Tom Downey: the billionaire masterminding the U.S. Presidential Election

America is no longer a country “by the people, for the people,” but a plutocracy. The new doc ‘Meet the Donors’ exposes our broken political system and the umber-rich pulling the strings.

“I think there’s the belief that somehow the whole system in Washington is not on the level—that it’s tilted against the ordinary citizen. And the reason people have that view is because they’re right: it is tilted against the ordinary citizen and it does favor the rich.”

That is Tom Downey, a former U.S. Congressman from New York turned founder of the high-powered lobbying firm Downey McGrath Group, Inc., and one of many talking heads in Meet the Donors, a damning new documentary that just made its premiere on HBO.

The film comes courtesy of Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. There is a brief showdown between Pelosi, Jr. and a right-wing lobbyist who took out vicious attack ads against her mother that showed the former House Speaker as a city-destroying Godzilla-like monster. Despite the family ties, this remains a fairly non-partisan examination of the corrupting influence of money in politics, and how the American political system is no longer a democracy but rather a plutocracy. The American public’s mounting frustration with this corrupt system has, in part, led to the rise of populist candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.