Politics beats economics every time – as the billionaires grovelling before Trump prove

And that just could be a cause for hope

Ann Telnaes resigned from the Washington Post after it refused to run this cartoon showing Jeff Bezos and other billionaires bowing before an imperial Trump. You can support her work via this link.

“The rich are different from you and me,” said F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. Ordinary people are frightened. We have doubts. But the wealth of the rich gives them the independence to “think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are.”

Ernest Hemingway was having none of it, and began a splenetic literary quarrel Fitzgerald was hopelessly wrong. The rich weren’t a “special glamorous race”. They were “dull and they were repetitious.” They drank too much, which was strange insult coming from Hemingway, but I suppose he knew what he was talking about. Worse than that, he continued, “they played too much backgammon”.

The critic Edmund Wilson neatly summed up the dispute:

“Fitzgerald had said, ‘The rich are different from us.’ Hemingway had replied, ‘Yes, they have more money.’”

Exactly 100 years on, and history has proved Hemingway right. Jeff Bezos (with a net worth of $246.5 billion) and Mark Zuckerberg (a mere $219 billion) are richer than all the pharaohs, monarchs, warlords, robber barons and emperors of the past believed possible. To say that they are rich beyond the dreams of avarice is to understate the case. They are rich beyond human comprehension.

And yet Donald Trump is showing that they are no different from you and me. Indeed, they may be worse. All that money hasn’t bought them independence or self-respect. They are still bullied. They still bend the knee.

Their wealth merely ensures that they grovel before a different class of boss: the president of the United States rather than the brutal supervisors at an Amazon warehouse.

On Wednesday one of the longest serving contributors at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post denounced his paper after it published an abysmal op-ed drawing moral equivalence between Joe Biden, who had issued pardons to defend his family and others from Trump’s vengeance, and Donald Trump pardoning his supporters who stormed the US Congress in an attempt to overturn a free election.

In apparent seriousness, the once-great paper cravenly opined that “it’s debatable which president’s abuse of the pardon power… was more damaging.”

David Maraniss said that the Post had “utterly lost its soul”. Its failure to defend democracy was “unconscionable”.

Before that, the Post’s cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned because the management would not let her satirise the subservience of tech billionaires to Trump. Before that, the management (led, tellingly, by Will Lewis, once a Murdoch flunkey here in London) pulled a leading article endorsing Kamala Harris.

Lewis is remembered by British journalists for heading Murdoch’s attempts to contain the hacking scandal. To protect his boss’s leathery hide, Lewis handed over to the authorities for prosecution reporters who had worked for Murdoch in good faith, and their sources, who had spoken to the Murdoch press after receiving supposedly sacred promises that their identity would be protected.

It deadens the soul to think that the Washington Post, the paper which taught us the importance of protecting your sources at any price during its coverage of the Watergate scandal, is now run by such a character.

I could go on about the journalistic decline. But to do so would be to miss the point. Jeff Bezos did not buy The Washington Post in 2013 to turn it into a right-wing or indeed far-right-wing rag.

Unlike Elon Musk neither Bezos nor Zuckerberg signed up to Trump’s world of paranoid extremism.

On the contrary, the support Bezos offered in a news industry whose business model has collapsed, allowed good journalism to flourish at the Washington Post until the eve of Trump’s victory in 2024, when everything changed.

Bezos isn’t on his knees because he admires Trump but because he is frightened of him.

Politics is showing that it trumps (forgive the pun) economics yet again. Hobbes’s Leviathan still rules because, in the end, the state has the real power.

I have written before about how the US under Trump is not an oligarchy any more than Vladimir Putin’s Russia is. The servility of American billionaires makes my case for me.

In real oligarchies, in ancient Greece or the Venetian Republic, members of the elite share power and make sure that no one becomes strong enough to reign over them.

But Roman Abramovich does not share power with Putin. If he defies the big boss in the Kremlin, Abramovich risks accidentally falling out of a high window, as so many Russians do these days.

Likewise, Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg are not Trump’s equals.

True, they are pitiful creatures when set against real dissidents in real dictatorships. No one is going to poison Bezos if he stands up to Trump. The FBI will not send Zuckerberg to the American equivalent of a Siberian salt mine if he finally discovers a backbone.

The threat of losing contracts and access to power is enough to ensure that they snap into line.

Because we are children of the neo-liberal era even the best minds find it hard to accept the primacy of politics. To make my point, think about the gap in an otherwise wonderful piece on the subservience of American plutocrats, by the Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman.

What was the point of being rich, he asked, if you end up like Jeff Bezos