These Poor Billionaires Are Melting Down Over Taxing the Rich

Facing the prospect of paying a bit more in taxes, billionaires are responding calmly and rationally: by calling themselves a marginalized, oppressed minority group being traumatized.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

Conjure in your mind’s eye the most grating, cynically obnoxious forms of claiming oppression and wielding supposed traumas in service of winning an argument that you can recall from the last few years. Are you feeling annoyed now? Good. Now imagine that same rhetoric being uttered by some of the world’s most rapacious, narcissistic, and spoiled elites: billionaires.

Well, you don’t have to imagine it, because it’s actually happening.

“I must say that I consider the phrase tax the rich — quote tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs, and even the phrase ‘from the river to the sea,’” Vornado Realty Trust CEO Steve Roth recently said on an earnings call, commenting on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s recently announced plans to tax luxury second homes owned by superrich people who don’t live in the city.

Yes, you read that right: calling to tax the rich is the same as yelling a racial slur, and hoarding billions of dollars of wealth makes you, apparently, a victim of oppression akin to racial minorities. Pretty soon, Roth will be telling us that his more than $1 billion net worth entitles him to civil rights protections, and that trying to raise his taxes is a hate crime.

Roth is not the only billionaire who’s seemingly been binge-reading old Tumblr posts from the 2010s. Fellow billionaire Ken Griffin, whose New York property was specifically mentioned by Mamdani in his announcement video, admitted he was left feeling unsafe and triggered by the callout. That’s not me being sarcastic: he told Bloomberg that Mamdani was “triggering the trauma” he went through when he moved himself and his business from Chicago to Miami four years ago. Like many refugees seeking asylum from political persecution, Griffin found himself having to leave everything he ever knew behind in search of a new home — specifically, one of the more than dozen that he owns in at least nine cities around the world.

It’s worth remembering at this point that both of these brave, traumatized survivors gave significant sums of money to groups that spent last year making and distributing defamatory ads painting Mamdani as an antisemitic hate-mongerer. One can only imagine the trauma these videos and mailers inflicted on the mayor. But then, hurt people hurt people.

We might also think about another Trump-supporting billionaire, Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman, who with one breath complains about how “DEI” on college campuses means everything is deemed racist and students demand protection from feeling upset, and in the next, whines about how “intimidating” antiwar protests “could be to Jewish and Israeli students” and that “racism against white people has become considered acceptable.” This is besides his steady stream of tediously confessional tweets that would put most college freshmen’s diary entries to shame.

“I have been called brave for my tweets over the last few weeks. The same could be said for those [who] called out Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare,” he informed us at the start of this social media journey. Yes, take a bow, Bill.

What is going on here? Just as the pro-Israel movement has hijacked the most grating aspects of liberal wokeness in the face of collapsing public support for its cause — the hyperfocus on marginalized identity and oppression, the crybully abuse of therapy-speak, the demands for censorship in order to be kept “safe” from upsetting ideas — another powerful group in poor public standing has clearly taken note: billionaires. And if the pro-Israel lobby can turn an anodyne phrase like “Free Palestine” into a hate slogan by simply baselessly insisting that it is, then hell, why can’t billionaires do the same to a phrase like “tax the rich”?

But in reality, these few instances are just the most recent and particularly embarrassing evolution of a rich, long-running genre: that of sulking billionaires and their defenders trying to paint the most powerful people in the world as a poor, persecuted minority.