Fake 'populism': How Trump's billionaire admin serves the rich, and hurts everyone else

Donald Trump's policies benefit wealthy elites at the expense of everyone else. His administration includes 13 billionaires, and he is cutting taxes on the rich while increasing them on the poor.

When Donald Trump campaigned to be US president in 2024, he promised he would help working-class Americans. He even did a photo op at a McDonald's, pretending to be a fast food worker.

When he returned to the White House, however, Trump made it clear that his policies would be serving a small handful of billionaire oligarchs, not the majority of the country.

Trump appointed 13 billionaires as top officials in his administration. As Public Citizen reported, this means that the Trump administration represents not just the 1% richest Americans, but the 0.0001%.

The billionaires in the Trump administration -- including Elon Musk, the world's richest person -- had a combined wealth of more than $460 billion as of January 2025.

Trump invited the world's most powerful oligarchs to his inauguration. The billionaire CEOs of Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations symbolically sat with his cabinet members.

Then, just a few hours after he took office, Trump invited three more billionaire oligarchs to the White House, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, to do a press conference about artificial intelligence.

As president, Trump has held regular meetings and phone calls with his billionaire supporters, including Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager. Fink personally called Trump to ask the White House to help BlackRock buy the ports on both sides of the Panama Canal.

Corruption: greenlighting money laundering, bribery, and crypto scams

As US president, Donald Trump has passed a series of executive orders that have essentially promoted corruption, on behalf of wealthy elites. He gutted an anti-money laundering law, and ended the enforcement of a law that banned bribery.

In an executive order, Trump boasted that allowing bribery will help "America and its companies gaining strategic commercial advantages around the world". He likewise told reporters that by permitting corruption, “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America”.

Just a few days before Trump returned to the White House, he launched a meme coin named after himself. Reuters reported that the people behind the $TRUMP coin made roughly $100 million in trading fees in just two weeks.

Trump launched the meme coin on the 17th of January, just three days before his inauguration. The value quickly rose, before falling by two-thirds, in what looked a lot like a pump-and-dump scheme.

What was so cynical about this meme coin scandal is that Trump was exploiting his own supporters. 810,000 people who had invested in Trump's crypto scheme lost money, totaling $2 billion.

Cutting taxes on the rich, while increasing taxes on everyone else

These pro-rich and anti-poor policies are based on the same playbook that Donald Trump pursued in his first term.

In 2017, Trump cut taxes on the rich and corporations. As of 2018, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the US paid a lower effective tax rate than the bottom half of poor and working-class Americans.

When he campaigned for president in 2024, Trump vowed to continue reducing taxes on wealthy elites.

Economists at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the people in the US who will see the highest increase in taxes during Trump's second term are the poor and the working class, whereas the rich will have their taxes cut.

They calculated that the richest 5% of the US population will have their taxes reduced by around 1.2%, whereas the poorest 20% will see their taxes increased by 4.8% on average.

This is because Trump is massively expanding tariffs, which will disproportionately impact poor and working-class Americans.

Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, which is essentially a tax on consumption, because the US imports many consumer goods from China, Mexico, Canada, and other countries.

Poor and working-class people spend a much higher percentage of their paycheck than rich people do on consumer goods, food, and basic necessities.

If a rich person has millions of dollars of wealth, and they get another million, they're not going to buy much more food and consumer goods. Their marginal propensity to consume is low.

If a working-class person who is barely making ends meet gets a pay raise, they likely will spend more on food and consumer goods. Their marginal propensity to consume is high.

This means that the burden of the tariffs will be felt much more by poor and working-class Americans.

In other words, Trump is essentially increasing taxes on the working class and cutting taxes on the rich. His administration is overseeing a wealth transfer from the majority of working-class people to the minority of the rich.

The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimated that the average rich person in the 1% of elite Americans will see their taxes reduced by $36,320, whereas the bottom 95% of Americans will have their taxes increase. The middle class will bear the largest burden.

That study was a projection of what the impact of Trump's tax policy will be in the future. Analyses of Trump's policies during his first term as president, from January 2017 to January 2021, came to similar conclusions.

A report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looked at the impact of Trump's 2017 tax law. They found that the richest 1% of Americans had their taxes reduced by $61,090, while the poorest 20% of Americans saw their taxes cut by just $70.

Trump has said that when he was president the first time he cut taxes on all Americans, including poor and working-class Americans. This claim is not technically wrong, but it is very misleading. Wealthy elites enjoyed much, much higher tax breaks than the majority of the population.

This is true not just in terms of the dollar amount, but also the percentage change.

The after-tax income of the richest 5% of Americans increased by around 3%, thanks to Trump's 2017 tax law, whereas the poorest 20% of Americans saw their after-tax income grow by just 0.4%. The middle class had its after-tax income increase by about 1.4%.

In short, Trump's policies primarily benefited rich elites.

The anti-poverty organization Oxfam reported in 2025:

Billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and retail workers. Thanks to a tax code that favors income from wealth over income from work—and a slew of tax-avoidance strategies—the richest among us end up paying a smaller percentage of their income to the federal government than most working families.

Here’s what we know:

• In 2024, billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion OR $3.9 billion per day. There were 74 new billionaires.

• According to a 2021 White House study, the wealthiest 400 billionaire families in the U.S. paid an average federal individual tax rate of just 8.2 percent. For comparison, the average American taxpayer in the same year paid 13 percent.

• According to leaked tax returns highlighted in a ProPublica investigation, the 25 richest Americans paid $13.6 billion in taxes from 2014-2018—a “true” tax rate of just 3.4 percent on $401 billion of income.

Historical US tax rates on the rich and corporations

Trump and his billionaire allies frequently complain that taxes are supposedly too high, but this is simply not true historically.

The top marginal income tax throughout most of US history was much higher.

In 1944 and 1945, during World War II, the highest marginal income tax rate was 94%.

The richest Americans paid an income tax rate of 91% throughout the 1950s and into the early '60s, in the so-called "golden era" of US capitalism, which was praised for fostering a strong middle class.

Even into the 1970s, the income of the richest Americans was still taxed around 70%.

It was Ronald Reagan in the 1980s who massively slashed taxes on the rich, from 70% to 28%.

Trump continued Reagan's pro-elite policies and reduced the highest marginal income tax rate to 37% in 2018.

(These income taxes, however, do not account for the fact that much of the wealth of the rich comes from capital gains on assets they own, not ordinary income.)

It is not just US taxes on rich individuals that have been slashed, but also taxes on corporations.

In the 1950s, '60s, and '70s the corporate income tax rate ranged from 48% to 53%. Again, this was the "golden era" of US capitalism.

Reagan reduced this to 34%, and Trump cut it to 21% during his first term.

Now in his second term, Trump wants to reduce it even further.

In terms of the revenue that the US government has received from corporate taxes, it has steadily fallen as a percentage of GDP.

In the 1950s, corporate income tax revenue represented approximately 5% of GDP.

In the 1960s, it fell to around 3.5%. By the 1970s, it decreased to roughly 2.7%. Under Reagan, it reached a low of 1%. Today, it's 1.6% of GDP.