Everyone Hates Private Equity. Trump Is Bailing It Out.

The industry has become the midterms’ most indelible political symbol for Wall Street’s reckless greed.

President Donald Trump picked an odd political moment to remove guardrails from the private equity industry. A July poll commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform found that a 65 percent majority agreed with the statement, “We need guard rails for Wall Street firms like private equity because otherwise they maximize short term profits for themselves, cut jobs, and reduce the quality of products and services.” There was surprisingly little partisan difference on this point. A 59 percent majority of Republicans agreed with a 78 percent majority of Democrats.

The public hates private equity so much that the once-arcane phrase “private equity” (in the 1980s we called it the leveraged buyout racket) is a political hot button in this year’s midterm elections. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that nearly three times as many congressional candidates in competitive races pilloried the industry by name as compared to congressional candidates in the previous five election cycles (when the preferred term of derision was ‘big banks”). 

Yet Trump keeps removing restrictions on private equity! 

In August 2025 Trump issued an executive order to free defined-contribution pension funds such as 401(k)s to invest in private equity, and this past March the Labor Department issued a proposed regulation to do so. The Securities and Exchange Commission followed through on Wednesday by approving a proposed rule allowing retirement-fund managers to charge a larger universe of clients the sort of high-performance fees associated with private equity (typically 20 percent above a certain benchmark). Currently such fees may be levelled only on “qualified” (i.e., rich) clients, defined either as any whose net worth is $2.7 million or more (excluding their primary residence) or as any for whom the retirement fund in question totals........

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