The title of the post is likely a title for a book that exists – I should check.
I am noting that this last presidential election saw historic levels of fund-raising – the Harris / Walz campaign, in very short order, received over two BILLION dollars, according to Open Secrets. The Trump / Vance campaign reeled in 1.5 billion. By comparison, the next closest contender, RFK Jr. brought in 111 million.
Millions and billions. And what did we get for all this spending?
Donald Trump is openly appointing and befriending the wealthiest to be in his cabinet. Elon Musk, notably, to run the “Department of Governmental Efficiency” – which isn’t a thing, as creating official departments takes congressional action. Nonetheless, now we have a person who, as a billionaire, funded much of Trump’s campaign – something around 250 million dollars, just from him.
And notably, other tech billionaires have now spent time with Trump – Gates, Zuckerberg, Bezos among them – and during a time at which up to 54% of Americans are getting their news from social media, and social media leaders and billionaire news-organization owners are letting go of fact-checking, I do believe that our very democracy has been (unwillingly by the majority of us) put up for sale to the richest of the rich.
N.B. I did watch a documentary based in North Carolina, my home state, called Democracy for Sale, and highly recommend it. There is also a book by Peter Geoghegan that I have not read yet.
Fresh Eyes 