Trump’s Next Term Could See America’s First True Oligarchs, Warns Democracy Activist Garry Kasparov

Elon Musk's DOGE plan could mix public and private interests in a way previously not seen in American politics, the former world chess champion said.

Elon Musk, rocket and electric car company chief, sometime Internet troll and more recently Donald Trump’s point man for cutting alleged waste from the federal government, may be on the cusp of becoming something else: the country’s first real oligarch.

That’s according to democracy activist and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, chairman of the New York-based Renew Democracy Initiative.

Kasparov should know. As a celebrity chess prodigy in the 1980s, he tried to use his fame to buck the Communist system in Russia. Kasparov became a dissident after the Soviet Union fell, when Russian president Vladimir Putin began turning back the clock on the country’s nascent democracy.

“There’s certain lessons that I think we can learn from Russia in the ’90s. The blurring of the lines between business and politics, which is called oligarchy by classical political philosophy ― it’s extremely dangerous,” Kasparov told HuffPost in a recent interview.

Russia and some other post-Soviet countries, like Belarus or Kazahkstan, have struggled with democratic reforms and are run by strongmen able to subvert the law to reward their supporters and punish their opponents.