Trump and His Oligarchs Want to Crush Dr. King’s Vision that America Belongs To Each Citizen Equally*
With the Able Assistance of the U.S. Supreme Court, They Could Succeed
In celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday last year, I posted America Should Belong To Each Citizen Equally. That vision is central to Dr. King’s legacy. Excepting certain built-in failings,[i] the U.S. Constitution as amended appears to provide every American citizen of voting age the same right and equal say in self-government — at least on paper. The country’s political and human-rights history is largely defined by the struggle to achieve that democratic ideal, which continues to be met with racist, misogynistic, and sectarian resistance that is nothing more than poorly disguised pretext to “secure” elections and root out “voter and election fraud.”
Solutions in search of problems!
Enter the tech and media moguls, wannabe “masculine” men, mostly, with unimaginable wealth, who control and manipulate significant swaths of the information we consume, whether through historically traditional media such as The Washington Post[ii] and Los Angeles Times or online platforms they freely own, such as X and Meta’s array, using algorithms and disinformation that favor certain politicians and points of view over others.
Under Trump, efforts to control information is accelerating through media organizations’ obeying in advance and appeasement — such as ABC News’s capitulation into paying $16 million to settle a weak defamation lawsuit brought by Trump over George Stephanopoulos’s use of the word “rape” (the presiding judge clarified that yes, Trump was found to have “raped” E. Jean Carroll); and CBS News’s contemplated settlement with the president-elect, in an equally bogus lawsuit over 60 Minutes’s interview of presidential candidate Vice President Harris, “as a gesture of good will, ” hoping to grease its potential merger with Skydance Media in the new administration. See also This is How The #BrokenTimes Covers the Fascist Oligarchy (Jeff Jarvis, Medium, January 18, 2025) (identifying a series of articles, essays, and opinions in The New York Times that exposes the paper’s journalistic malpractice through submission to Trump and his oligarchs in violation of principles of independence, integrity, and ethics).
And then there’s Trump’s toxically masculine[iii] bromance with unimaginatively rich tech and media moguls who have purchased access and influence by buying the presidency, padding Trump’s pockets in overfunding the inauguration, and favoring his fascist strategies and campaigns of disinformation in their respective platforms. Why? It’s not rocket science: To increase individual wealth and influence, the very definition of an oligarch — someone who “secures and produces wealth or power, then transforms one into the other.” The American Oligarchs Have Arrived to Destroy US Democracy (Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams, October 30, 2023) (“Oligarchy is corrosive. It destroys trust and confidence in government. It breeds cynicism and discontent. If not challenged, it will swallow us whole”). See also Oligarchs Already Own Much Of US — Can They Buy Democracy? (Sebastian Smith, Barrons, January 16, 2025).
Victor Pickard, C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, discussed, within the context of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X, why oligarchs controlling the media is anathema to democratic principles and institutions and their preservation:
“I believe this episode underscores yet again what bad social policy it was to entrust our core information and communication infrastructures — what should be treated as public goods and essential public services in a healthy democracy — to private, profit-driven platforms. We should never have been in this situation in the first place where the wealthiest person on the planet can simply buy up a major social media outlet on a whim without any public scrutiny. It’s an absurdity for any democratic society. . . .
“What is to be done? In the short-term we can hope that the DSA [Digital Services Act] and other EU policies will help curb the worst commercial excesses in social media platforms. But for the longer-term we need to aim for alternative models of governance — models that are radically-democratized and not pegged to the commercial market.
“Right now, ideas such as public ownership — whether it be based on a cooperative model or something more akin to a traditional public service broadcaster — seem to be utterly utopian. But we need to broaden our political imaginations and our policy debates to begin seriously working towards such alternative models. We can’t hope to maintain democratic societies if our information and communication systems are owned and controlled by oligarchs.” (Emphasis added.)
In two pivotal cases, the United States Supreme Court paved the way for a political party — determined to acquire and hold power — to undermine two fundamental principles for preserving liberal democracy and democratic institutions: the unabridged right to vote, by suppressing the franchise of targeted classes of citizens — primarily concentrations of minorities in gerrymandered red states; and the unimpeded flow of reliable information, substituted by manipulation and disinformation through the self-reinforcing purchase of political influence through wealth as a means to increase wealth and political influence.
Citizens United and Dark Money
In his parting speech from the Oval Office, President Biden warned:
“[T]his is the dangerous cancer — and that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. . . .
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. . . .
“And in a democracy, there’s another danger to the concentration of power and wealth. It erodes a sense of unity and common purpose. It causes distrust and division. Participating in our democracy becomes exhausting and even disillusioning, and people don’t feel like they have a fair shot.”
During his speech, President Biden alluded to one of the Supreme Court decisions, saying, “We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaigns’ contributions — we need to get it out of our politics.” In 2010, the Supreme Court decided Citizens United, holding that corporations could “freely fund independent political spending, saying that ‘independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.’”
In his January 18, 2025 essay, Paul Blumenthal explains:
“A wide array of outside groups immediately popped up — many with explicit connections to parties and candidates, despite the court’s supposed insistence on independence. . . .
“The lines of independence continued to crumble thanks to enforcement decisions by the FEC. Candidates were allowed to appear at super PAC fundraisers so long as they did not personally ask for sums exceeding the candidate contribution limit. Super PACs could use materials and information posted online by candidates and parties, including videos, images, ad messaging and targeting strategy. . . .
“The coup de grâce came in early 2024, after the law firm of Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias petitioned the FEC to allow a Democratic-aligned super PAC in Texas to coordinate with candidates when engaged in voter turnout efforts. The FEC’s decision gave the thumbs-up to direct coordination between candidates, parties and super PACs on one of the most vital elements of campaigning: voter engagement and turnout.
“But it wasn’t Democrats who took advantage. Republicans immediately seized the opportunity. Trump outsourced his ground game to groups like Turning Point USA and Musk’s America PAC while directly coordinating with them. Whatever lines existed between the independent spending envisioned by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United ruling and the candidates and parties backed by such groups were no more.
“This, now the state of affairs in 2025, is the worst possible system for campaign funding. Political parties are husks turned into personalistic fiefdoms by conquering warlords, like the Republicans, or incapable of leadership, policy prioritization and decision making, like the Democrats. State parties are in even worse shape, needing to beg for funds from their national party, thus making it impossible for them to create an independent identity. Filling their place are outside groups, with their phony independence providing billionaires like Musk a chance to assert control.
“Campaign contribution limits are effectively void now that super PACs can explicitly coordinate with candidates and parties. However, lawmakers still need to raise limited contributions on a nonstop basis for themselves and their party, leaving less time for legislating. . . .
“At the same time, the Citizens United decision led to a dramatic increase in the amount of campaign spending funded by undisclosed donors. The public may not know the identity of the hundreds of millions in dark money spent on elections since then, but the candidates and party actors — who, after all, can appear at their fundraisers — likely do. . . .
“Political parties, when allowed to function properly, are vital tools of democracy. Parties provide structure for democratic decision making, policy prioritization and coalition mobilization that ideological or self-interested actors cannot. Absent those structures, or undermined by the rise of and reliance on billionaire-funded super PACs and dark money, you get the personalistic rule of Trump and Musk . . . .”
Campaign Finance Reform Is Dead. Citizens United Killed It (Paul Blumenthal, Huffington Post, January 18, 2025) (emphasis added); see also Inside the rise of US oligarchs and how it opened a dark money ‘floodgate’ (Riley Stuart, ABC News, November 20, 2024).
Shelby County v. Holder and Voter Suppression as Pretext[iv]
Women’s right to vote under the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920, 146 years after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence. Ratification did not achieve full suffrage due in part to racial segregation — Jim Crow laws — designed to reverse political and economic progress African Americans achieved through Reconstruction.
The Voting Rights Act signed into law August 6, 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, “outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted in many southern states after the Civil War.” The law sought to enforce the plain language of the 15th Amendment, which was ratified 95 years earlier:
“The right to citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act created what was known as a “preclearance” requirement which mandated that states and jurisdictions with histories of voting discrimination “obtain approval from the Attorney General or a federal court before implementing changes in election procedures and practices. Covered jurisdictions could not implement their proposed changes until they received preclearance.” Recognizing its continuing need, Congress reauthorized Section 5 in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006. Since 1982 more than 800 proposed changes in laws were withdrawn or altered under Section 5.
Despite the country’s progress toward assuring free and fair elections to each citizen equally, on June 25, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder — claiming we live in a “post-racial society” — leaving “millions of voters of color without the mechanism that had stopped voting discrimination before it could be implemented.”
“States wasted no time implementing election changes that had not or might not have survived the preclearance requirement. . . . [T]he very day that the Supreme Court issued the Shelby County opinion, Texas officials announced that they would implement a discriminatory and burdensome photo identification statute. And on June 26, the day after the Shelby County decision, Senator Tom Apodaca, Chairman of the North Carolina Senate Rules Committee, publicly stated that the North Carolina Legislature would be moving forward with an omnibus law imposing multiple voting restrictions. In the absence of preclearance, the statutes went into effect and the Department [of Justice], along with private parties, had to file suit under a different part of the Voting Rights Act to enjoin them. Those lawsuits ultimately succeeded but they took years to litigate and consumed substantial resources, including millions of dollars spent by Texas and North Carolina to defend the state laws. In the meantime, untold numbers of voters were burdened or disenfranchised because the laws remained in place while the cases were pending.”
Reflecting On the 10th Anniversary of Shelby County v. Holder (Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, June 23, 2023).
In passing and amending laws meant to suppress the Black vote, southern states, primarily, attempt to disguise their discriminatory intent in pretext, offering solutions in search of problems. Those laws intentionally target minority voters to enhance the electoral prospects of the party in power.
Conclusion
I don’t have answers but a couple of suggestions. Stay informed and vigilant. I strongly encourage you to subscribe to Marc Elias’s free Democracy Docket newsletter to keep informed of current challenges to voter suppression throughout the United States. And, as Jeff Jarvis suggests in his January 18, 2025 article in Medium, seek reliable sources of information, and even if you don’t give up on “incumbent institutions of mass media,” turn to “the tender shoots rising from the ashes to replace them.”
Preserving the right to vote for all Americans and access to reliable information are key to determining whether we will have a free and fair election in 2028.
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i These failings include the Electoral College, disproportionate power in senators from states with smaller populations, and the ability of states to racially and politically gerrymander districts to suppress and manipulate the vote, thereby controlling government through complete disenfranchisement or the diminished value of individuals’ vote.
ii Predating The Washington Post’s appeasement of Trump, staff writer David Montgomery consulted twenty-one experts in the presidency, political science, public administration, the military, intelligence, foreign affairs, economics, and civil rights to “game out the consequences of another Trump administration.” He published the results in the Post’s Magazine. What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out. “The scenarios are . . . grim,” he said. Indeed! Please click on the link, if for no reason other than to see the spectacular cover art.
iii See Chris Hayes’s piece on the emergence of toxic masculinity. The problem with MAGA’s definition of manhood (Chris Hayes, MSNBC, January 19, 2025) (“A huge part of this has been these pathological expressions of gender frustration by men who seem to think that the real way to ‘be a man’ is to insult people and endlessly whine about DEI and the unfairness of the world to rich dudes. And that begins with the man himself, Trump, who is, more than anything else, a crybaby: endlessly complaining in ever more dramatic language about how much of a victim he is.”).
The opinion by Jamelle Buoi in the Times shows he has not surrendered to Trump and continues speaking truth to power. He discusses media moguls’ strange bromance with Trump’s profane form of “masculinity” as an insincere means to a powerful and lucrative end, focusing primarily on Mark Zuckerberg’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Referring to these budding oligarchs — the richest people in the world who control and manipulate massive information worldwide — Bouie explained:
“There is no apparent interest, from either Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or anyone else bemoaning the current cultural cachet of masculinity, in cultivating an image of responsible manhood. We have a clique of powerful middle-aged men who want nothing more than to be boys.”
These media moguls’ behavior, Bouie explains, “is exactly what you would expect in a country where the standard-bearer for the ‘return’ of masculinity to the political and cultural world is Donald Trump, a selfish, petulant and narcissistic man-child who celebrates his rejection of the traditional masculine virtues of duty and restraint and who has done so for his entire career on the public stage. Trump stands for masculinity as misogyny, dominance, exploitation and — as per Zuckerberg — aggression.”
“More concretely, Zuckerberg and like-minded tech moguls have direct material interests in cultivating Trump’s good favor by performing his brand of manhood. Meta, for instance, wants to undermine its competitors, suppress regulation and free itself from the threat of antitrust enforcement. Other tech billionaires want to leverage state power to secure their investments in artificial intelligence, ahead of a potential collapse in the value of A.I. stocks. If the bubble pops, they want Uncle Sam — and thus the American taxpayer — to be the one holding the bag. Their pose and presentation, then, are all obviously strategic.
“And yet it is all still a sign of the times — of a broad move toward something ugly and profane. ‘How easily men may be corrupted,’ Machiavelli observed, ‘and how they may transform themselves and give themselves a completely different nature, no matter how good and well educated they may be.’
“This may not be exactly true of Zuckerberg and the others — I’m not sure that they have merely begun to be, to borrow from Machiavelli again, ‘friends of tyranny for the little bit of profit it provided them’ — but it is undoubtedly true of those who have and will contort themselves for Trump in search of some advantage for themselves.”
iv This section was included in my post from last year, America Should Belong To Each Citizen Equally.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
**My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
