Trump wasn’t just another politician doing a TV hit. “He was an American mogul, an entertainer,” Nunberg said. “And he wasn’t rich from making microchips or selling stocks. It was from building. Construction. It was this image of success; of him being rich and he can make you rich. We were the WWE–Fox News version of the Obama campaign in the beginning, and I mean that as a compliment. It was aspirational. It was, ‘we can fight the system.’”

Trump also told people that every time he had started running for president—in 1988, 2000, and 2012—the money started pouring in. He claimed he’d “made a fortune on the birther stuff,” which piqued the interest of billionaire cranks who suddenly took an interest in him. It wasn’t clear whether Trump actually believed the conspiracy theory questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace, though his antipathy for, and some would say envy of and obsession with, Obama was never in doubt. During the early months of the campaign, the Republican operative said, Trump told him and a U.S. senator who later became a fellow supporter of the president that his presidential bid would be a marketing boon to his newest hotel, the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. “I’ll run for president for a few months and get a bunch of publicity and boost the room rates,” the operative says Trump explained. “You can’t buy that kind of publicity, and when you run for president, you get it for free.”

The Republican operative describes Trump as a man fixated on his money like no “billionaire” they’d ever met and carrying a “giant chip on his shoulder” inherited from his Queens-developer father, who had felt locked out of the Manhattan real estate market because he wasn’t “part of the club”—something Trump made it his mission to rectify. Win or lose, Donald J. Trump for President would make them all pay attention. And it would put tens of millions of dollars into the pockets of a man who may never have had as much of it as he led people to believe.

During dramatic, televised testimony in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on February 27, 2019, Cohen told his version of the story behind Trump’s decision to run for president. He too said Trump ran for president as an elaborate marketing scheme to promote his hotel business—just not in the United States. In Cohen’s telling, after decades of trying and failing to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, Trump hoped that climbing onto the ultimate global stage, as a presidential candidate, would finally put him in position to ink a Russian deal that would “make hundreds of millions of dollars.” “Donald Trump is a man who ran for office to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” Cohen said. “He had no desire or intention to lead this nation—only to market himself and to build his wealth and power. Mr. Trump would often say this campaign was going to be the ‘greatest infomercial in political history.’ He never expected to win the primary. He never expected to win the general election. The campaign—for him—was always a marketing opportunity.”

Cohen went on to describe a man who was virulently racist in his presence. He said Trump told him as they rode through a black neighborhood while Obama was still president, that no decent country had ever been run by a black person, calling all black-run nations “shitholes” and saying black Americans were “too stupid” to vote for him. Cohen says he threatened Trump’s former schools on the candidate’s behalf, not to release Trump’s grades or SAT scores, while Trump publicly demanded that Obama release his.

The aggressive, full-throttle voter suppression deployed by Republican secretaries of state in places such as Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Texas took full advantage of the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.

A four-year study published in April 2018 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (or PNAS) determined that many Trump voters’ concerns about America losing its dominant global economic position were a stand-in for their fears about a loss of white cultural and economic preeminence at home. This anxiety was not set off by any real worsening of their own economic circumstances—white Americans are on average better off financially than nonwhite Americans, whether or not they have a college degree—but rather a sense of cultural displacement; the idea that people of other races, ethnicities, national origins, religions, and sexual orientations were achieving a pride of place in American life that was crowding out white Americans, particularly white Christians, cultural conservatives, and those who favor traditional marriages. In the PNAS study, Diana C. Mutz of the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania noted that “change in financial wellbeing had little impact on candidate preference. Instead, changing preferences were related to changes in the party’s positions on issues related to American global dominance and the rise of a majority–minority America: issues that threaten white Americans’ sense of dominant group status.”9

In January 2019, the Government Accountability Office’s inspector general admitted, belatedly, that it had failed to fully consider the implications for the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause when it allowed Trump to lease the old D.C. Post Office and remake it into his latest Trump Hotel. As every foreign dignitary who leased rooms there was a potential partner in bribery with the president of the United States, former prosecutor and Georgetown Law School professor Paul Butler saw the red lights flashing there, too. “It’s clear that it limits the ways that a president can profit while he’s in office,” Butler said. “The question is: A, who interprets it in terms of President Trump’s own financial dealings, and B, who enforces that interpretation? [Trump] has managed to hijack the Supreme Court, now that he has five conservative justices. It’s one of the most conservative courts in history. In fact, it has two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who might actually be in the top three of the most conservative justices since the beginning of the Supreme Court. That’s not counting the two men who the president has placed on the Court himself. We don’t have a long enough track record to determine exactly how they’ll rule on issues, but we have every reason to believe that they’ll be in the same camp as the other two extremely conservative people.”

A Pew study conducted before the midterms found that roughly three-quarters of those supporting Republican candidates viewed illegal immigration as a “very big problem,” versus fewer than one in five voters who planned to vote for Democrats.17 When Pew asked if “the way racial minorities are treated by the criminal justice system” was a “very big problem,” seven in ten supporters of Democratic candidates agreed, versus just 10 percent who supported Republicans. That polarization extended to nearly every salient issue in American life, with Democratic and Republican voters differing on the importance of everything from gun violence (81 to 25 percent), to racism (63 to 19 percent), the gap between rich and poor (77 to 22 percent), climate change (72 to 11 percent), and sexism (50 to 12 percent) in diametric opposition.18

With its obscene signs attacking Obama as a witch doctor, a “lyin’ African,” and a black Hitler, its racist invective and period costumes evoking the Revolutionary War, and its professionally printed signs that said things like “bury Obamacare with [Senator Ted] Kennedy,” the Tea Party was perhaps the ultimate expression of the power of a wealthy few to channel the GOP base’s populist instincts and undifferentiated rage at the country’s first black president toward the preferred policy outcomes of the rich—and even to stir demands by citizens for the repeal of their own healthcare.

Bartlett now believes the modern Republican Party stands for little besides slashing taxes on the rich and gutting benefits for the poor. “Although there’s lots of disparate interest groups, anti-abortion people, gun nuts, and various other groups,” he observes, “the one issue that holds all of those people together and, particularly, the funders of the Republican Party, the ultra-wealthy, is tax cuts. I think that what people don’t understand is that this isn’t just about stimulating the economy. It’s obvious that the tax cuts of the Bush and Trump eras had no economic effect whatsoever. Their agenda is to destroy government, to downsize it to such a point that we have virtual anarchy. I think that one of the problems with the Republicans is they’ve internalized a lot of the ideas of Ayn Rand. I think that they are de facto anarchists, even if they don’t think so in their own minds.”

He was also a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House, where he helped craft what he later called the “Republican tax myth” that powered the Reagan-era tax cuts. Bartlett’s connections to the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks made him a kind of father of supply-side economics. Bartlett eventually renounced it all and wrote a bestselling book that accused George W. Bush of bankrupting America and betraying Reagan’s legacy. In a 2017 Washington Post op-ed, entitled “I helped create the GOP tax myth. Trump is wrong: Tax cuts don’t equal growth,” Bartlett opposed both the Bush tax cuts and the Republican Congress’s trillion-dollar tax cut, ultimately signed the following year, that went overwhelmingly to the wealthy and corporations.

“That’s why the [now associate Supreme Court justice Brett] Kavanaugh fight was so important,” Bartlett says. “It’s not just because he’s a reliable conservative, not just that he’s a movement conservative, but he’s young. He’ll be on the court for a very long time.” Bartlett believes that conservatives are looking for ways that the courts can both preserve those policies that are already in place and prevent the enactment of liberal democratic policies.

The rule of thumb was that white voters with “conservative views on race” had to be appeased with messages against multiculturalism and nonwhite immigration. But in the post–Civil Rights era the quiet parts—about explicit racial animus—were no longer to be said out loud. This was made clear by men like South Carolina political strategist-turned-über-Republican operative Lee Atwater, who delivered the famously blunt explanation to political scientist Alexander Lamis: “you start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So, you say stuff like . . . forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.”25

Mitch McConnell made it clear in the fall of 2018 that every degradation, every hit to the stature of the presidency of the United States and the institutions around it was worth it, because essentially all that mattered to him was transforming the judiciary for a generation.33

Trump was hardly the first rich man to take advantage of America’s social upheavals. Members of the plutocratic class had long supported and even funded quasi-populist movements for their own material benefit. In 1934, the American Liberty League formed to oppose the New Deal, even as labor strikes crippled the country. The League, funded by the wealthy DuPont family and organized by a bipartisan cache of millionaire industrialists, former politicians, veterans of the anti-Prohibition movement, and even a handful of Hollywood figures such as legendary movie producer Hal Roach, quickly amassed more than three hundred chapters on college campuses. They launched “educational campaigns” inveighing against Social Security, the minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and federal labor laws, which they claimed were socialist outrages against liberty, promulgated by the class-traitor president, congenitally wealthy Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Generations later, Ronald Reagan, who after a childhood in poverty in Illinois made his money in Hollywood, all but defunded Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs as president, crippled one of the nation’s largest labor unions by firing striking air traffic controllers, and slashed taxes on the wealthy while becoming a hero of the white working class, whose anger was channeled into fears of welfare cheats and the Cold War.

George W. Bush, the Brahman son of a namesake president and the candidate Americans were repeatedly reminded they’d most want to have a beer with, rode to the White House despite losing the popular vote, made good on his father’s promise (“read my lips”) not to raise taxes by slashing them even more for the wealthy, even as the country was in the midst of two wars fought largely by the sons and daughters of blue-collar workers.

Even Bill Clinton, the scrappy Arkansan who emerged from a troubled childhood to briefly lure some Reagan Democrats back into the fold with a booming economy and a generational reboot, ended the FDR-era Glass Steagall protections that kept banks from doubling as Wall Street casinos. Wealth inequality soared in the decades between the Reagan and Clinton years, even as household incomes continued to grow.12

The Tea Party movement, unleashed on live cable TV among financial traders outraged that the Obama administration might allow underwater homeowners to renegotiate their mortgages, found its billionaire backers in Charles and David Koch, the arch-libertarian heirs to an oil fortune. The Kochs’ father, Frederick, was an acolyte of Nobel Prize–winning economist James McGill Buchanan and a founding member of the John Birch Society. Their modern-day Liberty League’s goal was to stop the Obama plan from extending healthcare coverage to millions of Americans who couldn’t afford it by raising taxes on Americans in the top one percent.13 Even after the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was enacted, Republicans and their donors vowed to tear it out root and branch.

Nancy MacLean, a Duke University–based historian and author, whose book Democracy in Chains traces the origins of McGill Buchanan’s influence on the modern Republican Party. She considers his philosophy of property and wealth supremacy to be even more extreme than Ayn Rand’s gospel of selfishness.

Wise notes “the effectiveness of racial scapegoating” and points out that “approximately 635,000 white Louisianans, 60 percent of the white population of Louisiana, voted for David Duke in the Senate race, and then 55 percent did that in the governor’s race. For me, it was a very eye-opening thing on two levels. Number one, because I knew that 60 percent of my people were not Nazis, it intrigued me that six in ten of my people were willing to vote for someone who they knew full well was, because everybody in Louisiana knew that David Duke was a white supremacist. No one could claim innocence or ignorance; there were children in utero that knew the man was a Nazi, for God’s sake. It was obvious. Everybody knew it.

After noting that six in ten white people who are not Nazis still voted for one, he asked, “Whose job is it to help save white people? It’s clearly not black folks’ job, and yet in that campaign, the only people that saved us were black people. It was black folks who went to the polls and stopped David Duke. Because, if it had been up to us, he would have been the United States senator from Louisiana, or he would have been the governor of Louisiana. So, at that moment, I’m like, ‘wait a minute, it’s not black folks’ job to rush in and save us from our own bullshit. That’s our job. So, we as white folks have to actually struggle with our people. If we really believe we’re not all Nazis, we have to be willing to struggle with our people to bring them to a different level of consciousness and awareness.’” Indeed, despite losing the governor’s race by 61 to 39 percent, Duke, running as a Republican, won 55 percent of the white vote.

Beirich believes that Trump’s contention about good people being “on both sides” was “a very calculated Bannon-esque moment, because Trump knows he’s appealing to these people, they know he’s talking directly to them.” But it’s not just words, she said. “He has reposted white supremacist propaganda over and over again on that Twitter feed. He posted this idea that black people are rampaging through the streets killing white people, the same idea—‘black on white crime’—that motivated Dylann Roof. He posted that South African white farmers are under assault. That’s a lie. That’s a white supremacist lie,” she said. “He’s had hate group leaders in the White House, meeting with White House staff, and he’s hired people from hate groups to run key positions in DHS, immigration, and so on,” Beirich says. “The links are not distant. They’re pretty clear.”

And Stephen Miller, publicly denounced30 by his own uncle as an immigration hypocrite for his radical immigration views, was subjected to the ultimate insult by an unnamed adviser to the White House; as the images of caged children separated from their weeping moms struggling to reunite with toddlers who no longer seemed to know them spread across the airwaves, the adviser told Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman, “Stephen actually enjoys seeing those pictures at the border. He’s a twisted guy, the way he was raised and picked on. . . . He’s Waffen-SS.”31

“Anybody who really thinks that Donald Trump is unprecedented or not normal, isn’t paying attention to four hundred years” of history, says Tim Wise. “The oldest play in the American playbook, going back to the colonies, is the play of rich white men telling ‘not rich’ white people that their enemies are black and brown.” Wise says that playbook led to the once-scorned indentured European servant suddenly being inducted into the American family of “whiteness.”

This notion of binding working-class white Americans to their wealthy racial peers stretched into the early twentieth century, when factory owners and coal mine operators feared that racial integration would make the labor movement bigger and stronger, and that black, white, and brown working-class Americans would come together to demand higher wages and better benefits, and to pay for it they would raise taxes on the wealthy. Racism was a convenient wedge between white and nonwhite workers that served the interests of the rich, from the robber barons to those who bankrolled the Tea Party. W.E.B. Dubois called this “the wages of whiteness,” by which late nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century wealthy industrialists didn’t compensate white laborers in wages but nevertheless provided them with intangible benefits tied to their skin color. “They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white,” DuBois wrote in Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935. “They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.”33 As a result, DuBois wrote of white and black workers that “there probably are not today in the world two groups . . . with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.”34

The election of Barack Obama created what Wise calls “a perfect storm of white anxiety.” Obama “confronted white people with an image of the leader of the country that’s obviously very different than that which we’re used to, not only visually, but even his name, his story, his narrative.” This also came at a time when white people were facing being confronted “with a level of economic insecurity that we were not used to for three generations” and during a “quarter-century shift in popular culture that saw black and brown faces proliferating across popular culture, from music, to television to sports. “You could be in a cornfield in Nebraska,” says Wise, and suddenly, “white, black, and brown peoples’ soundtracks of their lives, the music they have on their iPod, the stuff they listen to, the television shows they watch, the movies they watch, are a mélange of cultures. You’ve got country music artists who are making records with hip-hop artists. So, there’s been a pretty significant shift, in terms of pop culture icons in the course of that twenty-five, thirty years. So now, if you’re already insecure as a white person who’s maybe middle aged, and you’ve got the black guy running the show, and you’ve got the economy melting down, and the posters on your kids’ walls are from all over the world. Some of the signs in your community are in Spanish now. And you’re starting to realize that maybe the notion of what an American is, is no longer specific to you. You’re having to share space, you’re having to share a concept, with people that you didn’t have to share it with before.”

Wise has found in his decades researching bias, including for his book White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, that when most people are confronted with their subconscious biases, and are “encouraged to respond to the better angels of their nature, they will do it. It’s when you don’t let them believe that they have better angels; if you make it seem like, ‘you’re just a horrible, irredeemable human being,’ they will show you just how horrible and irredeemable they are. “The research tells us . . . that most white folks don’t want to think of themselves as racist, and don’t want to be racist,” Wise says. It’s a matter of convincing them that there’s another way to allay their fears.

Responding to the notion of how “crazy” it was that Trump had gone “from a random, iconic celebrity to the despised leader of the free world,” and “from a cameo in Home Alone 2 to defending Neo-Nazis,” African-American culture writer Michael Arceneaux wrote in a March 2018 Essence column that “what’s crazier to me is we kept touting [Trump] as some sign of wealth and success despite evidence that one, he didn’t give a damn about us, and two, he wasn’t really that successful when you pull back the veneer of it all.” Arceneaux added that, “in many ways, hip hop—much like ‘The Apprentice’—helped perpetuate that folklore that Donald Trump was some masterful businessman whose image and fortune were to be marveled.”39

“We’ve never had a president who has come into office, who’s basically got conflicts of interest all over the world,” said Nick Akerman, who as a young lawyer was part of the team that investigated Watergate under special counsel Archibald Cox. He says Trump’s operation of the D.C. hotel, where Republican politicos and foreign leaders and diplomats lined up to pay to stay, was particularly problematic. “We have never before Trump had a president who is basically using the office to make money, and to conduct his business while at the same time being president of the United States. That has just never happened before. We’ve never had the kind of a conflict of interest where the emoluments clause has even been at issue.” Yet, Trump’s hotels and golf courses are “basically being funded by foreigners,” Akerman says, whose goal in spending money at Trump properties is “to influence the president.”

Meanwhile, as politically powerful and influential as Fox News has become, its reach is dwarfed by another conservative media player: the Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest broadcaster, which owns or manages 193 television stations nationwide, and in 2018 was seeking to purchase Tribune Media, in a $3.9 billion deal that would give Sinclair access to 73 percent of U.S. households. (The deal fell apart in 2018 amid a failure to win approval from the FCC, cheering anti-monopoly advocates.)

Sinclair Broadcast made headlines again in 2018 when a reporter at the website Deadspin discovered that the network had begun forcing its local news anchors to read a script accusing “some members of the media” of “us[ing] their platforms to push their own biases” and decrying “the sharing of biased and false news” on social media. The Deadspin mash-up of local TV anchors reading the identical words, in what appeared to be an attack on media criticisms of Donald Trump, quickly went viral, prompting Democratic members of Congress to call on the FCC to reject the proposed merger, which Trump publicly, and in unprecedented fashion for an American president, had supported. “There is nothing like Sinclair in the media system,” Jay Rosen says. “It’s really not comparable to Fox. You know you’re watching Fox. Even though it says, ‘fair and balanced,’ or used to, you pretty much know what you’re getting. You don’t know you’re watching Sinclair, because they hide behind the logos of the three broadcast networks. They present themselves as local broadcasting. They market their anchors as local people who have trusted relationships with their communities, and they are turning themselves into a megaphone for a national, political agenda that is synthesized at headquarters in Baltimore. Why the three broadcast networks allow this and don’t make a fuss about it, I don’t know.”

For media critic Jeff Jarvis, the main trouble is the media’s reluctance to acknowledge that there is a disconnect between a press whose most influential members live and work in the large urban centers on the East and West Coasts, and the bulk of what is often called “flyover country.” When it comes to modern social values like women’s rights, civil rights, and immigration, “we are liberal,” Jarvis says of the media writ large. “We did a terrible disservice to the country by not admitting that and by giving in to the myth of objectivity. Conservatives used that to set us up.” Jarvis believes this fundamental cultural disconnect had caused the media essentially to bypass half of the country for decades, and not fully examine its views. “We left a void and vacuum that was filled entirely by Rupert Murdoch. And, I think more than any single individual on Earth, the blame falls to him for the destruction of American, British, and Australian democracy,” he says. “I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I believe it.”

The June 2018 memo cast Barr as a man who had made up his mind. As far back as the late 1980s, when he served as an assistant attorney general, his memos and written opinions indicate that he believed in an almost monarchical executive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue—with powers so sweeping they could barely be checked by Congress.9

Mystal wondered aloud whether Barr had stepped in to halt Mueller’s investigation before sentences were handed down to major figures like General Michael Flynn, or before Roger Stone’s trial had even begun. “This is a 22-month-long investigation,” Mystal said. “Barr’s been on the scene for a month, and now we’re done? That doesn’t strike anybody as odd? No, I have absolutely no confidence that Bill Barr will do anything other than what is in the best interest of Donald Trump.”21 Speaker Nancy Pelosi told her House caucus in the days after the Barr letter’s release that there was no reason to trust an attorney general who had already declared, in writing, that the president is above the law, and that the public would need to see the full report.22

If passed into law, HR1, dubbed the “For the People Act” by the Democratic House, would outlaw the voter purges that took place in Georgia at the hands of now-governor Brian Kemp, and that have alarmed election integrity experts for decades, from the “caging” of thousands of Florida voters in 2000 under then-governor Jeb Bush, to the voter restrictions in North Carolina that a federal judge describes as targeting black voters with “almost surgical precision,” to the “crosscheck” system unleashed on the 2016 election by then–Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach, targeting millions of voters with Hispanic surnames in multiple states. HR1 would also seek to roll back partisan gerrymandering by encouraging every state to use independent redistricting commissions and to bolster election security nationwide to keep foreign hackers out of state voter rolls. And it would provide federal support for switching election systems from penetrable electronic voting machines to more secure paper ballots. The act would subject justices of the Supreme Court to the same ethics rules as every other government official. In addition, it would target “dark money” and its pervasive influence on American elections, for the first time legally requiring presidential and vice presidential candidates to release their tax returns. It would strengthen campaign finance laws, forcing the wealthy who donate to “super PACs” to reveal themselves to the public, while reaffirming that Congress, not the billionaire-friendly Supreme Court, is the body invested with the power to regulate money in politics. It would also bring about nearly every recommendation made in the past decade by advocates of full democracy. And yet it had almost no chance of passing a Republican-majority Senate. McConnell, the gravel-voiced Kentuckian, called the ideas a “Democrat [sic] power grab.” Snarling from the Senate floor, he charged that Democrats “want taxpayers on the hook for generous new benefits for federal bureaucrats and government employees,” by creating a “new paid holiday for government workers.”1 “So, this is the Democrats’ plan to ‘restore democracy,’” he sniffed, deriding the legislation as “the Democrat Politician Protection Act” and claiming federal workers would use the paid holiday to “go out and work on [Democratic] campaigns.” McConnell’s remarks were quite a reveal of his true intentions, and he was roundly denounced. How, after all, could making it easier for American citizens to vote be a “power grab”? And a power grab by whom—voters who might take advantage of increased access to the polls? McConnell seemed to be acknowledging that the only way his party can win elections is if fewer people vote, and if billionaires are allowed to spend unlimited money on campaigns.

A 2012 study by the largest private salary survey company, Payscale, found that the 70 percent of Americans earning less than $70,000 were significantly more likely to vote Democratic, while the 30 percent earning more than $70,000 were more likely to vote Republican.4

Nancy MacLean, in her book Democracy in Chains, chronicles the generations-long quest by the superrich to hobble democracy in their own interest.

According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, of the ten states with the most regressive tax policies, seven (Florida, South Dakota, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming) levy no broad-based personal income tax at all, and two (Pennsylvania and Illinois) use a flat tax that falls on rich and poor with equal percentage weight but vastly different shares of disposable income, and the last (Oklahoma) attaches a top rate to its graduated income tax that is so low, at $12,000, that it might as well be a flat tax. The institute’s 2018 report on the distribution of tax systems nationwide pointed out that these “terrible ten” states, which rely heavily on sales and excise taxes, tolls, and other fees paid day by day, “tax their poorest residents—those in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale—at rates up to six times higher than the wealthy. Middle-income families in these states pay a rate up to four times higher as a share of their income than the wealthiest families.” Income inequality in the states with regressive tax systems was far higher than in high-income-tax-rate states like California, which the ITEP determined has America’s least regressive tax system, followed by the District of Columbia, Vermont, Delaware, and Minnesota.17

“Something needs to change here,” Bregman said. “Ten years ago, the World Economic Forum asked the question, ‘What must industry do to prevent a broad social backlash?’ The answer’s very simple; just stop talking about philanthropy and start talking about taxes, taxes, taxes.” Bregman recalled a challenge by tech billionaire Michael Dell, who during the forum challenged those gathered to name a single country where a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent had produced results. “I’m a historian,” said Bregman. “The United States, that’s where it has actually worked, in the 1950s during Republican president Eisenhower, the war veteran. The top marginal rate in the U.S. was 91 percent for people like Michael Dell and the top estate tax for people like Michael Dell was more than 70 percent. This is not rocket science. We can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes. We can invite [rock star and human rights advocate] Bono once more. But, come on, we gotta be talking about taxes.”26 A video of the exchange quickly went viral.

https://youtu.be/paaen3b44XY

Nancy MacLean believes America needs more than just an adjustment to its capitalist system or to its rates of taxation if it hopes to pull itself back from the brink Trump has driven us to. She says the nation needs a new “story”—a narrative that can bind together our disparate parts into a cohesive whole, and that will give every American a stake in the success of this experiment in multiracial democracy. “The philosopher Richard Rorty wrote this book called Achieving Our Country, that kind of stuck with me,” she said. “It basically says you can’t win the support of a majority in America if you don’t have a good narrative of who we are as a people, and a story of where we came from and where we’re going. That was one of the things that I admired so much about Barack Obama.” MacLean says that from the first time she heard Obama speak, as he ran for the U.S. Senate from Illinois, where she lived at the time, she thought, “Whoa, that is the narrative we need. We can be proud to be Americans if our history is Frederick Douglass, and the women’s suffrage movement, and the labor movement, and all these transformations. It’s a narrative that at least says there was,” and is, “a ‘we.’”

33.  “McConnell’s Laser Focus on Transforming the Judiciary,” Burgess Everett and Elana Schor, Politico.com, October 17, 2018.

4.  “Does Your Wage Predict Your Vote?” Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, November 5, 2012.

17.  “Who Pays? A Distributional Analysis of the Tax System in All 50 States, Sixth Edition,” Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, October 2018.