According to the Federal Reserve, the share of wealth owned by the top 1% in the US recently hit a record, the highest since tracking began. The top 1% today holds $55 trillion in wealth, roughly the same amount held by the entire bottom 90% of all Americans. Today’s uber rich enjoy staggering wealth, and they wield control of traditional and online media outlets to keep it that way.
Nationwide, television, print, and major digital platforms are now controlled by a handful of largely right wing, ultra-rich individuals and corporations using those media to forge national narratives that serve their own interests. Billionaires and massive corporations use their wealth to promote and lobby for tax gifts, subsidies, write-offs, loopholes, deregulation, and weakened labor, environmental and banking laws to advance their own wealth at the expense of everyone else.
Economists say we are in our second Gilded Age, where industry scions and robber barons run roughshod over labor, the environment, and the rule of law. The long-simmering, slow-motion transfer of political power from the working electorate to wealthy elites began decades ago, through legal and regulatory changes rather than any single dramatic event. The key to transferring political power back to the middle class is understanding what took it from them.
How Republicans pulled off the oligarchs’ coup
Democracy has always depended on access to a truthful public square—from which to shape informed political judgments— where political power flowed from informed votes rather than wealth. This foundation crumbled under two major shifts: The 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United. These two developments cleared the way for the top 1% to exert outsized, largely unaccountable control over both public opinion and state and federal elections, turning the US into the billboard of inequality we are today, with broken healthcare, barely-there public education, and eroded social safety nets limping alongside staggering wealth and the most corrupt regime the nation has ever known.
The Fairness doctrine, in effect from 1949 through 1987, required broadcasters to tell the truth in the news, and, when offering opinions, to present the opposing viewpoint. After Reagan Republicans repealed the Fairness Doctrine, broadcasters were suddenly free to adopt a single ideological orientation and promote it for profit, harm to public discourse be damned. Today we see the effect of building an audience around opinion, grievance and outrage instead of verified facts. It is no surprise that the percentage of Americans who still support Trump despite his nonstop parade of incompetence correlates exactly with the percentage who watch Fox News.
Then, beginning in 2010, the horrific Citizens United ruling allowed Super PACs to raise and spend unlimited sums on elections while dark money nonprofits, which are not required to disclose their donors, expanded. In result, private wealth began buying elections, converting economic power of the elites into political power.
Elon Musk alone spent $250 million on the 2024 election. Last week, right after SpaceX landed a $1.6 billion federal contract, Musk committed to spending another $120 million to increase Republican voter turnout in the midterms.
Excessive spending by high wealth political donors doing business with the federal government reinforces the anti-tax and anti-regulatory environments that increase their wealth. Republicans thus have the legally dubious political advantage of excessive megadonor, CEO and dark money contributions, and a substantial financial advantage heading into the midterms.
End stage: Trump’s illicit gains from the White House
The breakdown in our democratic system rests on the interaction between Citizens United and un-regulated news, not just their individual effects. A media environment unmoored from accuracy requirements provided the infrastructure — cable networks, talk radio, and later digital platforms — through which right wing political messaging could be aired with no competing viewpoints or facts. Campaign finance deregulation amplified that messaging at scale, letting the nation’s top 1% spread the same narratives pushed on conservative “news” outlets. Together, they produced the most corrupt administration in our nation’s history, leading to unprecedented cuts in food assistance, health care, education programs, and student loan services while serving up massive tax breaks for the ultra-rich.
In short, the uber rich have bought up media outlets to manipulate low education voters with addictive culture wars— and the denial of science— so that they can decimate government services and rob them blind.
Trump, who sued the IRS when a contractor leaked that he paid only $750 in federal taxes the year before he first ran for president, and paid zero in federal taxes for ten years before that, has turned the presidency into a personal wealth gambit to monetize the office from every angle. The Trumps have pocketed billions through foreign government bookings at Trump hotels, overseas real estate ventures, and digital asset banking, to say nothing of Eric and Don Jr.’s federally-backed adventures in defense, cryptocurrency, mining, and consumer tech. Trump collected $2.4 billion in 2025 alone from illicit cryptocurrency ventures, illegal foreign “gifts,” and collusive taxpayer-funded “settlements” of bogus legal cases. According to Forbes, Trump’s revenue last year was triple what he earned privately when out of office, and now, Patron Saint of Insider Trading, he’s “selling” early access to his social media posts.
There isn’t any real debate about Trump’s corruption. He flexes low intellect, mob boss criminality on purpose; the reptilian brain demonstrates brute power to stay alive.
Republicans and right wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation laid the tracks that brought us to Trump decades ago, through the erasure of truth in the news and the Supreme Court’s CU transfer of political power to the elites.
The second Gilded Age is indeed the age of en—-ification. Although it won’t be easy, at least we know how to wipe it off: return accuracy to the news, and reverse Citizens United to get money the hell out of politics for good.
Sabrina Haake is a political analyst and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. She writes the free Substack, The Haake Take.