The News You Need, Monday, August 10, 2026
Oligarchy, Federal Judges Targeted, El Niño, Patel to Moscow,Tech Brothers' Bunkers
Plutocracy Replaces Democracy / Federal Judges In Danger / El Niño Drives up Commodity Prices / Epstein in St Tropez / The Kremlin Awaits Patel / Tech Brothers Build their Bunkers / The Port of Argenteuil
The Gilded Age: Trump and the Tiny Oligarchic Clique Around Him Are Creating a Different Kind of Government. It Isn’t Democracy.
Financial Times
Scott: As European scholars of democracy and its variants are observing, Trump has busily transformed America into a different kind of government. In the Trump system, the notion of three coequal branches has faded as the Congress is emasculated—no longer serving its vital deliberative and oversight functions. The judiciary maintains its integrity to some extent, but it is placed under the supervision of a Supreme Court which is largely deferential to Trump and psychologically dependent upon his favors. Hundred year old precedents are overturned for Trump’s benefit, without even offering a reasoned explanation for this action. The regulatory state is placed under the control of the persons and entities it is supposed to regulate, as the ultrawealthy, and particularly the tech bros are ascendent. This system comes closest to the classical Greek notion of πλουτοκρατία, plutocracy, rule by the wealthiest—who use their wealth to secure and retain power and then largely to continue to enhance their wealth and power. Writing for the Financial Times, Guy Chazen identifies and portrays the plutocratic class.
In America’s Gilded Age, millionaire robber barons operated from the shadows, bribing pliant lawmakers to do their bidding. Under President Donald Trump, billionaires have gone one better. Some are in his cabinet.
According to one widely cited estimate, Trump’s cabinet members have a combined net worth of $7.5bn, making his administration the richest in American history. Including Trump himself, the figure reaches roughly $14bn.
The US has long prided itself on being the world’s leading democracy. But its system of government is increasingly dominated by an economic elite that has parlayed its immense riches into tangible political influence.
“Now the tycoons are taking to being in government themselves,” says Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of the House of Representatives from California. The result is that political power in America has been “captured by excessive wealth”, he adds.
The small coterie of ultra-wealthy individuals in Trump’s orbit not only enjoy privileged access to the leader of the free world, but they also dominate the media landscape and the tech economy. Some openly boast of their influence over the levers of power…
“Oligarchs . . . have not had this kind of visibility since the Gilded Age — a time when wealthy actors were noticeably, blatantly intervening in politics, shaping outcomes and really making sure the system operated in their narrow favour,” says Jeffrey Winters, author of The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies. The burgeoning power of the economic elite is increasingly shaping the physical landscape of America’s cities. JPMorgan Chase’s new headquarters in New York, a 60-storey skyscraper that reportedly cost $3bn to build, has dominated midtown Manhattan’s skyline since opening last October. Some are calling it a “monument” to Jamie Dimon, the bank’s CEO. But it is in Washington that the billionaires’ influence is most keenly felt. No longer content to lobby from afar, ultra-rich tycoons — especially from Silicon Valley — have infiltrated the capital’s ecosystem, taking on advisory roles in government, cultivating ties on Capitol Hill and weighing in on the most important issues of the day, from AI to industrial policy…
Pay to play
If there was a trigger for the growing influence of the ultra-rich in America’s political system, it was the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which held that independent political spending on elections by business was protected by the First Amendment. The judgment opened the floodgates to big money in politics. America’s rich had spent $31mn in the 2010 elections, according to liberal advocacy group Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF). In the 2024 election cycle, the 100 largest billionaire donor families gave $2.6bn. A huge proportion of that came from just a handful of individuals.
Three billionaires — Elon Musk, Miriam Adelson and Timothy Mellon — accounted for more than a third of the roughly $1.5bn spent to elect Trump. Campaign spending by the ultra-rich has increased as the gap between rich and poor has widened. According to Winters, who teaches political science at Northwestern University, the country’s 400 wealthiest people saw their share of the US’s total wealth shoot up by 146% over the past 30 years, while that of the entire bottom half of the American population declined by 25% over the same period…
These billionaires have bought the government and we don’t have enough money to buy it back,” [Democratic senate nominee Troy] Jackson told local radio last month. “And I’m sick of that, and many, many people across the state and country are sick of it.” Khanna maintains that the pendulum of history will swing the other way again, just as the Gilded Age paved the way for a new age of progressive politics that enforced antitrust laws to curb monopolies, reformed taxation and expanded direct democracy. “America has a remarkable capacity for self-correction,” he says. “And we have the chance post-Trump to shape a historical moment.”
Federal Judges Targeted In the Age of Trump
The Washington Post
Charles: John McConnell, chief Federal judge of Rhode Island, never worried very much about his personal safety, until he issued a temporary restraining order challenging the Trump administration’s sweeping freeze on billions of dollars in Federal spending. Ten days later, he reminded the government it was obliged to follow the order, noting that not complying would risk being held in criminal contempt.
That night right-wing loon Laura Loomer attacked McConnell on social media for abusing his judicial power, and included a picture of the judge’s daughter in her post. Elon Musk recirculated Loomer’s post to his millions of followers.
Washington Post reporter Joanna Slater described what happened after that:
McConnell, 68, received credible death threats. A MAGA activist doxed his daughter. Two Republicans in Congress started impeachment proceedings against him. An insurance company even canceled McConnell’s homeowner’s policy (the insured party was too risky, the firm indicated, with an attached link to one impeachment effort).
It escalated from there. Disturbing calls and emails began arriving at the federal courthouse, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, about 400 in total. McConnell’s case manager asked not to listen to them anymore.
John McConnell, chief Federal judge of Rhode Island
McConnell recently played one that is saved on his phone. In an expletive-filled rant, the caller accuses of McConnell of “stepping way over” his “boundaries.”
“You better tell little motherf---ing Judge McConnell, I don’t know who the hell he thinks he is,” the caller said. “I wish somebody would f---ing assassinate your a--.”
The U.S. Marshals Service told McConnell they had identified at least six credible death threats. One specifically menaced McConnell’s wife. Another turned up on the dark web — the swath of the internet not accessible to search engines — where someone was looking for McConnell’s home address, saying Smith & Wesson wanted “to pay him a visit.”
McConnell’s experience is not unique. In recent years, federal judges and Supreme Court justices have faced increasing risks to their safety. In the 2025 fiscal year, security incidents of “significant concern” jumped 57 percent and are on track to rise again, the judiciary recently told Congress.
According to the Marshals Service, there were 564 threats to federal judges in the 2025 fiscal year, up from 509 the prior year.
The Washington Post asked The White House about Trump’s personalized attack on Judges. This was spokesperson Abigail Jackson’s despicable Orwellian response:
Jackson said such opinions are a form of free expression. The implication that Trump sharing his thoughts about judges is “akin to making threats is deeply unserious and should be dismissed by anyone with half a brain..”
El Niño threatens to disrupt the world’s most-traded commodities
Financial Times
Scott: If the hellscape of massive fires across Europe and North America isn’t enough to persuade you of the transformations being wrought by global warming, think again the next time you get a bill for a bag of coffee or a bar of chocolate.
A strengthening El Niño is threatening to disrupt production of some of the world’s most heavily traded agricultural commodities, driving sharp swings in prices and raising the risk of food shortages and widespread inflation. The weather pattern, which causes severe rains and droughts and typically occurs every two to seven years, has already hit coffee and cocoa prices as investors anticipate crop damage from Brazil to West Africa and south-east Asia.
Arabica coffee prices have risen about 30% since early June to $3.12 a pound. The rally included its biggest one-day gain in 47 years.
Cocoa has moved just as sharply. New York futures climbed more than 63% from about $3,950 a tonne in mid-June to an eight-month high of $6,455 on July 9 before easing back to $5,600 on Thursday, still more than 40 per cent above the June low. Analysts at Rabobank have pointed to an increasing correlation between coffee and cocoa prices despite their “vastly different underlying fundamentals”, suggesting investors are applying an “El Niño risk premium” across soft commodities.
The ECB has calculated that strong El Niño events typically raise global food commodity prices by 9%. Economists at Jefferies warned on Thursday that “in the context of already upward pressure on commodity prices due to the US-Iran war, this effect is likely to be higher”.
Epstein at Saint Tropez
Le Monde
Scott: For two decades, Jeffrey Epstein summered in a luxurious villa in the resort of Saint Tropez, which he used as a staging area for an array of criminal enterprises focused largely on human trafficking and sexual services for an elite clientele of the wealthiest and most powerful. All of this transpired under the nose of French authorities who took no notice. Now prosecutors in Paris are piecing together criminal cases based heavily on materials released by the US Justice Department and are asking how it was possible for this to have gone on, been meticulously documented by US authorities, with no enforcement action being taken at any point? And why is the Trump Justice Department refusing all assistance with their inquiries?
