to oligarchy.
After centuries of democratic progress, we’re watching the World’s Richest Man® and the World’s Most Powerful Man® battle for supremacy on social media like feuding warlords. How did the land of Lincoln and Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Kennedy, become a playground for billionaire sociopaths?
The answer has a name: John Roberts.
Back in the day, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned us:
“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
In 2010, Chief Justice Roberts made his choice: He chose the billionaires. He chose oligarchy. He chose to detonate 240 years of American democracy.
The case was supposed to be simple: Could a right-wing group funded by fossil fuel billionaires show their anti-Hillary Clinton propaganda film within a month of an election? The Federal Election Commission said no because it violated a ban on corporate electioneering.
But Roberts wasn’t satisfied with just allowing the movie.
At Justice Anthony Kennedy’s urging, Roberts pulled off a judicial coup. He ordered both sides to re-argue the case, but this time on the broader question of corporate and billionaire election spending, something that wasn’t even part of the original lawsuit. This was judicial activism on steroids, the kind of power grab that would make a third-world dictator proud.
The result, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America, was an all-Republican-appointee 5-4 decision, Citizens United, that legalized political bribery and unleashed an avalanche of billionaire and corporate cash that has, in the years since, largely buried American democracy.
Justice John Paul Stevens was so furious that he read his 90-page dissent aloud from the bench, forcing his five bought-off Republican-appointed colleagues to listen in awkward discomfort.
Stevens said the ruling “threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation. The path it has taken to reach its outcome will, I fear, do damage to this institution.”
In a prescient moment of outrage, he added:
“A democracy cannot function effectively when its constituent members believe laws are being bought and sold,” pointing out that Roberts and Kennedy had “changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to change the law.”
The result of this bizarre decision, one embracing a theory no other advanced democracy in the world tolerates, has been an explosion in billionaire and corporate money flooding our election system. It’s made a mockery of Roberts’ and Kennedy’s assertion that transparency requirements would guarantee that “citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”
As a result, Musk is now claiming — almost certainly correctly — that:
“Without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and the Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate. … Such ingratitude.”
In other words, “I’m the rich guy who bought the White House for you, Trump, and you owe me.”
Of course, Musk isn’t the only one saying such things. The entire GOP knows how fossil fuel billionaires — particularly the Koch brothers — have been so instrumental in building and maintaining a national messaging infrastructure that there’s not a single Republican politician at the federal level who’ll acknowledge the importance of stopping global warming even as it regularly kills Americans.
Thus Stevens, it turns out, was absolutely right.
Outside spending exploded from $574 million in 2008 to $4.5 billion in 2024. In 2024, eight of the top 10 largest donors supported Republicans, with Musk dumping over $290 million. Dark money spending surged from less than $5 million in 2006 to more than $1 billion in 2024. Just 21 billionaire families contributed $783 million in 2022, easily outspending millions of small donors combined, and in 2024 a hundred billionaire families poured $2.6 billion into electing mostly Republicans.
Musk isn’t just boasting when he claims he single-handedly delivered the White House to Trump. The world’s richest man dumped over $290 million into electing Trump, including $238 million to his America PAC, $20.5 million to the deceptively named “RBG PAC” that dishonored Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s memory, and arguably illegal $1 million daily “lottery” payments to swing-state voters.
This isn’t political participation: it’s a hostile takeover of the American government by the biggest money in America.
Musk’s America PAC became one of the most prominent get-out-the-vote efforts for Republicans, essentially functioning as Trump’s campaign while pretending to be “independent.”
The Federal Election Commission's toothless “coordination” rules have become a joke since Roberts and his four corrupt colleagues ruled that billionaires and corporations can simply buy entire campaign operations.
And the corruption doesn’t stop with Musk. The cryptocurrency industry alone poured $238 million into the 2024 elections, more than oil, gas, and pharmaceuticals combined. Crypto money accounted for 44% of all corporate political spending in 2024.
The payoff was immediate: Trump ordered the SEC to drop lawsuits against crypto firms, signed an executive order establishing a national Bitcoin reserve, pardoned a bitcoin fraudster after he directed millions into Trump’s personal pockets, and appointed crypto insider David Sacks as White House AI and crypto czar.
This is corruption so blatant it would embarrass a banana republic.
Citizens United didn’t just corrupt presidential elections: it’s also systematically destroying Congress. Crypto super PACs alone spent $134 million targeting 67 congressional races, successfully defeating crypto-skeptical Democrats like Katie Porter with $10 million in attack ads.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Citizens United “the worst ruling” of her time on the Court. At least 22 states and hundreds of cities have voted to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it.
The American people know their democracy has been stolen.
Billionaires Musk and Trump are now locked in a dirty battle with Trump claiming Musk read and loved the “Big, Beautiful [Billionaire Tax Cut] Bill” while Musk implies Trump was regularly boffing teenage girls at Jeffrey Epstein’s home just down the street from Trump Tower.
While Trump and Musk trade insults about who’s more corrupt, they’re both symptoms of the same disease.
This is what happens when five unelected judges — several of them nakedly on the take from billionaires at the time — decide that the morbidly rich should rule America.
We now have what the Brennan Center for Justice calls “a fusion of private wealth and political power unseen since the late 19th century.” It’s the Gilded Age robber barons’ wildest dreams made real.
The sordid spectacle of Trump vs. Musk isn’t just embarrassing; it’s the death rattle of American democracy. Two oligarchs are publicly fighting over who owns our government, while Republicans on Roberts’ Supreme Court uneasily pretend this is “free speech.”
We’re not witnessing a democratic election cycle. We’re watching the final consolidation of American oligarchy.
Unless we overturn Citizens United and reclaim our democracy from billionaire sociopaths, the Musk-Trump cage match is just the opening act. Coming soon: President Bezos vs. President Zuckerberg (or their proxies), brought to you by Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court’s pro-oligarchy majority.
The choice Brandeis warned us about in 1919 has been made: Roberts and Sam Alito chose wealth concentration. Clarence Thomas chose oligarchy. Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy chose to let billionaires buy our democracy.
Now we’re living with the consequences, at least until we all decide to do something about it. And that starts with voting out of office every possible Republican and all of the corporate so-called “moderate” Democrats who have enthusiastically embraced Citizens United and the corruption it’s brought us.
The work, in other words, falls to us. Pass it along.