Is Trump co-governing with the billionaire class?

In recent years, particularly since the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and the subsequent rise of the Squad in Congress, progressives in the United States have increasingly asked themselves what it would look like if we could elect true social movement champions to office. Instead of having movements mobilize to run promising candidates every two to four years, then sending off the newly elected officials to navigate the halls of power by themselves — a process that usually ends in disappointment — activists have worked to envision a different relationship with the politicians they support. They have asked, what would it mean if elected officials actually governed hand-in-hand with social movements as partners?

This idea of movement politicians acting in close collaboration with the grassroots forces that put them into office is sometimes referred to as “co-governance.” In large part, co-governance today serves as an ideal. It helps us to envision a type of democratic partnership distinct from standard transactional deal-making. And it helps movements to articulate their goals and expectations for how they would like to see their most aligned politicians behave once in power.

But there are also some problems: It can be hard to imagine what co-governance would actually look like in practice — and even harder to come up with good examples of how these types of partnerships are being carried out in the real world.

One way to make it easier to think about co-governance could take shape in practice is to look at how pro-corporate politicians (both Republican and Democratic) have long sought to partner with business. “Politicians have a lot of experience with co-governance,” national director of the Working Family Party Maurice Mitchell told The Forge in 2021, “but it’s generally co-governance with capital.”

At the city, state and federal levels alike, politicians brag about having close ties with corporate leaders. They welcome business expertise into their administrations. And they craft partnerships that give representatives of capital explicit roles in designing and carrying out policy. In this respect, co-governance is not something new; it is merely a demand that leaders from social movements be given the same welcome and deference that CEOs have been accustomed to for as long as we can remember.

This raises an interesting question with regard to the current administration: Does this analogy hold for how Trump has treated his partners in the billionaire class? Or, to put it another way: to what extent can we say that Trump is co-governing with business?

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Embracing economic elites

In 2022, we wrote a series of articles on the history, theory and practical implementation of co-governance, which we later compiled into a report. In this series, we laid out a set of common practices that characterize co-governance relationships. In places where progressive movements have tried to build partnerships with aligned politicians, there are five things in particular that they have sought to do:

1. Establish a structure or “table” to define who is part of the governing alliance;
2. Create a common agenda and set of priorities;
3. Back movement politicians with staffing and support;
4. Establish ongoing meeting spaces to strategize and assess progress; and
5. Empower allies through initiatives such as task forces and assemblies.

One way to evaluate Trump’s governing relationship with business, then, would be to look at the ways in which he may be adopting these practices — or neglecting them.

Clearly, there are a number of areas in which Trump has embraced the idea of bringing representatives of capital into his administration. In terms of the second item above, creating a set of governing priorities, he has drawn much of his second term’s agenda directly from Project 2025, the 900-page policy “wish list” written by the Heritage Foundation, a flagship conservative think tank heavily backed by business. Trump sought to distance himself from the agenda during his campaign, when it seemed like the extremism of its mandates might be a political liability. But since taking office, his administration has been remarkably faithful to its policies. Progressives can only dream of having such a guiding hand.

With regard to the third practice of co-governance, which involves having outside partners help select appointees and provide staffers for an administration, Trump has again embraced a highly collaborative relationship with corporate elites. By recent count, there are 12 billionaires inside the Trump White House, their net worth totaling to more than the entire GDP of 175 of the world’s nations, as U.S. News & World Report noted. Or, as Bernie Sanders told Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, “Trump has… said it loudly and clearly: we are a government of billionaires.”

Beyond cabinet picks, conservatives have triumphed in placing ideologues in strategic roles throughout government, both prominent and obscure. One of the authors of Project 2025, Russell Vought, now serves in a powerful position in the Trump White House as the head of the Office of Management and Budget. The nominee for Solicitor of the Department of the Interior, William Doffermyre, has long demonstrated his loyalty to the fossil fuel industry, having served as general counsel for a liquid natural gas project before being tapped for a role in the administration. And these are but two among a wide array of examples.

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The table is not set

All of these examples point to ways in which we might say that Trump is enacting a model of co-governance with the billionaire class. However, there are other aspects of Trump’s style of rule that do not reflect a shared partnership with business — and these departures from co-governance practice can also tell us interesting things about the administration.

The first practice of co-governance that we lay out in our report is what we call “setting the table.” This involves defining who is part of the governing alliance that will be operating in partnership with the elected official — or who has a seat at the co-governance table, so to speak. Part of the point of co-governance is to envision the use of power as a collective and democratic endeavor, rather than one wholly predicated on the inclinations of a single individual.

As we wrote, “The idea is to amass a set of practices that turn the exercise of governance into a movement task, where inside and outside organizing are linked, and where the politician is but one part of a collective project to deploy social power.” Or as Mitchell put it, “To me, it’s about flipping what has been a very personal, careerist focus to something that is very much rooted and accountable to people.”

Needless to say, Trump is not interested in any such collective process. To the contrary, his governing project is an extremely individualistic one. It is based on cultivating total fealty and reinforcing his absolute executive authority. The structure that defines the agenda is ultimately not based on ideological commitments or shared policy ideals, but on the whims of Trump’s vain and capricious personality.

So while Trump is allowing representatives of capital and elements of the conservative movement to take over parts of government, he has made clear they ultimately serve at one person’s pleasure — his own.

Because he is all about cronyism and personal loyalty, more than any coherent ideology, Trump is an inconsistent ally. This can prove jarring for capitalist titans used to having politicians fawn over them. In some respects, a more traditional Republican administration — or even a neoliberal Democratic one — might be more welcoming of a genuine partnership with business.

As it is, billionaires may end up finding the Trump administration to be a mixed bag. They will benefit from tax cuts, no doubt. But at the same time, Wall Street has been widely dissatisfied with the president’s tariff plans. And, in general, while corporate leaders prefer steady and predictable landscapes in which to pursue profit, the past few months have provided them with anything but consistency. Trump escalating the war against Iran could invite further instability.

Industry by industry, any gains businesses secure under the administration could be spotty. Big Pharma might win an easier regulatory environment one day, but the next find itself losing money owing to canceled vaccine contracts and cuts to government research. (One recent article in Axios was headlined, “Pharma is facing its nightmare scenario.”)

As the recent, acrimonious split between Trump and Elon Musk has illustrated, who can count themselves as being on the inside of the administration and who’s on the outs can shift rapidly. The abrupt personal fallout between the president and the world’s richest man has come with pledges to eliminate government subsidies for and orders from Musk’s businesses. Just weeks ago, Musk was posturing as the power behind the throne. Now, Trump says that he will sell his Tesla.

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When it fractures

In our report, we did not just write about the common practices of co-governance. We also outlined the major pitfalls that can doom any partnership between social movements and elected officials. One major problem is that the coalition taking part in the co-governance process can fracture. Movement groups often disagree with one another about priorities and policies. Some groups may feel that an elected official is doing a good job delivering; others may feel betrayed.

We quoted David Hatch, former director of Reclaim Chicago and founder of The People’s Lobby, who told us: “The line between necessary and unacceptable compromise is never as clear as we’d like.” Because of that, we remarked, “As long as activists are prone to disagree about where the line should be, the threat of splintering will persist.”

When the coalition fractures, the risk is that politicians and movement groups turn on one another. Instead of trying to have each other’s backs, they descend into acrimony. And the pursuit of their mutual goals can suffer as a result.

In the case of the current administration, Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the Washington Post, “Trump likes conflict, and he’s building conflict into his cabinet.” Because his White House runs on personal loyalty, rather than ideological consistency, it is entirely possible that segments of the business community — or other pro-Trump constituencies — that have thus far signed on for collaboration may end up defecting. It’s also possible, if their groveling is insufficient, that they may be expelled.

For those who oppose Trump, there is possibility here. As much as they are able, opponents can endeavor to highlight cleavages between his allies. They can elevate issues that spark disagreement amongst MAGA supporters. They can court constituencies that might have liked the idea of Trump as a repudiation of the bankrupt status quo in Washington, but that now feel alienated by his actual policies. And they can see the administration for what it is: Less a well-ordered partnership that melds business and government into a ruthless, coherent whole — and more a fractious and fearful coalition, the parts of which rub uncomfortably against one another, and which, with a little work, can maybe just be pulled apart.

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Research assistance provided by Matthew Miles Goodrich. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.