(Third in a three-part series) It is no secret that super-rich Americans do not “pay their fair share” in taxes, as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont have often put it. In fact, in one instance, they pay nothing.

HuffPost’s Molly Redden cited an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the non-profit Americans for Tax Fairness showing that those with more than $100 million – 0.05 percent of the population – have a combined $8.5 trillion in capital gains due to growth in the value of stocks, bonds, investments, real estate or businesses – one-sixth of the nation’s total. But tax loopholes enable them to pay no income tax on that wealth, including when passing it on to heirs. If a “Billionaires Income Tax” which Democrats have been pushing becomes law, it will yield about $500 billion in additional federal revenue from those whose capital gains total $1 billion or more, in addition to billions that can be raised by other wealth taxes.

In addition, private equity companies have been playing havoc with the housing market, as well as acquiring and then breaking up or closing companies. Drug-makers are accused of charging exorbitant prices. The wealthy are demanding an end to federal regulations. Oil companies want to exploit oil and gas resources wherever they are.

It is no surprise, therefore, that policy proposals for a possible second Donald Trump presidency seek to protect wealth and corporations. During his presidency, his “big, beautiful” tax cut, as he calls it, yielded a windfall of billions of dollars for the rich.

Tech billionaires, especially, are salivating over another Trump presidency and they persuaded him to pick JD Vance as his running-mate. The driving force behind that choice, The Washington Post reported, was venture capitalist Peter Thiel, “Vance’s former employer and mentor.” Anticipating a Trump victory, Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, posted on X, “WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY.”

“For Thiel, Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket is payoff on a prescient bet placed a decade ago when he embraced the Yale Law School graduate with Rust Belt roots – joining a roster that included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI founder Sam Altman,” The Post said.

Jeet Heer, writing in The Nation, cited a private WhatsApp group for billionaires, Off Leash, which military contractor Erik Prince created. “Trump’s return to the White House would literally allow the wealthiest Americans to pocket trillions that would otherwise be used for public services,” Heer said. “This simple material fact is enough to explain why the propertied class won’t listen to civic lessons about the toxicity of Trump. They are obscenely rich and Trump will help them stay that way. In fact, he’ll allow them to become even richer than they’d otherwise be.”

Ken Silverstein explained in The New Republic, “Prominent figures in the Off Leash crew are well known for their paleoconservative political views, but the private opinions expressed in the group chat are even more extreme and jarring than we normally see voiced publicly. Participants chirpily discussed the desirability of clamping down on democracy to deal with their enemies at home and regime change, bombings, assassinations, and covert action to take care of those abroad.”

And Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, claimed in The Guardian that billionaires backing Trump “are leading a movement against democracy.” Reich added, citing a report from Americans for Tax Fairness, “Just 50 families have already injected more than $600 million into the 2024 election cycle … Most of this is going to the Trump Republican Party.” Reich referred to a 2009 article which Thiel wrote on the topic “The Education of a Libertarian” in the Cato Institute’s Cato Unbound journal. Thiel, who, with Tesla’s Elon Musk, is expected to be given senior positions in a Trump presidency, stated, “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Reich countered, “If ‘capitalist democracy’ is becoming an oxymoron, it is not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaires like Musk and Thiel are intent on killing democracy by supporting Trump and the neo-fascists surrounding him.”

However, other tech billionaires share Thiel’s views. In his “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” venture capitalist Mark Andreessen “outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the ‘techno-capital machine’ produces everything that is good in the world,” New York Times columnist Elizabeth Spiers wrote.

“In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels ‘enemies’ – social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us – the unwashed masses, people who have either ‘unskilled’ jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both – we exist mostly as automatons whose entre value is measured in productivity,” Spiers added.

She dubbed such sentiments “neoreactionary” and said it “is disdainful of democracy and opposes institutions … that bolster it. It despises egalitarianism and views oppression of marginalized groups as a problem of their own making.” Such thinking, Spiers said, has special appeal to the billionaire class: They can pretend they are not elites despite their wealth and influence.

But not only billionaires will benefit from Trump’s re-election. His rhetoric indicates he will run an autocratic administration. If he follows through, corruption will likely become rampant as his cronies enrich themselves through an American kleptocracy.

However, exactly how a Trump regime will turn out remains uncertain. Even though it appears that there is a unified front behind his re-election bid, the coalition is not homogeneous. The wealthy elites want to rule the world. Another group is calling for the U.S. to be made a Christian state. Others insist on a return to a past dominated by “white culture.” And Trump evidently plans to entrench his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in power.

Those will not necessarily be competing demands if Trump moves to upends the rule of law, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court recently granted the presidency almost total immunity from prosecution. However, it is unlikely that Trump will be able, at least in the beginning, to impose a despotic regime as happened in Italy under Benito Mussolini, whom Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” deemed the original autocrat.

It could be a form of populism, which Ben-Ghiat described as government in which democratic politics undergo an “illiberal evolution,” a term journalist Fareed Zakaria coined. “While populism is not inherently authoritarian,” Ben-Ghiat wrote, “many strongmen past and present have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than legal rights. For authoritarians, only some people are ‘the people,’ regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group. This why, in strongman states, attacking the leader is seen as attacking the nation itself, and why critics are labeled ‘enemies of the people’ or terrorist.”

That sounds very familiar.

But Ben-Ghiat noted that while several current rulers are clearly autocratic, there is no definite label for others “who repress civil liberties but use elections to keep themselves in power.” She pointed to Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, who describes his country as being an “illiberal democracy.” But other labels have surfaced, such as “hybrid regimes,” “electoral autocracies” and “new authoritarianism,” which mark “this new wave of antidemocratic rule.”

Whatever it is called, if Trump wins, the nation should prepare for drastic changes after Jan. 20, 2025. That will mean democracy, as it is now known, is at stake.