‘everyone’s Trying To Kiss The Ring’: Trump’s Inauguration Devours Corporate Cash, Smashing Records

Donald Trump’s first White House victory caught corporate America flat-footed. This time around, industries that his administration will soon oversee are showering his inaugural committee with record-breaking donations — and making sure both the president-elect and the public notice their largesse.

Not only are companies giving far larger amounts than they did to Trump’s first inauguration — when they didn’t have a firm grasp of how to handle misgivings about the mercurial politician — they’re doing so in a far more public fashion, announcing the donations months before they have to be reported to federal regulators.

“The stigma of a Trump donation, which was out there to some degree eight years ago, is no longer there,” said Brian Ballard, a longtime fundraiser for Trump who’s raised money for the Presidential Inaugural Committee. “Who knows what's going to happen two months from now? But for today, up and down, corporate America is solidly pro-Trump.”

It’s also a far cry from as recently as four years ago, when much of corporate America made a show of cutting ties with Trump over his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Since then, Trump’s subsequent felony convictions, promises to pardon members of the mob who stormed the Capitol or seek revenge on those who prosecuted him have done little to dull the corporate quest for Trump’s approval.

Now, between Trump’s inaugural committee, an allied super PAC and a 501(c)4 group set up to boost the incoming administration politically — and which is not required to disclose its donors — Trump allies could rake in as much as $250 million dollars, according to Ballard.

Much of that money is coming from the biggest names in the tech, auto, banking, health care and fossil fuel industries. The world’s five biggest tech firms each gave at least $1 million, either directly or through their chief executives. So did the CEOs of Uber and OpenAI. The auto giants Toyota, Ford and General Motors each forked over $1 million, as did the behemoth drugmaker Pfizer, the telehealth company Hims & Hers and the tax service Intuit. Robinhood, the stock trading app, contributed $2 million.

In a sign of how much these companies want their donations known, their spokespeople quickly confirmed the news to POLITICO, while reps for Chevron and Bank of America said they had also contributed, but declined to say how much.

Many of those firms have contributed to past inaugural committees — but as a general trend, the checks this year are bigger. Microsoft, for example, doled out $1 million — double its contribution for 2017 and 2021. Google gave $285,000 each to Trump’s first inauguration and President Joe Biden’s inauguration. This time, it more than tripled its offering to $1 million.

“Everyone’s trying to kiss the ring and curry favor with the new administration,” said a health care lobbyist granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “We’re hopeful this new administration will be friendlier than the previous one.”

The Trump transition and Inaugural Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

The corporate money flooding in to support Trump’s inauguration is all the more notable given that many of the same blue chip companies either paused or pledged to review future campaign contributions to members of Congress who voted, at Trump's encouragement, against certifying the results of the 2020 election.

But those donations may be too little too late for some in the president-elect’s orbit.

“One of the questions [the incoming administration is] going to ask when companies request a meeting with one of the agencies is, ‘What was your position on the members that didn't vote to certify the election in 2020?’ and if your answer is, ‘Well, we withheld funds,’ they're going to say, ‘Well, we're not interested in meeting with you,’” one GOP lobbyist said of the incoming administration.

The staffers who will populate the second Trump administration “are different kinds of people, and they don't owe their victory in any way to corporate America or to the people that traditionally have helped elect presidents,” the lobbyist argued.

Government watchdogs and veterans of past inaugural committees are skeptical that Trump’s team will be able to spend the hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve raised. That’s because the American people pick up a good deal of the tab to inaugurate a president and many of the balls and other events surrounding the official proceedings are separately sponsored by corporations.

“So much of the inaugural resources are public dollars,” explained a member of Biden’s Presidential Inaugural Committee, not authorized to speak on the record, mentioning security and the federal land and facilities that host the ceremony itself as examples. “So if people think that [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg’s million dollars are going to go to something like the swearing in ceremony, that's just not true.”

The inaugural committee is required by law to disclose its donors 90 days after taking office. But it can keep the public in the dark about how it spent the money and where it funneled any leftover funds.

“Is it going to go to Trump’s businesses? To Trump’s Super PAC? We don't know and Trump never has to tell us,” noted Craig Holman, the head of government affairs for the watchdog group Public Citizen.

The fundraiser for Trump’s Presidential Inaugural Committee said any surplus is likely to go toward Trump’s presidential library.

Yet even this limited transparency into the inaugural committee’s fundraising will be far more than the public is likely to get on Trump’s transition — the first in modern history to reject public funding and the restrictions and disclosure requirements that come with it. Though Trump’s transition promised in late November to reveal its private donors, it has not yet done so, and no legal mechanism exists to hold them to that pledge. The transition did not respond when asked whether, when and how it would disclose its funders.

The Inaugural Committee, meanwhile, has to report to the Federal Election Commission the names of all donors who gave more than $200 dollars. But there is no upper limit on contributions and no restriction on donations from dark money groups, government contractors, corporations currently under federal investigation or individuals seeking roles in the new administration.

Inauguration fundraising “is an opportunity, no matter who's in office, for deep-pocketed donors to buy influence with whoever's president,” said Rep. Mary Scanlon (D-Penn.), who reintroduced a bill this week to close ethical loopholes and prevent conflicts of interest in inaugural fundraising. “In some ways, it's even more corrosive than ordinary campaign donations, because you already know who won, so you are specifically making payments to ingratiate yourself with someone you know is going to be in office — that's just an opportunity for corruption.”

Some past presidents have chosen to impose their own guardrails. Biden’s Presidential Inaugural Committee, for example, refused donations from registered lobbyists and the fossil fuel industry and set a cap of $1 million per contribution. Former President Barack Obama went further in 2009, barring any corporate donations to his inauguration.

Trump did not announce any such restrictions.

A group of House and Senate Democrats wrote to Trump’s inaugural committee this week demanding information about how it screens its donors to avoid violating the prohibition on contributions from foreign nationals. The lawmakers noted that there was cause for concern given that Trump’s 2021 inaugural committee accepted nearly a million dollars from a Pakistani investor who also lobbied the Trump White House on behalf of Qatar and was later indicted for tax evasion, campaign finance violations and failing to register as a foreign agent.

But having lost their Senate majority, they will have little recourse if their oversight letter goes unanswered.

Scanlon similarly has little hope that her bill, which would impose a $50,000 cap on donations to inaugural committees, ban contributions from Super PACs and corporations and require detailed accounts of how the money is spent, can advance under the incoming GOP trifecta, but hopes its reintroduction will draw public scrutiny of the issue.

“We're just going to try to keep pushing for transparency, and try to make sure that people know just who is trying to influence their government,” she said.