In the post-Citizens United era, after the Supreme Court let a flood of plutocratic money pour through a super PAC darkly, the billionaires began to run rampant. Soon enough, new informal “primaries” were set up in which potential candidates on bended knee toured the resorts and luxury locales those billionaires preferred, auditioning for their support. And yet transformation has come so quickly to American politics that those may soon be considered the good old days of twenty-first-century democracy before the billionaires realized that, when it came to candidates, they didn't have to buy them, they could be them.
Donald Trump was the first to take that aperçu to the bank big time (though Ross Perot in 1992 and Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000 broke the ground). Now, as TomDispatch regularNomi Prins, author of All the Presidents' Bankers, points out (offering the dollars and sense to back it up), the American electoral system is a genuine billionaire’s playground -- and ever more literally so.
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