Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

What happens when a country stops pretending to care about democracy and just lets the billionaires run wild? Look no further than Putin’s Russia—a place where wealth buys protection, loyalty buys power, and corruption isn’t hidden, it’s institutionalized.

Now, under Donald Trump’s return to power, Elon Musk’s tightening grip on federal spending, and a GOP entirely beholden to dark money, America is no longer just flirting with that model—we’re fast becoming it.

This is the story of how the U.S. is being hollowed out from the inside, not by foreign enemies, but by our own billionaire oligarchs.

While Musk’s Doge team has tried to free up a trillion dollars in federal spending to pay for the upcoming GOP tax cuts for billionaires, his people have cancelled hundreds of billions of dollars in federal programs and contracts. At the same time, press reports indicate his SpaceX company just got another $5.9 billion cash injection made possible with your and my taxpayer dollars.

It’s an old story. Wealthy people help their “friends” acquire political power, which is then used to make those same wealthy people even richer…and along the way the politicians end up enriched themselves.

This form of governance is called a kleptocracy.

Russia, for example, is one of the world’s most corrupt “developed” nations; scholars estimate as much as 25% of Russia’s GDP is routinely funneled to oligarchs in tight with Putin, as well as to Putin himself, who now has an estimated personal wealth of $200 billion.

As long as oligarchs toe Putin’s political line and continue to provide him with kickbacks, fees, gifts, and “campaign contributions,” he makes sure the Russian government facilitates the success of their businesses and looks the other way from the harms they’re inflicting on that nation’s workers and environment.

And when people point out examples of Russian corruption, Putin’s regime makes them pay a terrible price.

Alexi Navalny outed massive corrupt kickbacks and theft from Gazprom (gas) and Rosneft (oil), then started the Foundation for Fighting Corruption, a nonprofit devoted to uncovering and publicizing theft from the Russian people by the Putin regime and its cronies. He was poisoned, then imprisoned, and finally murdered for his efforts.

Similarly, Russian attorney Sergei Magnitsky discovered a $230 million tax fraud scheme being run by oligarchs close to Putin; he was subsequently murdered. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the CEO of Yukos, one of the nation’s largest oil operations, but within a year of his publicly complaining about corruption in the Kremlin he ended up in prison.

Before the 2010 election of Viktor Orbán, Hungary was considered one of the most up-and-coming of the former Eastern European nations, with great schools, hospitals, a thriving entrepreneurial class, and a growing middle class. Fifteen years of naked corruption, however, have made Orbán into a fabulously rich man and left his country in ruins.

Hungary now has one of the lowest levels of productivity in the region, schools and hospitals are collapsing under the weight of demands for bribes or kickbacks, and most all of the nation’s major businesses have been seized by pro-Orbán oligarchs who then strip them of their assets and share that wealth with the president.

As the ever-brilliant Anne Applebaum notes:

“[S]ome twenty percent of Hungarian companies operate ‘not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty [to Orbán].’”

This is the road Trump and Musk are traveling and dragging America—and the American working class—along with them.

Grounded in Reagan’s rhetoric trash-talking government and empowered by five corrupt Republicans and their Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, the GOP has been building the foundation for Trump’s corruption for four decades.

Now a steady stream of CEOs making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lardo to hand Trump million-dollar checks in exchange for a private dinner have become a routine sight. The three richest men in America—who own more wealth than the bottom 190 million of us—stood with him on the stage when he was inaugurated, and his cabinet has 13 billionaires, the richest in American history.

When President Jimmy Carter told me that America had become “an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery” nine years ago, he probably never believed it would become this naked and flagrant. But here we are, as Trump invites CEOs and international leaders alike to lavish him with praise and gifts in exchange for favorable regulatory relief or tariff treatment.

And now Trump is going after attorneys who challenge him. The lawyer for a University of Michigan student who was arrested last year for protesting Israel‘s treatment of Gaza was returning to the United States from an overseas spring break vacation with his wife and two children—this is the lawyer, a US citizen, not the foreign exchange student—when he was detained at the Detroit airport and CPB demanded to inspect his phone.

“This current administration is doing something that no administration has done—they are attacking attorneys,” Dearborn, Michigan attorney Amir Makled told The Financial Times.

The police state tactics that always accompany highly corrupt political regimes are starting to pop up on a nearly daily basis here in America.

Corruption of this sort is morally repugnant, but not just because of the injury it does to our national integrity and reputation. It also impoverishes everybody in the country who doesn’t have the money to buy their own regulations, tax breaks, pardons, immunities, and government contracts.

It’s almost certainly why Trump just suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which outlaws government officials (like himself and his cabinet members) from profiting off companies, oligarchs, and even foreign countries themselves’ desire to do business in or with America. Now they can drain America dry, just like Putin does Russia and Orbán does Hungary.

The next step, of course, was to slap tariffs on countries, rather then on products (as has historically been done for over 220 years) so foreign leaders would have to come to Trump hat-in-hand to grovel and offer him the kinds of gifts the Saudis have been showering on him and his family for almost a decade since they made the Jamal Khashoggi murder scandal go away.

His tariff scam is just his latest grift to enrich himself while expanding the power of the presidency in defiance of the Constitution which clearly states that only “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises…”

In the 44 years since Ronald Reagan began trading campaign contributions for favorable regulatory and tax treatment, fully $50 trillion has been extracted from the American middle class and deposited instead in the money bins of the morbidly rich. We’ve gone from two-thirds of us being in the middle class in 1980 to around 47% of us today.

It’s a level of wealth transfer facilitated by SCOTUS-legalized corruption that Putin and Orbán can only dream of—and has made America’s billionaires the richest in the history of the planet. No pharaoh, king, or emperor has ever come even close to the wealth today enjoyed by Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al.

As the stock market goes through wild gyrations, it’s worth remembering that this is also exactly the sort of scenario that the people close to Trump love. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of his confidants, moved hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the stock market just before Trump’s tariff announcement; it’s a safe bet that others close to Trump (and probably his own family) did the same. And will buy back in when he tells them he’s going to fix the situation.

There’s a reason why Warren Buffett moved $334 billion—that’s billion with a “B”—of his portfolio into cash just as Trump was coming into office; he’s seen this movie before. He no doubt knows that some of the nation’s greatest fortunes were made during the Republican Great Depression, when fat cat investors were able to buy businesses, land, and stocks for a song.

Wealthy investors who know how to play the game love this sort of turbulence, and Republicans have been happy to accommodate them ever since the days of Reagan, as I pointed out (and predicted) in January nine days after Trump’s inauguration.

It’s no coincidence that 10 out of the last 11 recessions since 1953 have happened during Republican administrations.

Republicans love recessions because they give morbidly rich people great (and predatory) investment opportunities to profit from the pain of small investors and small businesses; offer an excuse to gut social services; and increase the tolerance for strongman Republican politicians who say, “I alone can fix it.”

And while creating chaos with foreign countries, playing the role of bully, and forcing their leaders to prostrate themselves before Trump seems like it wouldn’t be of a direct benefit to him or his administration, it actually produces some huge effects.

As Americans in both government and business watch some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world grovel at Trump’s feet, they begin to feel a bit of terror in the pits of their own stomachs.

No American CEO wants to find themselves in the position of the guy who ran Disney and out of terror paid off Trump with $15 million. And whistleblowers must be thinking two and three times before deciding to take what they know public, given how all-powerful this man is making himself seem.

This and the destruction Republican presidents repeatedly inflict on our economy are so conspicuous it’s amazing the mainstream media doesn’t mention them more often. Of course, they are also ongoing victims of one of Trump’s terror campaigns at this very moment.

All you have to know about Trump, as with Putin, is that at the end of the day it’s all about the money and the power and immunity from the law which that money can buy.

Because of the repeated GOP-caused recessions, the total number of jobs created by every Democratic administration since 1980 is over 50 million but the number of jobs created during Republican presidencies from Reagan to Trump combined is fewer than zero.

On balance, Richard Nixon was the last Republican president to oversee the creation of even one single job, and most American voters today probably have no direct memory of him.

So, where and when did this corruption of our American system start? The first steps were taken in 1976 and 1978.

The fleecing of what’s left of today’s American middle class, in the decades since Reagan put out the welcome mat to billionaires and the oil industry, is really a crisis of corruption made possible by five on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court striking down our most important anti-corruption laws with their Buckley (1976), Bellotti (1978), and Citizens United (2010) decisions.

Those three decisions put America directly on the path to resembling Hungary and Russia.

So, now the most corrupt president in American history is determined to emulate his role models, Putin and Orbán, in further enriching America’s oligarchs (and himself) while impoverishing the rest of us.

The kleptocratic blueprint that has gutted nations like Russia and Hungary is now being followed in Washington, D.C.

Every tax break for billionaires, every regulatory rollback, every billionaire-funded dinner at Mar-a-Lago is another page in a playbook that ends in a democracy where elections still happen, but only the rich truly win.

If Americans don’t wake up to the scam soon, we may find ourselves living in a country where corruption isn’t just tolerated—it’s both official and permanent policy.