Hello, everyone, I'm Kimberly Adams.

Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

I'm Kyle Rizdahl, Tuesday, 3 December today, and we are talking on this Tuesday show about big money in American politics.

Billionaire families, we are told, contributed something like 18% of all the money raised during the 2024 election cycle.

And a lot of those mega donors are, oh, by the way, check the news, lining up for or getting jobs in the upcoming Trump administration.

It all feels very oligarchical, you know.

So we wanted to know more about how we got to this point and where we go from here and whether, like, is that too much?

Is it too much to call it an oligarchy or something else?

So here, to make us smart about this is David Sorota.

He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the investigative

news outlet, The Leaver, and his podcast series, Master Plan, digs into how big money in politics

has become more and more unrestricted over the past 50 years. Welcome to the show, David.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Before we get to like the definition of oligarchy and everything like that,

wealthy people have always had power in American politics,

in politics everywhere in the world.

Was there anything actually different about this election when it comes to the influence of the rich?

I think there was in that the billionaire class was not just funding the election.

And American elections have become, in many cases, certainly after Citizens United,

they feel more like auctions than elections.

But in this particular election, the billionaire class,

they were central characters in the election itself. In other words, they weren't just funding it

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