Trump, Kanye and the superwealth ticket in presidential politics

By Catherine Rampell

What's better than being kingmaker? Being king.

In the good old days, billionaires and hundred-millionaires were content to buy elections for others. They funded super PACs, astroturfed "grass-roots" campaigns and patronized political contenders willing to sing for their supper.

Likewise, if you were a candidate, kissing the ring of some billionaire benefactor became a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for winning an election, especially if your opponent had already secured his or her own ultrawealthy patron. Which led to rival billionaires spending small fortunes to face off vicariously through their candidates.

Lately, though, plutocrats have gotten more efficiency-minded. Why bankroll a middleman to do their bidding in Washington, they've realized, when they can just do the job themselves?

And thus Donald Trump entered the presidential race, boasting that he had already been puppeteering politicians for years and was ready to star as a no-strings-attached Pinocchio himself.

While Trump's support is concentrated among lower-socioeconomic-status Americans, their wealthier brethren have taken notice, too. The nattering nabobs have looked at how effortlessly Trump has roiled the political order and decided: Hey, I can do that.

In August, music mogul Kanye West concluded a rambling MTV Video Music Awards speech about artistry, self-esteem and smoking something to "[knock] the edge off" with this statement: "And yes, as you probably could have guessed by this moment, I have decided in 2020 to run for president."

In a subsequent Vanity Fair interview, West confirmed his seriousness of purpose: "I didn't approach that because I thought it would be fun. It wasn't like, 'Oh, let's go rent some Jet Skis in Hawaii.' No, the exact opposite. I sit in clubs and I'm like, 'Wow, I've got five years before I go and run for office and I've got a lot of research to do.' "

Shortly after West's announcement, billionaire and Trump frenemy Mark Cuban began publicly flirting with his own presidential run. "If I ran as a Dem, I know I could beat Hillary Clinton. And if it was me vs. Trump, I would crush him. No doubt about it," he told CNBC.

Just consider Cuban's resume: He's a swaggering, loudmouthed billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner and reality TV star (as a judge on "Shark Tank") known for saying politically incorrect things. This surely makes him at least as qualified as Trump to become, in Cuban's words, the first "three-comma POTUS," a reference to the triad of punctuation marks required to denote a minimum-10-digit net worth.

Plus, Cuban can best Trump on at least one criterion. Cuban has (sort of) already served as a U.S. commander in chief: He played the fictional President Marcus Robbins in the made-for-TV movie "Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!"

Expressing similar ambitions, former fugitive and (ex-) hundred-millionaire John McAfee last week announced that he is running as a Libertarian Party presidential candidate. Among the experiences that qualify him as a "serious" candidate for president, according to his campaign website: He "hid in the jungles of Central America for weeks while being chased by an army."

It's not exactly unprecedented for a fabulously wealthy person who's never run for dogcatcher to try to secure the nation's highest office. Like Trump, billionaire Ross Perot positioned himself as a truth-telling outsider when he ran for president in 1992 and 1996.

But Trump has paved the way for yet more "three-comma" presidential wannabes by demonstrating just how useful affluence can be in a campaign - not only for practical reasons (such as buying ads and get-out-the-vote manpower) but symbolic ones as well.

One of Trump's many political innovations this year has been to convince Americans that extreme wealth means not that you're out of touch with Joe Six-Pack (as Mr. Six-Pack was inclined to believe about, say, hundred-millionaire John Kerry) but that you must be "very smart."

There's no shortage of evidence that rich people themselves have long attributed their wealth to their smarts (ruling out any contribution from, say, luck or family connections), and then extrapolated those smarts to other areas of endeavor. Consider the silly but confident statements made by assorted billionaires about, for example, hyperinflation and sexual orientation.

But for a long time, the conventional wisdom was that big financial assets were an even larger political liability, since they signified snooty elitism. Trump changed all that by (a) showing he could be just as unpolished as Mr. Six-Pack himself, and (b) perhaps more important, playing to the public's faith in meritocracy.

As the famous political philosopher Tevye the Milkman once observed, "When you're rich, they think you really know."

Catherine Rampell's email address is crampell@washpost.com. Follow her on Twitter, @crampell.

© 2015, Washington Post Writers Group