Washington Merry-Go-Round

IMMEDIATE RELEASE 19 September 2026
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
Today’s Events in Historical Perspective
America’s Longest-Running Column, Founded 1932
Who’s Your Billionaire?
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift
                                        
WASHINGTON – Thanks to a Republican-friendly Supreme Court, there will be a record-setting amount of money spent on elections this year. Next year, there will be more, and the year after that, even more.
You get the idea. Money is so equated to winning that should you choose to run for office, the first question is, “Who’s your billionaire?”
The Supreme Court eliminated spending caps with the 2010 Citizens United ruling for PACs (Political Action Committees), allowing them to give unlimited amounts to the candidates they choose. Individuals, by contrast, may give only $3,500 per candidate each year, and the average contribution is under $100. So, when candidates tout their fundraising totals, it is not like the old days, when thousands of donors filled campaign coffers with small donations. Small-dollar money still flows, but it no longer compares with the billionaire/PAC largesse that dominates politics today.
 A Trump-backed PAC has $400 million, which Trump allies could dole out over the next two months, or drop later in a last-minute effort to hold on to the Senate and maybe even the House, thanks to the late-arriving money.
A group of billionaires headed by tech titans Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, aligned with the GOP, with George Soros on the other side, set the standard. Musk says he will spend $100 million this cycle and Republicans are counting on his cash to help a deeply flawed candidate hold a Senate seat in Texas.
There is more cash on the Republican side because they are the party in power. As Trump often says, if the so-called “reforms” he is advocating to shrink the pool of eligible voters are not enacted, the country wouldn’t see another Republican president again, maybe forever.
Trump’s policies are not popular, not even his immigration hardline. “He’s gone too far,” is a popular refrain. Voters feel they’ve been misled with talk of tariffs bringing in billions and promises of no more foreign wars.
Everything is in place for Democratic wins with the caveat that nobody can be sure what happened to the electorate that rejected Trump in 2020 and two years later, reelected him. It was truly a phenomenon, all those unaligned Trump voters, and it has Trump consulting his gut to figure out what comes next.
The rest of us are left wondering whether he can escape the messes he created at home—especially high gas and food prices—while locked in a standoff with a third-rate power that has gotten the better of him.
Elected as a right-wing populist, he helped usher in this century’s robber baron billionaires at a time when there is rising distaste on the left and the right for the wretched excess that comes with extreme wealth.
What we need is a leader with the knowledge and ability to take on a profoundly misaligned system. Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive who put the wheels in motion to dismantle the empires that the robber barons of the early 1900s had built. He supported the 1913 Revenue Act (signed by Taft, his successor), which all but one Republican backed and most Americans saw as an act of fairness that would have wealthier Americans paying their fair share, which topped out at seven percent.
In1944, during the height of World War II, top-earning Americans were paying a 94 percent marginal rate for the upper portion of their income, an amount reduced to 91 percent following the war. Two decades later, President Kennedy took that down to seventy, a more equitable number that actually resulted in more, not less, federal revenue. The economy rebounded. But President Reagan thought this was such a clever idea that he took it down to 28 percent in 1986. In fact, Kennedy had gotten it right, identifying that the tax and revenue lines on a chart intersected at 70 percent. Reagan did not even attempt to conceal his boon for the wealthy, honestly describing it as a “flat tax” and setting us on the path to the inequity we see today that ushered in a new generation of robber barons. The tax is now at 37 percent; it should be twice that.
Money is the mother’s milk of politics and has spawned sarcasm such as, “We have the best government money can buy,” which throughout our history has been all too true too often, and never more so than today.
What goes around comes around, and on the ballot in Montana this November is a measure that would eliminate corporate and dark-money spending in the state to essentially undo the effects of the Citizens United decision that opened the floodgates to political money.
What happens in Montana does not necessarily set the standard for the rest of the country, but it is a step in the right direction. The American people are catching on to the truths and untruths in our political system. And as they say, money cannot buy love, not even for politicians, and if the polls are correct, the massive billionaire PAC money inundating the midterm election is running into a dam of discontent.
 
See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).
© 2026 U.S. News Syndicate, Inc
Distributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND