President Joe Biden used his farewell speech Wednesday to call out what he referred to as a nascent oligarchy in the United States. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google Analytics appears to show that a lot of Americans had no idea what he was talking about.
“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said, in his address. “We see the consequences all across America.”
Biden compared today’s oligarchs to those who ran the country during the 19th century. “More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts,” he said. “They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had.” Biden added that creating labor rights for the public “helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen.” He concluded: “We’ve got to do that again.”
Confounded by Biden’s use of the term “oligarchy,” Google search analytics shows there was a surge of searches for “oligarchy meaning” and “oligarchy definition.” Of the top five states where searches for the term were highest, three of them (Nebraska, Iowa, and Wyoming) were states that went for Trump during the election.
In an homage to Eisenhower’s parting address, Biden also used his speech to call out what he called “a tech-industrial complex,” which he said represented a dangerous “concentration of technology, power and wealth” in the hands of the very few. “Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power,” the President said. “The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit.” Surely the fact that Silicon Valley’s tech tycoons helped Trump win had some influence over Biden’s decision to include this in his speech.
There’s no telling whether the people who voted for Trump are the same people who have never heard of “oligarchy,” though if there is a crossover between those two demographics it would make sense. The Trump campaign was not particularly quiet about the fact that it planned to institute plans and policies specifically designed to benefit the wealthy while throwing the rest of America under the bus. Somehow, 50 percent of the electorate voted for him anyway.
Now that Trump’s administration is coming into view, it’s clear that it will be one of the most pro-wealthy administrations in the history of the country. Trump himself is a billionaire, as is his new political wingman, Elon Musk. Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s supposed partner for DOGE—the organization designed to wreck the federal government—is also a billionaire, as are Trump’s nominees to lead the Department of Education, the Commerce Department, the Department of the Interior, the Treasury, and NASA.
Since being elected, those close to Trump have openly advocated for policies that would benefit the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. In their pursuit of a balanced federal budget, rightwingers have suggested making cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and other federal programs designed to distribute benefits to Americans. At the same time, Trump has promised to lower taxes on the wealthy—a move that would paradoxically add trillions to the deficit. Trump has also suggested ending taxes on Social Security benefits, which would dry up the program’s revenues, thus threatening a program that some 79 percent of Americans believe “should not be reduced in any way.”