
Billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in a row at President Trump's Inauguration ceremony on January 20, 2025 in the US Capitol.
If Trump’s inauguration is any indication, the 47th President is readying for more of the same with mega-donors at the center of the action.
K.V. Dahl III made the trip to DC all the way from LeClaire, Iowa. But didn’t get to see the inauguration.
He was just a few blocks from Capitol Hill when his group decided crowds were too thick to even make it to his watch party. The weather made it too icy to hang around. President Donald Trump’s inauguration took place inside the Capitol’s rotunda, while Dahl and his group of eight made its way back to the hotel.
At the bar in The Hamilton in DC, Dahl said the speech—which he watched from his cell phone—was “classic Trump.” Since attending the 2017 inauguration, he has liked what Trump has had to say about the economy and the border. And as a president of a Ford dealership in Davenport, he said he liked Trump’s talk of repealing incentives on the electric vehicle market.
“America is not in decline,” he said. “He’s giving us hope. It’s a happy day for every American.”
While Dahl was left out of the rotunda, Monday’s ceremony was remarkable if for nothing else than the net worth gathered on stage. While talking about the Los Angeles fires, Trump described the impact he saw.
“They’re raging through the houses and communities, even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country, some of whom are sitting here right now,” he said.
From Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to the TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew and Republican mega-doner Miriam Adelson—and who can forget Tesla CEO and Trump’s favorite campaign blank check Elon Musk: the inauguration of the 47th president was a who’s who of the wealthy, a show of wealth concentration in the United States.
Today, the wealth held by the richest 0.01% has reached a new peaked. With $20 trillion in wealth, the top 0.1% earn on average $3.3 million in income each year. Meanwhile, the average Iowan makes less than $50,000 a year.
“He spent a lot of time during the campaign saying that he was for the middle class, but it’s the billionaires who funded his campaign with the best seats in the house at his inauguration,” said state Sen. Zach Wahls (D-Coralville).
Wahls said Trump’s promises to lower prices were at odds with his policies. As an example,Trump has proposed a tariff on foreign goods.
“A lot of Iowa exports—whether those are agricultural products or manufacturing products—are going to be a lot more expensive. And then also you saw retaliation from other countries that raised taxes on American exports, made them less competitive,” Wahls said.
State Rep. JD Scholten said market consolidation is a story Iowans know well. Take Iowa’s meat processors: 85% of processing capacity for meat and poultry is captured by just four companies. Those companies have outsized power to determine pricing both for producers and for the retailers on the other end.
“You see it in seed. You see it in fertilizer. You see it on the input side. You see it on the market side. And in the state of Iowa, you see these multinational corporations extract the wealth from our communities and leave us with literal shit in hog manure,” Scholten said. He writes for a newsletter You’re Probably Getting Screwed where he focuses on these questions of consolidation and how it leaves normal people behind.
“What I’m hopeful for is that there’s been this undercurrent for a while now,” he said. “All these tech billionaires have been influential in every presidency in the past decade, but now they’re coming to the forefront. And so that’s the thing that does give me hope is that this is coming to the forefront. And people who haven’t been paying attention can see how clearly things are wrong right now.”
Virginia Politics Correspondent Michael O’Connor of the Virginia Dogwood contributed to this story.
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