Published March 4, 2025
BY TULLAH MCCOLL
When President Donald Trump took office for the second time on Jan. 20, he put together the richest cabinet in history, with the combined net worth of billionaires in Trump’s administration being $382.2 billion as of Dec. 10, according to a U.S. News article.
Money may have the power in the U.S., not the people.
The three richest men in the world–tech moguls Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg–sat alongside Trump during his inauguration. Yet this isn’t the first time America has seen big-business owners with extreme affluence have major influence over the federal government.
Today’s income inequality shares resemblance with The Gilded Age, occurring from the late 1860s to the early 1900s. The name for the time period was coined by author Mark Twain and meant that the country’s extravagantly rich facade concealed the poverty hidden beneath economic expansion. This time marked the rise of the rich-elite in America, like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. For the working class, it was seen as a time of uncertainty.
Similar to Rockefeller and Carnegie, Americans may see Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg as captains of industry–successful businessmen with important influence on the decisions made within the industry. Others may see the three as robber barons–powerful businessmen whose practices are often considered ruthless and display monopolistic behavior (a single supplier controlling the market, allowing them to have pricing power because of the lack of competition). Either way, there is concern over what a government “for the people” looks like with the men in power representing an extremely tiny fraction of the global population’s income. Famous political leader of the Populist party, Mary Elizabeth Lease, called this a “government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street” during a speech in 1890.
While wealthy donors and corporations have historically spent money aiding campaigns, Citizens United (a 2010 Supreme Court decision) mostly terminated formerly existing finance restrictions and enabled unlimited spending on elections. Musk spent an estimated $277 million to back Trump and Republican candidates during the 2024 election, as stated in a CBS News article. This type of corporate control in the U.S. can be seen as a reflection of the wealth gap that has come to define the Gilded Age. The McKinley vs. Bryan election of 1896 is sometimes considered the first modern presidential campaign because of the amount of money spent by Republicans. “McKinley’s campaign raised some $10 million; Bryan’s around $300,000,” according to Eric Foner’s textbook, Give Me Liberty!
The wealth gap, however, has even greater effects on those uninvolved in politics. In 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said that 78.7 million workers were paid at hourly rates, representing 55.6% of all wage and salary workers. Of those paid hourly, 141,000 workers earned the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
In January, 2025, the Associated Press explained that the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans, making up 131,000 households, owned about 14% of the nation’s wealth. However, the bottom half of the U.S. population, about 65 million households, together owned just 2.4% as of last fall.
Although concerns of workplace conditions have lessened since the time of Rockefeller and Carnegie, U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration opened an investigation on Amazon in January 2023, finding that the company was exposing employees to “ergonomic hazards capable of causing serious physical harm,” says the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission.
Today, the working and lower-middle class face additional threats under the control of present-day robber barons, like the inability to afford housing, health care and child care. A large gap between the rich and poor presents social problems, and it can create lessened social coherence, leading to increased disease, crime and violence rates, referenced from The National Library of Medicine.
History is taught in schools for younger generations to learn from our country’s mistakes, honor our achievements and improve our future. If the nation fails to recognize the harm in immense wage disparity and unprioritized workers’ rights, history is likely to repeat some of its unhonorable past.
