Newsweek Cover, April 6, 2017:

Mr. Monopoly, that mustachioed fat cat with the Taftian profile, was about as close as most Americans got to a New York City billionaire until candidate Donald Trump started flying his jet to their cities and villages last year. Now they are practically an everyday sight, because President Donald Trump has coaxed a pack of them out of their penthouse triplexes, yachts and private jets to either join his Cabinet or sit on his councils and advisory boards. Trump voters know they've had a government for billionaires--that's one reason they're so mad--but to have one by billionaires means the Mighty Oz is now setting the nation's agenda, and there is no curtain.

Anybody with $1 billion in net worth possesses a tranche of wealth greater than the gross domestic product of 60 nations. So what can a president give to these men who have everything? And what can they do for him and to the rest of America? The answer may be found in the most famous line from the Italian classic novel The Leopard, about the decaying Sicilian aristocracy: "Everything must change so that everything can remain the same." The best gift Trump can give his rich friends from Manhattan is to appear to be shaking up the system while leaving their myriad tactics for manipulating and amassing capital unaffected by federal regulation and higher taxes. Less than three months into his presidency, Trump is well into that agenda--quietly deregulating the financial industry, stripping Barack Obama's climate change rules from fossil fuel producers and promising to lower taxes on the very rich.

A billionaires' takeover of the U.S. government was not one of Trump's signature campaign promises, but in retrospect it was obvious he wasn't going to bring in the sustainability MBAs--he doesn't know any. Instead, he set up a government of, by and for his peers (or men the famously insecure Trump wishes to call his peers). His Cabinet of millionaires and billionaires is the richest in American history. The New York billionaires, though, have more in common with Russian oligarchs and Nigerian petro-magnates than with almost any other Americans--whether they are flipping burgers at McDonald's or performing heart surgery at the Mayo Clinic. They have been sold to the public as men who will help Trump run the country "like a business," in which the public is the consumer. After careers in which they put growing their colossal bank accounts ahead of the interests of small towns, working stiffs and the common weal, there is no reason to believe they will worry about how predatory lending or letting Obamacare "explode" affects real people. Trump's billionaires are not government-hating ideologues like the Koch brothers or mega-donor Robert Mercer. They are more like what Trump used to be--unaffiliated centrists. And their agenda--and now the country's agenda--is defined by those matters that affect their wallets.

Read the rest at Newsweek.