U.S. President Donald Trump reacts on stage at the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas, Texas, U.S., September 9, 2026.
Some days feel like we're all living in the pages of a novel set in the Gilded Age, a time when the merely rich transformed into the very obscenely rich while everyone else struggled.
Yesterday, the Washington Sunreported that the president had four golden chandeliers installed in the West Wing in celebration of his June birthday. The White House scrapped normal procedure. A small firm was given a $50,000 no-bid contract to get the job done fast.
On the same day, the Timesreported that nearly half the country is having trouble making ends meet, with that number approaching 75 percent among low-income Americans.
"Nearly three-quarters said they struggled to pay for food, housing, medical care or daily transportation in the past year compared with 13 percent of upper-income adults," the Timessaid of a new survey by the Pew Research Center. "About half of those on the lower end of the income spectrum said they could not pay some of their bills each month, and 77 percent said they did not have enough money to cover expenses for three months in an emergency."
That so many people are scrambling is a consequence of Donald Trump's choices. The triple whammy of illegal war, illegal taxes (tariffs) and illegal deportations are burning up the economy in the form of stagflation (stagnant incomes plus inflation). Hourly wages are back to where they were before Trump returned to power, the Timessaid. In September, prices rose to their highest in five months. They were 3.7 percent higher than this time last year.
But the above contrast doesn't capture how systemic the problem is – that the corruption and villainy are not Trump's alone. For that, we have reporting today by the Post. It revealed the individuals and companies that made $330 million in "donations" to his fund to build a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House used to be. All of them appear to have gotten something in return: favorable regulation, government contracts, even pardons.
The Gilded Age was not only an era of explosive wealth. (No one had seen so much money made so quickly from industrialization.) It was also an explosion of what we would these days call white-collar crime. There's a reason reformers used the phrase "robber barons." It captured how the merely rich became very obscenely rich through a combination of corporate concentration, corruption and workforce exploitation. Naturally, the more people were aware of the crimes against them, the angrier they were with "the money power."
There's plenty of reason to be mad with the money power now.
Absent from the list of donors to Trump's ballroom is Trump. Last year, amid outcry about the (illegal) demolition of the East Wing, he said don't worry. "It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine." He might not use his own money, however, and he might not use his friends'. The budget for the ballroom ranges from $800 million to close to a billion dollars. In August, the Post reported most of that would come from taxpayers.
The president knocked down the East Wing in a fit of rage after No Kings, the biggest protest in American history. Then he solicited "donations" for a renovation no one wanted, no one approved, no one consented to. The "donations" were really "pay for play," a cute name for bribery. Rich individuals and global conglomerates paid for favors from the president, including pardons, the cash being laundered through a shady nonprofit that tried to whitewash their identities. Compounding the injury is Trump's apparent plan to inflate the budget, keep the "donations" for himself, and stick the American people with the bill.
I don't know if history is going to repeat itself. However, I will note that the Gilded Age begat the Progressive Era, a period of unprecedented social and political reform in the early 20th century that rose from the backlash against the decadence and impunity of the previous era. I will also note a new poll by the Associated Press that suggests the emergence of a new consensus in which Trump is becoming symbolic of our own 21st-century Gilded Age.
The AP found that "as Trump’s family business pulls in record money from new ventures helped by his policies," about 60 percent believe he is "either illegally profiting or doing something unethical but not illegal." Over half believe he has privileged his financial interests "a lot" since returning to the White House. Just 10 percent think he is focused “a lot” on them.
It appears that Americans are increasingly connecting the dots. It's not just that they are struggling to make ends meet. It's that Trump's choices are the reason for that struggle. A new Fox poll has the president's approval at just 36 percent. That's four points lower than George W Bush's was this time during his second term, the month before his party was wiped out. The GOP lost both chambers of the Congress in the 2006 midterms.
A final word.
About today's "robber barons."
They include leaders of household brands: Microsoft, Apple, Google. Donald Trump has been bestowed with immunity, but the Supreme Court did not bestow it on them. In the future, if they cannot be prosecuted for bribery, their firms are exposed, potentially, to either furious government oversight or the hammer of antitrust law. They're all monopolies. They're all illegal in one way or another. The coming backlash is going to be against them, too.