The Democrats are currently on track to take the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. If this happens, they will empower resistance bureaucrats to slow down all Trump Administration initiatives. Of course, they’ll not only impeach Trump, but will also pursue impeachment proceedings against many Trump officials. This will substantially drain momentum from the administration and increase momentum for the Democrats heading into the crucial 2028 presidential election.
The Democrats are already putting together plans, formulating a narrative, and accumulating evidence, which they will use against Republicans should they retake power. We’ve seen this movie before.
The Marxist machine has had time to learn from its mistakes during 2020-2024. The Democrats will likely pursue criminal prosecution against key targets in the MAGA orbit, including big donors like Elon Musk, the DOGE bros, and even junior Trump staffers. We’ve already seen in Arctic Frost an effort to spy on sitting Republican United States senators—they’ll be on the target list, too.
This is power. Force is power. Politics is the management of force. For his tech-oriented publication Pirate Wires, Mike Solana recently published “Theory of Power,” which outlines how the Left will replicate California’s wealth tax to target billionaires on a nationwide scale. He believes that the Left is targeting billionaires because wealth is power. He’s half right.
Wealth itself is not power—it is the means to power. The Left seeks to redistribute the wealth of the billionaire class to the people living in America in exchange for power. Leftists are not targeting the billionaires because their wealth poses a threat to the Left’s power—they want to seize the power of that wealth for themselves. Since the billionaires do not know how to wield their potential power, they have become targets. If they did, the California wealth tax wouldn’t even be an issue.
Wealth cannot protect its holder from force. If politics is the management of force, then political influence is power. There are plenty of people with political influence and no wealth who have more power than billionaires. There are 20-something political staffers who have more political power than billionaires. There is a legion of bureaucrats with more political power than billionaires. Who has more power, a billionaire or the IRS lawyer investigating him? Of course, it’s the IRS lawyer, because the IRS lawyer is backed by regime power.
The billionaire class has largely abdicated regime power—the question of who is in charge—with a few notable exceptions, such as Elon Musk’s 2024 election engagement and purchase of Twitter. The wealthy are quite good at influencing politics for their discreet business interests, with one analysis finding that they receive a 220 times return on investment through their lobbying efforts (other analyses attribute the rise in corporate profits to lobbying).
However, regime politics is not fundamentally about lobbying for an appropriation or a carve-out in the tax code, which puts generating wealth above gaining political power. Machiavelli warned against this in The Prince: “And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms, they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art.” Wielding political influence for higher corporate profits to buy another jet or a fifth vacation home is thinking of “ease more than of arms.” If politics is the management of force, then political influence is the “arms.” The billionaires are on track to lose their “state,” because they’ve neglected the art of influencing regime politics.
For all its faults, the Left understands regime politics. Billionaire wealth extraction is just one part of its overall plan to sustain and deepen its regime-level power. And if its only opposition, the MAGA political class, is destroyed by regime politics, the Left’s wealth extraction scheme is not only inevitable, but it will also be the least of the billionaires’ worries.
All of this means that right-aligned billionaires should move immediately to gain regime-level political influence. To be clear, wealth can be a strong amplifier of political influence. Still, political influence has a simple recipe: it requires access, credibility, leverage, and the ability to change behavior. In other words, donating to campaigns is not enough. Elected officials must be lobbied to act in the interest of those who support them, or someone else will lobby them for their own interests.
Before a politician is elected, the benefactor has the leverage. But once the politician has regime-level power, the benefactor is subject to the beneficiary’s power. If right-wing billionaires want to survive what’s coming, they must have a well-run machine to influence politicians after they are elected. Solana makes this point—with which I fully agree: they must “respond as if [their] life depends on it, because my reading of what these people are saying, casually, cheerfully, and increasingly out loud, is…it does.”
But power is fickle. Any billionaire who wields political influence strictly for their own benefit rather than on behalf of the people will find themselves burdened with all the paranoia and stress of a tyrant. To that end, Xenophon’s On Tyranny provides relevant advice: “Consider the fatherland to be your estate, the citizens your comrades, friends your own children, your sons the same as your life, and try to surpass all these in benefactions. For if you prove superior to your friends in beneficence, your enemies will be utterly unable to resist you.”
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