One Sunday in March 1888, former President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary: “This is a government of the people, by the people, and no longer for the people.” It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. Hayes made this private admission at the height of the Gilded Age, when, as historian Richard White put it, “the government and the economy were riddled with corruption.” Businessmen amassed fortunes unprecedented in American history and sought help from government officials to further expand those fortunes.

If there was any doubt that we are in a new Golden Age, it was dashed by spokesman Mike Johnson’s admission to Fox News on Wednesday.

Johnson appeared on “Fox and Friends” the morning after congressional leaders released the full text of an agreement to keep the federal government running until mid-March. As my colleague Hayes Brown explained on Tuesday, Congress must pass a funding bill this week to avoid “a downright unpleasant shutdown.” On the one hand, most House Republicans don’t want to vote for a bill that Senate Democrats and President Joe Biden will accept. But they also don’t want to be held responsible for a government shutdown. To close that circle, Johnson planned to count on Democratic votes to speed passage of the bill with a two-thirds majority, allowing much of his caucus to reject the deal without consequences.

After “Fox and Friends” co-host Steve Doocy played a compilation of GOP representatives complaining about the bill, he asked Speaker Johnson about Elon Musk’s post a few hours earlier that “this bill will not pass should”.

“If you could,” Doocy asked, “what is your message to Elon Musk?”

“I communicated with Elon last night,” Johnson revealed. “Elon, Vivek (Ramaswamy) and I were in a text chain together and I explained the background to them.”

In other words, with the federal government just days away from a partial shutdown, the second in line to the presidency is spending his time tending to the egos of two wealthy businessmen.

Johnson didn’t even consult Musk and Ramaswamy in areas where they might have expertise. He explained to these men very basic facts about how the House of Representatives works. “Remember, folks, we still only have a razor-thin Republican lead,” Johnson told the two men. “So every bill has to have the votes of Democrats.”

The speaker’s attempts to calm him down were unsuccessful. Like Musk, Ramaswamy has maintained his opposition despite Johnson’s efforts. It seems Musk didn’t heed the lesson in the basics of Congress either: He wrote on X that any congressman or senator “who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!” , that only a third of the Senate will be up for re-election in 2026.

The problem here goes far deeper than the rich confusing wealth with expertise – any sports fan, for example, can name a dozen team owners who prove this failure to the world every year. However, these two men were assigned an Advisory Commission on Government Expenditures. Musk and Ramaswamy want to cut trillions from the federal budget – cuts that are as huge as their understanding of governance is tenuous. And that’s before you factor in Musk’s web of conflicts of interest with various government regulators. In a vacuum their posts would be harmless, but their influence makes them disastrous.

Late Wednesday, Musk’s influence was confirmed when President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance released a statement echoing him. They criticized Republicans in Congress for “allowing our country to hit the debt ceiling in 2025” and called for “a streamlined spending bill” that raises the debt ceiling but “doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.” want,” such as “sweet provisions for government censors and for Liz Cheney.” Will Musk and Ramaswamy be the architects of this “streamlined” bill?

For decades, the influence of money in politics has been growing as income inequality in the country has increased. Those who warned of this growing influence were completely vindicated. This year, Trump’s campaign received around $800 million in funding from seven billionaire families. His government will include more than a dozen billionaires, the richest since President Warren Harding’s corrupt White House.

To end the first Gilded Age, Hayes recognized, massive reforms were required. “The real difficulty lies in the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and unscrupulous who represent or control capital,” he wrote. “Hundreds of laws passed by Congress and state legislatures are in the interests of these men and against the interests of workers. These must be revealed and removed. All laws governing corporations, taxation, trusts, wills, descent, and the like require review and comprehensive change.”

Ending the Second Golden Age requires the same comprehensive measures.