April 27, 2025
Last night a new club opened in the wealthy Georgetown neighborhood in Washington, D.C. It’s called “Executive Branch,” and it’s an invitation-only club backed by Donald Trump Jr. and megadonor Omeed Malik. Dasha Burns of Politico reported that it costs more than half a million dollars to join. The exclusive club is designed to allow top business executives to talk privately with Trump advisors and cabinet members. Burns reports that the club already has a waiting list.
When then-candidate Donald Trump celebrated the administration of President William McKinley, it was always clear he saw it as the triumphant marriage of the very rich to the U.S. government. It was the era of so-called robber barons, industrialists and financiers who flooded political campaigns with money to convince voters that those trying to rein them in were socialists or anarchists, then called upon the politicians they put into power to pass laws that benefited their businesses.
“Behind every one of half the portly well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” the Chicago Tribune wrote in 1884, “or of some syndicate that has invaluable contracts or patents to defend or push.” Last Sunday a new filing with the Federal Election Commission revealed that donors delivered an astounding $239 million for Trump’s inauguration. Theodore Schleifer of the New York Times notes that Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee raised $107 million. The $346 million raised by Trump’s two inaugural committees is more than the monies raised by all other inaugural committees since Richard Nixon’s committee raised $4 million in 1973. While Trump’s allies have said the money that wasn’t spent on festivities will go to other projects Trump is behind, including his presidential library, there is no oversight on how Trump uses that money.
Spending on the election was even more dramatic. Earlier this month, Americans for Tax Fairness analyzed spending in 2024 and discovered that just 100 billionaire families donated a record-breaking $2.6 billion to federal campaigns, up by 160 times from billionaire spending in elections before the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. Seventy percent of that money went to Republican candidates or causes. In the three races that determined control of the Senate—Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—outside money from billionaires made up 58.1%, 56.8%, and 44.5% of the outside money coming in. Elon Musk donated about $290 million, giving four times as much money to political campaigns in 2024 as he paid in income taxes between 2013 and 2018.
Those investments in a Trump administration are paying off. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is withdrawing a Biden-era rule requiring poultry companies to keep the levels of salmonella bacteria below a certain level in their meats to prevent illnesses commonly known as food poisoning. When the Biden administration proposed the rule, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explained that salmonella causes 1.35 million infections a year and kills 420 people. The USDA said that about 125,000 of those infections came from chicken and another 43,000 from turkey. Officials estimated that the new rule would reduce salmonella illnesses by 25%.
The National Chicken Council celebrated the Trump administration's reversal of the rule, saying it would have had “no meaningful impact on public health.” On Friday, Charisma Madarang of Rolling Stone pointed out that the poultry company Pilgrim’s Pride gave $5 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, making it the largest donor to that effort. Two of the company’s executives, chief executive officer Fabio Sandri and head of the company’s food safety and quality assurance Kendra Waldbusser, serve on the board of the National Chicken Council.
Last month, Rick Claypool of the consumer rights organization Public Citizen noted that the Trump administration has dropped federal investigations and lawsuits against 89 corporations, many of whose leaders donated heavily to Trump’s inaugural fund. Another of those who has benefited significantly from the new policies is Elon Musk. Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, told Laurence Darmiento of the Los Angeles Times: “I think the overall goals of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are to slash regulations, to slash budgets and to cut positions all with this claim they are going to increase efficiency and fight fraud.”
But corporate ties to the government are not just about avoiding oversight; they are also about snagging lucrative federal contracts. Gilbert noted: “I would say it’s a smoke screen and cover for personal profit and corporate power—and that’s where Musk’s personal conflicts of interest come into play, as well as the other corporate actors across this government.”
On Friday, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng of Rolling Stone reported that staffers for billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” have been working on a multimillion-dollar communications project called “Project Lift” at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The plan appears to be to insert Musk’s Starlink into the $2.4 billion contract Verizon currently holds to upgrade the FAA’s systems, but DOGE staff have made FAA employees sign nondisclosure agreements, so details are scarce. An FAA spokesperson told Perez and Suebsaeng: “The federal employees running Project Lift are exploring a variety of solutions to modernize the FAA’s telecommunications network. Current contractors are part of the discussion.”
In the Trump administration, the connections between the government and business include the president’s family members.
Zach Everson of Forbes has been following the story of the Trump family’s involvement in artificial intelligence company Dominari Holdings, Inc. In February, Everson reported that just weeks after Trump announced the administration's push to loosen regulations and expand infrastructure for AI, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric invested in Dominari and joined its brand new advisory board, for which they received 750,000 shares each in the company although they had no official duties. The company then launched another company, American Data Center, Inc., in which the Trumps also invested. That company focused on the “high-performance computing infrastructure” to support AI, cloud computing, and cryptocurrency.
According to Amber Jackson of the U.K.’s Data Centre Magazine, Dominari stock leaped more than 1,000% after the Trump sons joined the advisory board. On Friday, Everson reported on a Securities and Exchange Commission filing revealing that Dominari has applied for conditions that would enable the shareholders, including Don and Eric Trump, to sell their stocks earlier than a normal timeline would allow. Each Trump brother now controls 1.2 million shares of Dominari, each holding now worth $5.8 million.
On Wednesday, Trump made the pay-to-play nature of his administration explicit when he announced that the top 220 holders of his $TRUMP cryptocurrency token would be invited to a dinner with Trump at his private club and that they would be offered a “VIP White House Tour” the next day. MacKenzie Sigalos and Kevin Collier of CNBC reported the meme coin jumped more than 50% on the news, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees.
Just before sunrise this morning, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began a live-streamed sit-in protest and discussion on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to call attention to the Republicans’ budget bill. On Friday, Alan Rappeport and Tony Romm of the New York Times reported that the Republicans’ proposed 2026 budget would slash federal support for “child care, health research, education, housing assistance, community development and the elderly,” and for foreign aid. Attacking “woke” programs, it appears to implement much of Project 2025. Russell Vought, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump’s first term and has returned to that position in his second, was a key author of that playbook.
Cuts to programs that protect ordinary Americans will help to fund the extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Extending those tax cuts will cost at least $4 trillion over the next decade. Congress returns to session tomorrow, and it will take up the budget. In a statement, Jeffries and Booker said: “Republican leaders have made clear their intention to use the coming weeks to advance a reckless budget scheme to President Trump’s desk that seeks to gut Medicaid, food assistance and basic needs programs that help people, all to give tax breaks to billionaires.”
Throughout the day, Democratic lawmakers, activists, and passersby joined Jeffries and Booker’s twelve-hour sit-in.
An AP/NORC poll released yesterday showed that Trump’s approval rating has dropped to 39%. Today a Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll confirmed that number. Trump’s approval rating at almost 100 days in office is the lowest of any president in 80 years.
For his part, Trump announced today that he “is bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes!”
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Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/26/donald-trump-washington-club-00311720
Chicago Tribune quoted in Harper’s Weekly, February 9, 1884, p. 86.
https://apnews.com/article/poultry-salmonella-food-poisoning-usda-081dafd3c8a75c3ef2203d260584a893
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/politics/trump-inauguration-donors.html
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires-buying-elections-theyve-come-to-collect/
https://www.citizen.org/article/corporate-clemency-trump-enforcement-report/
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-03-27/elon-musk-trump-doge-conflicts-of-interest
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60271
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/us/politics/trump-budget-cuts.html
https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/the-new-cost-for-2025-tax-cut-extensions-4-trillion/
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/27/politics/booker-jeffries-democrats-sit-in-capitol/index.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/best-wishes-to-all-who-celebrate
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/another-39-approval-poll
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-lowest-100-day-approval-rating-80-years/story?id=121165473
Bluesky:
Seems there’s no end to the cruelty! A friend is a new director of a community center, has started a food pantry. I give her what I can. We both agree it’s only the beginning for the poor just trying to feed their families.
A couple in front of me at the grocery store couldn’t scrape enough together to pay twenty bucks for their sparse basket of food. I believe it was a scam but I paid the bill for them anyway. People are already struggling to eat! It’s going to get rough, but not for the rich!
Thanks Heather!
I am a firm believer of what goes around, comes around. It may not happen when we want it to, but it will happen. Don’t give up nor give in. This Thursday is May 1st, May Day but it is also Law Day. The American Bar Association celebrates this day as an affirmation of the laws created and maintained by the Constitution. “We brought one great country out of 13 colonies that had many differences,” said ABA President William R. Bay. “It reflected a belief that we could work together. That was the promise of our Constitution, which has really stood the test of time.” Bay added, “We can learn great lessons from what they did then. They had significant differences, but they put them aside to form one country to be governed by one Constitution. These days we spend so much time talking about what divides us. I believe this is the time to focus on what unites us. It’s hard work but it’s important work.”
Join your local groups at designated times, to show up at courthouses throughout the country on this day!