Tech tycoons are lining up to donate big sums of cash to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund ahead of his next stint in the White House. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon has pitched in a million bucks. Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has tossed in another million. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman scrounged up a million of his own.
It is both an unsightly and an unsurprising spectacle. Top-dollar corporate donations to an incoming administration’s inaugural fund — which has no legal contribution limit — are routine, a kind of open-air display of patronage and influence-peddling.
Trump’s inaugural fund in 2017 raised all kinds of questions concerning international donors and inappropriate spending.
Big business often plays both sides when it comes to politics, donating in roughly equal measure to both Democrats and Republicans, and inaugural donations are no exception. After banning corporate donations in 2008, Barack Obama accepted them for his 2012 inaugural fund. President Joe Biden also allowed corporations to donate to his inaugural fund in 2020 (Amazon contributed to his fund, although with a significantly smaller $276,000 donation). Biden did, however, prohibit foreign agents and the fossil fuel industry from contributing.
But with Trump, the donations hit different. Since Trump exhibits a personalist style of governance, corporate donations take on the gloss of not just a conventional effort to purchase influence but also a gesture of deference to a leader who can be at turns vindictive or lenient based on a whim. Consider how Trump singled out specific companies like Carrier on what was then Twitter as a tactic to prevent them from shipping jobs overseas (mostly unsuccessfully). Trump has also allowed companies that he favors to be exempt from massive tariffs.
Bezos, Altman and Zuckerberg all have reason to want to get on Trump’s good side. Bezos has, among many other things, cloud computing deals with the federal government to worry about. Zuckerberg knows that Trump has expressed interest in changing the laws that protect social media platforms from liability for what’s on those platforms. And Altman knows that generative AI is a fledgling industry in which novel regulation could dramatically alter its profit capacity and pace of development in the coming years.
On top of all that, Trump has made bombastic legal threats toward business leaders — by name — including threatening to imprison Zuckerberg. However impractical or unrealistic Trump’s authoritarian threats may be in reality, it’s not exactly a good feeling for business leaders to hear that the president wants them in jail. That kind of rhetoric would spur many people — out of a sense of self-preservation, if not basic self-interest and business acumen — to make an effort to mollify that leader. (Zuckerberg recently dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.) In other words, Trump’s unpredictability and penchant for retribution seem like sufficient inducements for a high-profile rich person to give him money.
Trump’s inaugural fund in 2017 raised all kinds of questions concerning international donors and inappropriate spending. According to The Guardian, Trump’s fund received “tens of thousands of dollars from shell companies that masked the involvement of a foreign contributor or others with foreign ties.” And while Trump’s record-setting $107 inaugural fund in 2017 was double the size of Obama’s in 2008, his actual festivities were reportedly more limited and appeared less grand.
In 2022, the Trump Organization and Trump’s presidential inaugural committee paid $750,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the Washington, D.C., attorney general’s office that alleged they misspent the money. As CNN reported, then-D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine said at the time of the settlement, “After he was elected, one of the first actions Donald Trump took was illegally using his own inauguration to enrich his family. We refused to let that corruption stand. With our lawsuit, we are now clawing back money that Trump’s own inaugural committee misused.” Trump, in a statement released by the Trump Organization, said the settlement signified “absolutely no admission of liability or guilt.”
The entire tradition of allowing corporations and plutocrats to donate to inaugural funds is bad, regardless of which party is ascending to power. Inaugural festivities don’t need to be lavish, and they can be publicly funded. An inauguration isn’t a Super Bowl, and it isn’t meant to be some imperial spectacle — the public (to the extent it is even paying attention) can marvel at the peaceful transfer of power itself. No politician is immune to being swayed by corporate donations, but Trump’s inability to compartmentalize, his seeming vulnerability to flipping dramatically on policy to win over megadonors and the whimsical nature of how he pursues policy make the whole ritual particularly susceptible to corruption. The norm for both parties should be to ban unlimited corporate and private donations altogether.
