Thanks to the 14-year run of The Apprentice, even the politically ignorant were well aware that Donald Trump (net worth $6.2 billion, per Forbes) was a wealthy real estate tycoon. If anything, the voting public judged Trump wealthier than he really is; as John D. Miller, a marketer for the NBC series, pointed out in October, “We created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty.” Given that narrative’s predominance, nobody can be surprised that the president-elect’s sidekick ended up being the richest person in the world, or that he’s appointed a dozen billionaires to top posts.
This has happened before. The worst presidential choice prior to 2024 was James Buchanan in 1856. Like Trump, Buchanan won both the popular vote and the Electoral College. These two presidents are the lowest-ranked in an annual poll of American political scientists, and Buchanan ranks last in a 2021 survey of American political historians (though for some mysterious reason that one ranks Trump only fourth-worst). Buchanan is reviled for fumbling Confederates’ threats to secede, which of course led to the Civil War. I would argue that the public also chose very badly in reelecting Richard Nixon in 1972 and George W. Bush in 2004—and that in choosing Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party cleared a path that eventually led to Trump.
None of the Founders fretted as much about oligarchy as Adams; he was writing about its dangers as early as 1766, and in 1785 he urged that the Pennsylvania Constitution permit sufficient payment to its legislators to allow ordinary people to serve, lest “an Aristocracy or oligarchy of the rich will be formed.” Six years after he ended his presidency (the weakest part of his legacy), Adams wrote that “the Creed of my whole Life” had been that “No simple Form of Government, can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power. Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism, Aristocracy will soon commence an Oligarchy, and Democracy, will soon degenerate into an Anarchy.”
“I think his experience in London, where he was American ambassador during and especially immediately after the war in the 1780s, really shaped his opinion about oligarchy,” Holly Brewer, Burke professor of American history at the University of Maryland, told me. “He became more comfortable with it.” The carriages, pulled by six horses, were “modeled after how the king traveled in London,” Brewer said.
The Framers of the Constitution, Mayville argues, believed in checks and balances among various government institutions, but they did not consider any need to balance the power of government against the power of wealthy private citizens. Adams thought otherwise. “The rich, the well-born, and the able,” Adams wrote in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787–8), “acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives.” Adams’s solution to this imbalance of power was to separate out “the most illustrious” among this elite and corral them into the Senate.
The Constitution ended up giving the Senate more power, and the president less power, than Adams thought wise. Jefferson thought the opposite. “You are afraid of the one,” Adams wrote Jefferson, “I, the few.… You are apprehensive of monarchy; I, of aristocracy.” Adams judged a strong president a natural ally of the many against the oligarchs. That theory worked superbly with Franklin D. Roosevelt and reasonably well with John F. Kennedy. It works not at all with Donald Trump.
Mayville summarizes Jefferson’s view as “Old World aristocracies would be replaced in the republican age by new natural aristocracies of virtue and talent.” To a great extent that eventually happened, aided in the twentieth century first by the spread of publicly funded high schools where attendance was mandatory and, at midcentury, by the spread of higher education.
Jefferson failed to anticipate that the voting public would resent his natural aristocracy of virtue and talent—the people we today call meritocrats—much more than trust fund brats and hedge fund billionaires. Indeed, Adams defined “aristocrat” (he also meant “oligarch”) as those who exercise the most electoral sway. “By aristocracy,” he wrote, “I understand all those men who can command, influence, or procure more than an average of votes.”
Why do rich people exert so much influence? Money is the obvious answer, and Adams acknowledged its power. But in The Discourses on Davila (1790) he emphasized another, more psychological explanation. There is, Adams wrote, a universal desire “to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected, by the people about [us], and within [our] knowledge.” In short: We all live to show off. This is why Mills compared Adams to Veblen; one might also compare Adams to the journalist Tom Wolfe, the preeminent chronicler of social status in the late twentieth century. Granted, among idealistic college students, associating oneself with the wretched of the earth yields greater status, but for most of the rest of us associating oneself with the rich is what gets the job done. Adams again (in The Discourses on Davila, quoted by Mayville): ...
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