There’s a memorable scene in the film The Big Short involving the lightly fictionalized hedge fund manager Mark Baum. Baum is listening in horror as some real estate bros describe all the shady practices that have fueled the housing bubble in Florida. Halfway through the conversation, he brings his team aside and demands to know why the crooks would give up their secrets so easily.

“They’re not confessing,” his colleagues explain to him. “They’re bragging.”

A few weeks before the presidential election, the New York Times published an article about the influence of big donors over the Kamala Harris campaign based on not-so-humble bragging from the heights of corporate America. Now it reads much more like a confession. While Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden over the carnage in Gaza, she had no problem signaling her intention to scrap parts of his economic agenda that benefited working-class Americans but went down badly with the very rich.

The Times described “a steady stream of meetings and calls in which corporate executives and donors offer their thoughts on tax policy, financial regulation and other issues,” which had resulted in “a Democratic campaign that is far more open to corporate input than the one President Biden had led for much of the election cycle.”

According to one business executive, the Harris campaign was “definitely giving large corporations a seat at the table and giving them a voice,” in a way that marked “a significant difference from the Biden administration.”

The donors weighed in behind the scenes when Harris promised to ban “price gouging” for groceries and secured an immediate rollback on the pledge: “In the days after, Ms. Harris’s team clarified that the plan would apply only during emergencies and would mirror laws already in place in many states — a narrower concept that would not immediately address rising grocery prices.” Harris might have been left with little to say about one of the most pressing economic problems in the United States, but at least her corporate backers were happy.

Back in 2019, Joe Biden famously told an audience of rich donors in New York that they shouldn’t worry about minor reforms that would leave their wealth and power fully intact:

You all know in your gut what has to be done. We can disagree in the margins, but the truth of the matter is it’s all within our wheelhouse and nobody has to be punished. No one’s standard of living will change, nothing would fundamentally change.

According to the Times, Biden greatly overestimated the willingness of America’s corporate oligarchy to recognize, in their gut or anywhere else, the need for some modest rebalancing:

Many corporate executives have had deep concerns about the Biden administration’s economic policies. Mr. Biden embraced significant tax increases on the rich and appointed ambitious regulators like Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair, who has made investors feel that deal-making on Wall Street has become increasingly unpredictable by taking a more aggressive approach to challenging mergers. But the extent of the outreach from Ms. Harris’s team has left many on Wall Street viewing her as a more moderate economic leader than Mr. Biden.

As well as making “remarks that indicate a less zealous approach to antitrust enforcement,” which went down very well on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, Harris explicitly rejected Biden’s plan to raise the capital gains tax to 39.6 percent. Billionaire Mark Cuban boasted that he had inundated the Harris campaign with “a never-ending stream of texts and calls and emails,” urging them to support various economic policies that would benefit his class: “The list is endless, and in all those areas I’ve seen something pop into her speech at some level.”

According to Cuban, the (very limited) shift to the left in the Democratic Party under the impact of the two Bernie Sanders campaigns would soon be a fading memory with Harris in charge:

She says she’s open to inputs from independents and Republicans, she means it. She truly is open minded. I’ve put some wild things in her direction that they don’t laugh at. People are trying to say, “Here are the progressive and liberal principles that have always been the principles of the Democratic Party.” Those are gone. It’s Kamala Harris’s party now.

At the time when he made this boast, Cuban presumably expected to have his feet well under the table of the next administration. When the results started coming in, Cuban swiftly congratulated Trump on his victory — “you won fair and square” — and offered congratulations to Elon Musk too.

He could afford to be magnanimous. No matter what happens over the next four years, Cuban and the other members of the billionaire class will be fine, regardless of what candidate they supported this time around. They were fine under Biden, they would have been fine under Harris, and they will certainly not suffer any real damage under Trump’s presidency, even if they find him personally distasteful.

The role they played in steering the Harris campaign onto the rocks, however, is one that everyone without the protective insulation of wealth should remember during the second Trump term.