Continued Free Rein (The Opposition Report #17)

It’s now just a couple months out from the midterm elections that will determine the direction of the country for the remainder of Trump’s second term. Congressional candidates are hitting the stump and, more and more, taking shifts at the shortform video factory. Staffers are desperately trying to figure out how to spin their employers’ position on data centers for the most advantage. And billionaires are signing bigger and bigger checks, though not usually on TikTok.

Recently, work by The New York Times found that the top 20 donors this election cycle have already collectively donated over $1.2 billion. Most of that egregious sum went to Republican candidates, although George and Alex Soros did end up on the leaderboard. Elon Musk, who donated almost $300 million to candidates and his own PACs in 2024, is also publicly planning to spend another $100 million this cycle.

“The US has long prided itself on being the world’s leading democracy,” Financial Times U.S. correspondent Guy Chazan observed at the start of the month. “But its system of government is increasingly dominated by an economic elite that has parlayed its immense riches into tangible political influence.” The number of millionaires and billionaires in Trump’s cabinet was what really stood out to Chazan. But the sums being spent to influence state elections are also eye-popping nowadays.

Money in politics is bipartisan, even crypto cash. But the amount of corruption under this Republican administration has been egregious, particularly in recent weeks and months as corporations get regulation after regulation overturned. Meanwhile, policy experts grow increasingly concerned that states might drop out of SNAP because of the One Big Beautiful Bill cuts. Regulating greenhouse gases emissions from coal power plants? On the chopping block, just like protections for old-growth forests.

One of the only places the federal government is apparently ‘supposed’ to intervene in people’s lives is women’s healthcare: at the start of the month, then-acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a religious group that the Trump White House has been working “to get permanent solutions so the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.”

And the other three areas that the Trumpian state evidently has free rein? Deportations, persecuting critics of the administration, and bombing foreign countries.