You argue that Democrats have to share the blame for Trump’s rise, partially in promoting the idea that the solution to vast inequality is to have nicer rich people, or philanthro-capitalism. Well, Trump’s pitch to voters was: “I’m rich. Sure, I have absolutely no experience in government, but the fact of my wealth is all the evidence you need that you can trust me to fix everything.” It’s an absurd pitch, but I don’t know how far away it is from why Americans have trusted Bill Gates to remake the American school system or Africa’s agriculture system. I don’t think there could’ve been a pitch as crass as Trump’s “I can fix America because I’m rich” without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.

There’s a quote in your book that the Trump phenomenon is an uncouth, vulgar echo of the dangerous idea that billionaires can solve our problems. I wonder if, also in Trump, we see a more uncouth and vulgar echo of another idea that the Democrats brought us: benevolent nepotism. Look at the structure of the Gates Foundation and this idea that, rather than trying to solve these huge global problems through institutions with some kind of democracy and transparency baked into them, we’re just going to outsource it to benevolent billionaires. Look at how the Gates Foundation allocates its money, and how it’s structured: it’s Bill Gates, his father and his wife and Warren Buffett — that has been interrogated a whole lot less than this current outsourcing of the world to Jared and Ivanka.

You wrote the book very quickly, so that it would be contemporaneous. What has happened since you sent it to the publisher that you wish you could have put into the book? The reason I rushed the book is that I’m really worried about how Trump would exploit a major shock in the United States, like what recently happened in London. Right now, what we are seeing is Trump shocking the public every day with his outrageousness or his blunders; it’s kind of like a rolling shock doctrine. We’re all clicking on the Trump show, and meanwhile they’re methodically transferring wealth from the lower and middle to the upper, upper echelons of the income ladder. And that is less sexy than Melania slapping his hand away, which isn’t in the book.