The GOP's Finely Tuned Bribery Machine
It's playing out right before our eyes, but the secret 2025 agenda it's facilitating is even more scandalous.
The shock-and-awe Republicans have in store for the country if they take power next year is hard to convey to the unsuspecting—so fanatical from issue to issue that it can strike these voters (including many Republican voters) as implausible. Alarmist.
Most pressing and politically salient are their dictatorial and misogynist ambitions. Donald Trump will turn reproductive-rights policy over to religious extremists. He aims to arrogate power from the other branches of government and use it to punish enemies—judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and high-profile critics—all unbounded by constitutional law.
More conventionally, but no less fatefully, Trump’s policy ambition is wildly regressive. He promises to give rich people trillions of dollars in tax cuts and pay for part of it by imposing a huge sales tax on consumer goods. The rest will be financed by throwing people off Medicaid and with inflationary deficits. Prices will climb higher still if he expels a huge share of the immigrant workforce, too, as he’s promised.
Fortunately for Democrats and for the incredulous voters of America, Trump loyalists wrote the whole program down, and even gave it a nefarious-sounding name: Project 2025.
I want to stipulate up top that I think this is the Democrats’ most potent material: Dark, conspiratorial, substantive, high viral potential. But it competes with another damning aspect of right-wing politics: Between the renomination of Donald Trump, and the maturation of the Federalist Society’s plan to commandeer the Supreme Court, and the congressional GOP’s complicity in both development, the Republican Party has become an especially naked conduit for bribes. Republican officials are now openly selling policy—and the promise of future, grander policy—to the highest bidders.
PULLING A BOEHNER
Last month, Trump famously promised to let oil CEOs write their own environmental regulations if they raise a billion dollars for his campaign. The CEOs responded by organizing high-dollar fundraisers all over east Texas. To their credit, House and Senate Democrats have made a priority of investigating this quid pro quo corruption.
Miriam Adelson, the widow of Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, suggested she’d seed a Trump Super PAC with tens of millions of dollars if Trump agreed to green light Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and within days, she began cutting checks.
Trump reversed his long-standing support for banning TikTok in exchange for cash.
That’s how Trump sells policy. Things work a bit differently on the Supreme Court, where the justices are tenured for life, and the Republican appointees are ideological fanatics first and greedy hucksters second.
In their case, right-wing elites have underwritten lavish lifestyles to discourage ideological defection or untimely retirement.
Clarence Thomas retroactively disclosed millions of dollars in gifts, significantly more than all the other justices combined, and even those disclosures proved incomplete. In secretly recorded video, Sam Alito, recently placed himself on one of two sides of a grand battle between partisan-religious factions. Alito, who feeds from the same trough as Thomas, has simultaneously resisted immense pressure to recuse himself from January 6-related cases, even after reporters confirmed that he’s flown multiple insurrectionist flags over his properties. In the same set of secret recordings, Alito’s wife (the flag enthusiast) suggested she sees her husband retiring in short order, at which point she’ll be unencumbered to fly more extremist flags, and sue media outlets for defamation. But of course that places Alito under yet more pressure to rule in ways that might help Trump’s campaign.
Congressional Republicans are mostly implicated here through their obeisance to Trump. They run the House on his behalf, and advance a mix of his personal vendettas and the interests of the people who bribe him. But even before Trump, House Republicans acted as passthroughs for moneyed right-wing elites. Thirty years ago, John Boehner distributed checks from tobacco industry lobbyists to Republican colleagues on the House floor. For a decade thereafter, they established the K Street Project to pressure lobbying firms to hire Republicans and reward those that did with immense influence over legislation. At the state level, Republicans outsourced bill writing to ALEC, the consortium of GOP officials and right-wing business elites that churns out model legislation for swift enactment.
LEOCRATIC FASCISM
This is politically explosive stuff, but it doesn’t graft seamlessly on to the Project 2025 appeal.
There are obviously important resonances: Republicans doing the bidding of shadowy elites, a devil’s bargain between special interests and would-be tyrants.
But from another vantage point, the fascist crackdown threat and the looting of America threat might appear incompatible. If Trump and his loyalists in Congress and on the bench are so transactional, we probably don’t have to worry that they’ll wreck democracy. Their paymasters want money and other spoils, not chaos and instability. And if famous, respected business executives are warming to Trump, how radical could he possibly be?
For that reason I suspect it’s wisest for Democrats to campaign most heavily against the looming crackdown, and use it to implicate the Republican donor class in the plot against America, rather than start with the quid pro quo corruption and work backward.
But a) the people stripping America for parts aren’t just greedy cynics—many of them (Adelson, Leonard Leo, et al) welcome the end of democracy so long as they get to be in charge, and b) even those who are not fanatics are blinded to the moral and economic risks of underwriting GOP campaigns.
Trump of course promises to renew his tax cuts, which expire next year. That’s a big inducement. But it’s only one side of the ledger: Trump is running on a policy agenda that, if enacted, would likely make the country poorer in general, offsetting the tax windfall for the wealthy, if not swallowing it whole.
If they’re warming to Trump anyhow, it’s likely because they believe that they can cash in their chits with him such that they’ll get a guaranteed return on their investment in Republican politics.
The most generous way to interpret their complicity (excessively generous in my view) is that they’re hedging out of fear that Trump will retaliate against them if he loses. Even if they all believe his second term will be a disaster for America, and that the best outcome for their whole class would be for him to lose, their individual incentive is to get on board before it’s too late, which in turn makes it much more likely that he wins.
Democrats can’t stop greedy executives from being reckless or stupid but they can alter the calculation. Biden can attempt to resolve their collective-action problem by assembling and persuading them that this kind of gangster capitalism is likelier to fail across the board than make any one company better off: As
argued recently, a criminal president would be bad for American business.Biden can also warn them that his anti-corruption and corporate tax agendas will be influenced by how extensively the corporate elite is willing to cozy up to fascism. One of Biden’s big early mistakes was letting bygones be bygones with all the incumbent executives and world leaders who played ball with MAGA cronyism in Trump’s first term. There’s no reason for him to be similarly magnanimous in a second term, and he certainly shouldn’t allow the money men warming back up to Trump to assume that Trump’s the only candidate with a long memory.
If we had political media stars who knew anything about, well, anything, they could explain how life in Hungary, Turkey, Russia—the countries Trump openly and explicitly prefers to this one—is not so great! But that would be “biased.”
I agree with Paul Krugman that rich people just want to “watch ‘em jump.” They have more money than they’ll ever need no matter what happens, but they’re personally offended by the notion that they have any responsibility to the rest of us, and they’ll vote for a dictator who will let them do whatever they want with no obligations. That’s what they consider proper respect to their awesomeness.
And in the end, most of the people who even know about Project 2025 are just shrugging and saying “Trump would never actually go that far.” To which I say “Show me a circumstance where Trump didn’t ’go that far’.”
I have come to learn I am a political junkie and part of an “informed elite.” I find this rich given how little I used to care about politics - but Trump will do that to you. I also have learned just how uninformed the vast majority of America is - and how willing they are to bet the American farm based on the few TikToks that crossed their path in any given week (hyperbole intended). I absolutely understand having other priorities - but in this day and age, I admit, I struggle to truly empathize / understand that sort of apathy.
But the behavior of these “business elites” surpasses all understanding. I truly don’t want to admit that American capitalism only rewards short-sighted ruthlessness over either talent or intelligence, but they are making an extraordinarily strong case.