Kissing Trump's Butt Paid Off Big For Corporate Donors
Recent filings with the Federal Election Commission have revealed the scale of record-breaking corporate donations to the Donald Trump-JD Vance Inaugural Committee. Trump smashed his previous inaugural donation record of $107 million for his first presidency, raising more than twice as much, with 650 donors—140 of whom gave no less than $1 million. This includes the tech billionaires who ponied up and got VIP seats at the dreary event.
Trump’s top donor, Elon Musk, has benefited from his co-presidency, growing even wealthier while not worrying about conflicts of interest when it comes to protecting his companies and government contracts. Then there are individual billionaires, like crypto mogul Justin Sun, who has had his criminally fraudulent activities wiped away with help from large donations to Trump. But there are a whole lot of others filling up the swamp and wetting their beaks.
The crypto industry donated a total of $18 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and has been one of the biggest winners so far. Trump courted cryptocurrency firms during his campaign, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which dropped a cool $1 million on Trump, watched the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its lawsuit against them after Trump came into office. And Trump Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently announced that the Justice Department’s unit that investigated cryptocurrency fraud-related crimes would be disbanded.
Companies with a large investment in the electronics market such as Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook gave $1 million to Trump, have received a respite from potentially crushing China tariffs on popular products like the iPhone, though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said there’s a good chance that will change.
Intuit, maker of TurboTax, got more than their $1 million donation’s worth. Reports have indicated that the Trump administration plans on ending the IRS’s Direct File program. The move benefits tax-filing companies by eliminating the free filing option for Americans.
Pilgrim Pride, a poultry company owned by Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS, reportedly made the largest donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, $5 million. What did they get in return so far? Trump recently paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that has allowed the U.S. to investigate and prosecute foreign corruption tied to America’s trade interests since 1977. JBS knows this law intimately, having already paid out more than a quarter of a billion dollars in criminal bribery charges under the FCPA.
And there is no end in sight for billionaires who want to make payments to Trump in some form or another. Major companies like Meta, Amazon, Tesla, and X, which all face ongoing government lawsuits, are settling cases, many of which are considered by critics to be baseless, with Trump himself.
Both Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X went so far as to settle long-standing, questionable lawsuits from Trump, with Meta sending $22 million to his presidential library and X sending another $10 million in settlement money.
At the same time Musk, whether or not he decides to step out of the political spotlight to try and repair the terrible branding effect he’s had on Tesla, is still reportedly ready to hand over $100 million to Trump-controlled super PACs.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts on the line, and many companies coincidentally linked to investors with names like Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the swampy dots in Trump’s White House.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
