It’s clear that Americans don’t like oligarchs. When the broad left is campaigning against oligarchy and oligarchs, we are on solid ground.

Politico reported Wednesday that Donald Trump has told members of his inner circle that Elon Musk will soon step down from his White House duties. The news came just after Republicans lost — by a whopping ten points — a Wisconsin judge election on Tuesday, in which Musk had campaigned prominently, spent $20 million, and, as if we lived in the worst kind of vulgar kleptocracy, offered to pay people for votes and ballot signatures.

Also on Wednesday, a Marquette University poll showed that 60 percent of respondents disapproved of Musk and his work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroying the federal government.

As usual, Sen. Bernie Sanders has had the right political instincts in this moment. When Musk began laying waste to everything Americans value, from cancer research to Social Security, Sanders launched the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour through red and purple states. The message to Trump: “We will not allow you to move this country into an oligarchy,” which Sanders defined as a government “of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.”

It’s resonating. Last month Sanders, often with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, drew tens of thousands in Altoona, Wisconsin; Greeley, Colorado; Las Vegas, Nevada; and elsewhere. A crowd of 30,000 in Denver even surpassed the crowds Sanders attracted during his presidential run.

Even at town halls hosted by Republican congresspeople, constituents have been bringing their own anti-oligarchy message. Last month, Republican congressman Mike Flood, holding a town hall in Columbus, Nebraska — where Trump won easily — found himself drowned out by attendees chanting “tax the rich” and loudly booed for his stated support of Musk and DOGE. At similar sessions in other Republican districts, constituents have deluged their congresspeople with questions about Musk, his conflicts of interests and illegal actions, Social Security, Medicare, and other federal services.

Similar scenes have played out in Wyoming, Kansas, and elsewhere. Politico’s report on Musk’s likely exit noted that President Trump has been watching these town halls with consternation, fearing that Republicans won’t keep their majority in the House next year.

The anti-oligarchy message has also inspired protests at Tesla dealerships all over the country, with hundreds showing up to protest Musk and DOGE.  Tesla stock and sales have been suffering, a development that Musk has taken personally, seeming almost in tears in some interviews. The hits to his business — certainly helped by these protests — are helping to motivate his departure from the White House, the Politico report emphasized.

America doesn’t want billionaires buying votes, destroying our government for personal gain, and attacking the livelihoods of working-class people. Trump’s administration is a government only a billionaire could love, the Left is arguing. Increasingly, that message is resonating.

Musk is an especially gross billionaire, even by normal billionaire standards. Personally repellent, he’s charmless and weird, overt in his contempt for the American working class and open about his efforts to buy our government and profit from it. His exit from government will be widely cheered.

But once Musk is gone, there’s no reason the anti-oligarch movement can’t claim more heads. After all, the Trump administration will still be an oligarchy, with more billionaires than any previous one in US history, and the most viciously anti-working-class regime in recent US history, with reckless disregard for every government program that helps people survive and a laser-focus on dismantling union rights.

Other billionaires in Trump’s administration include Linda McMahon, a professional wrestling executive tasked with dismantling the department that oversees the nation’s public schools; Steve Witkoff, a real estate mogul representing the United States in Middle East diplomacy; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who, long before joining the Trump administration, made headlines as the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald for cutting off the paychecks of his employees who died or went missing in the terrorist attacks of September 11; and Pete Hegseth’s deputy secretary of defense, Steve Feinberg, a billionaire investor who’s loaded with conflicts of interest, having invested millions in the defense industry, Forbes reported Wednesday.

Some in the administration are merely superrich: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a hedge fund manager, is not a billionaire but his net worth is at least half a billion dollars — awkward optics for someone presiding over a tariff policy that will increase the cost of living for ordinary Americans and probably cause a recession.

There is much that can be said about the Trump administration that is both true and deeply damning. The regime is eugenicist, racist, patriarchal, anti-science, transphobic, xenophobic, warmongering, irresponsible, corrupt, chaotic, stupid, nihilistic, and antidemocratic. All that is true, and each is a good reason to oppose and to fight Trump. The regime’s grotesque and illegal kidnappings and disappearances of pro-Palestine protesters have been criticized by Joe Rogan, and more surprisingly, Ann Coulter and Curtis Yarvin.

But no specific criticism of this administration has united and mobilized Americans as much as the “oligarchy” framing. It’s helping bring thousands into the streets this weekend, with protests by a quarter of a million people planned in all fifty states as well as in DC. “Oligarchy” is a narrative the left should stick with, even long after Musk quits to spend more time with his declining Tesla stock.