Donald Trump stood outside the Palm Room doors at the White House this week, taking questions alongside the AI titans with whom he’d just had lunch. Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg, Greg Brockman: a still image of the gaggle captures a net worth that edges into the trillions.

Cockburn found his mind wandering back to Trump’s interview with The Spectator at the start of his second term. Ben Domenech pointed out that the priorities of his wealthy new big tech friends “and the kind of populist priorities of your voters, don’t necessarily align on everything.” “Probably,” Trump conceded. “Are you going to have to tell them no on some of the things that they’re going to ask of you?” Domenech asked. “Sure. I just do what’s right,” the President answered.

Fast forward a year and a half and consider the following issues: AI regulation, cryptocurrency, H-1B visas, data centers. On how many of them has the President sided with his MAGA base over his new wealthy friends?

Democrats running in tight races have sought to capitalize on Trump’s camaraderie with billionaires. Jon Ossoff popularized the term “Epstein class,” while James Talarico regularly says that the “rules” of America were “written for billionaires.” This messaging is very much borrowed from the Bernie Sanders-AOC-Zohran Mamdani playbook – and is not too great a departure from the leftist meme that “billionaires shouldn’t exist.”

But a new book from two economists suggests that the Democrats should widen their target. The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There by Princeton’s Owen Zidar and UChicago’s Eric Zwick, highlights a tier of three million “Main Street Millionaires.” Zidar and Zwick are profiled in a New York Times piece headlined, “Are Democrats Worried About the Wrong Rich........

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