The stunning grift of Trump’s inaugural fund | Will Bunch Newsletter

His doctors told Pope Francis to take it easy, but on Easter weekend the 88-year-old pontiff refused to listen. Using a wheelchair, he met briefly with Vice President JD Vance after his aides admonished the Trump regime about its treatment of refugees. On Easter Sunday, Francis preached for an end to the fighting in Gaza. “I express my closeness to the sufferings ... of all the Israeli people and the Palestinian people,” he said — his last public words before his sudden death Monday morning. In a world of phony self-proclaimed “strongmen,” the late pope showed us there is true strength in empathy and compassion. All of us, regardless of our faith, should be praying for more like him.

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It was a blockbuster story that splashed across every front page in America and was the top of the hour on all the Sunday news shows: The Selling of the President 2025, as analysts pored through the highlights of the stunning $239 million slush fund that President Donald Trump amassed from inaugural donors. They spoke of billionaires with dubious credential seeking ambassadorships and greedy corporations eager for special treatment from the U.S. government.

OK, the very first paragraph here is actually a lie, or a partial lie. It’s certainly true that the committee that raised money for the president’s Jan. 20 inauguration did indeed file its required financial report, confirming the $239 million haul that was more than double the record ($109 million) that the 45th and 47th POTUS had raised in 2017.

The “lie” part of what I wrote is that — despite high-level corruption that would have been unthinkable even in the greed-soaked reign of the eventually disgraced Richard Nixon — you had to hunt to find this story in the back pages of a newspaper, and it was barely mentioned in a media world that covers Trump 24/7 yet seems comfortably numb with some of his worst corruption.

We shouldn’t be complacent about it, though. While the ballpark size of Trump’s corporate gold rush was previously known, as was the frenzy by Silicon Valley giants such as Amazon, Meta, and Apple CEO Tim Cook to curry favor with the incoming president, some of the new details in the more comprehensive report are eye-popping.

For example:

Ambassadorships for sale? Among the megadonors to the fund were longtime GOP contributor Warren Stephens ($4 million), who was a major investor in a payday lending firm investigated by a regulatory agency Elon Musk is dismantling, and is now nominated as ambassador to the United Kingdom. The report lists the donation on the same day Stephens was announced for the position, Dec. 2. The list also includes Melissa Argyros ($2 million), picked as ambassador to Latvia, and Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta ($1 million), tapped for the post in Italy.

Controversial corporations. The largest single donor to the inaugural fund, the poultry giant Pilgrim’s Pride, which gave $5 million, was targeted by a government crackdown during the Biden administration and also faces antitrust lawsuits over alleged price fixing. The Wall Street Journal reported the company has already benefited from a decision by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to “extend a waiver allowing pork and poultry facilities to maintain higher production-line speeds, which allow the companies to process more animals.”

Just behind them was Ripple Labs, a cryptocurrency and blockchain company, which gave almost $4.9 million — not long before Trump’s U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dropped a probe of the company. The Trump regime is likely to water down or eliminate most crypto rules, which probably explains the overall $18 million in inaugural donations from the fledgling industry.

Big oil gusher. Remember the mini-flap that occurred during the campaign when Trump asked a room full of oil-industry titans to raise $1 billion for his campaign, while promising, if they did, to sharply reduce regulations — even regarding climate change? It turns out the inaugural fund was another way for the industry to show its fealty, including gifts from Chevron ($2 million), Occidental Petroleum, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips ($1 million apiece) and the political-action committee of the American Petroleum Institute ($500,000).

But, frankly, it would be almost easier to list the Fortune 500 corporations that didn’t give to the Trump fund than the ones who did. And while you wouldn’t be wrong to note that a lot of major firms tend to sponsor such events for both Republicans and Democrats, Team Trump managed to open the wallets of corporations that haven’t recently backed the inaugural, such as McDonald’s, Delta Air Lines and Johnson & Johnson. No one, it seems, wants to be on the bad side of the president who promised, “I am your retribution.”

And yet the most scandalous thing about Trump’s inauguration fund isn’t the donors. The dog that hasn’t barked here is that very little of this massive haul has been spent — hardly a surprise to anyone (like me) who spent the January inaugural weekend in D.C., when most outdoor events were canceled and Trump supporters shivered in icy drizzle and snow bursts, waiting hours for two low-wattage events at the Capital One Center. This was nowhere near a $239 million production.

No, this instead is maybe the largest slush fund in American political history. No one knows where most of this cash is going, and Team Trump hopes you don’t care. His aides insist the leftovers will largely go toward the not-very-far-along Trump presidential library project, which may or may not go somewhere in Florida.

Sure, whatever.

As Trump closes in on the 100-day mark, his regime has been characterized by the Three Cs (or maybe four), which are Chaos (think about the on-again, off-again tariffs), Constitutional Contempt (deporting refugees to a Salvadoran gulag without due process) and Corruption. Having watched Trump for some 40 years now, the first two feel like the cover story for the third, his colossal grift.

This inaugural fund — pumped up by companies and their CEOs either seeking favors or desperate to avoid sanctions — is disgraceful, but it may also be just the tip of the iceberg aimed at enriching a White House billionaire whose business empire looked ready to collapse when he entered politics in 2015. Just one example of the conflicts: Vietnam is scrambling to avert the whopping 46% tariff imposed by the Trump regime, even as the Trump Organization is about to break ground on a $1.5 billion resort in the country and is eying three similar projects there.

I’m old enough to remember when Nixon was investigated for selling ambassadorships to the highest bidder, when we didn’t have a Justice Department that was calibrated to ignore all crimes by Republicans and use their time and energy to instead investigate Democrats over their political opinions. Trump knows the rank corruption of his second term is getting an amped-up, national version of the Philly Shrug... for now. But the pendulum of justice is long, and someday it swings back.

Question: [Defense secretary Pete] Hegseth: Dead man walking, or Hegseth survives because Trump will never admit an error? — @cdwilsher.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: Yes, the knives are out yet again for the former Fox News weekend host who became the most unqualified Defense Secretary in American history (and it’s not even close). This after a new flurry of reports that Hegseth discussed top-secret plans for a military attack on Yemen in a second chat group that included his wife and others who shouldn’t have been privy to such sensitive information. NPR is even reporting a search is underway for his successor, but I would not count on that. From the very start, the Trump regime’s imposition of Hegseth — despite his alleged serial abuse of women, Christian nationalist tattoos, and lack of any hint that he can manage such a large and powerful organization as the Pentagon — has been about its domination over GOP senators and over the body politic. His mentor, the late Roy Cohn, taught Trump to never admit a mistake, and it’s taken him to the White House. Why stop now?

I wish there was space to publish all of your fascinating answers to last week’s two-parter about travel planning under the Trump regime, as well as any thoughts of moving out of the United States. But the short answer is that a lot of you are rethinking 2025 trips, especially if it involves leaving the country and reentering. Nancy Entwhistle, retired RVer, said her annual summer journey to Canada is off “because it seems they can send anyone to an El Salvadoran prison these days,” while Mary F. Sprogell cites another problem: FAA budget cuts that have her questioning air safety. Charles Clauser said he’s glad his wife talked him out of leaving the country when Trump was reelected, because he’s heartened by the protest movements and if they succeed, “I will be glad I hung around to see our country reclaim its true calling.”

📮 This week’s question: The New York Times reports the Trump regime is eager to raise the U.S. birth rate, studying incentives like baby bonuses. What do you think would encourage more young people to start families? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Starting families” in the subject line.

This weekend, I wrote about roughly 85 residents of the Quadrangle senior living complex in suburban Haverford who’ve twice now stood on the road near the main entrance to the facility waving signs protesting the abuses of the Trump regime. But while the folks I met there ranged in age from 76 up to 93, they actually were the cutting edge of a bigger trend. The two nationwide anti-Trump protests organized by the 50501 Project have been among the largest one-day protests in U.S. history, but also possibly the oldest.

Dana R. Fisher, a native of the Philly suburbs and sociologist at D.C.’s American University who specializes in studying contemporary protest movements, reported this weekend that field surveys of three recent major protests found the average age was 51 — compared to 34 at the first Women’s March in 2017 — which is the oldest she’s seen in her research. “Resistance 2.0 in the streets is made up of highly educated, middle-aged, White people,“ Fisher wrote on Bluesky.

That certainly lines up with the anecdotal evidence, including a viral column from my Inquirer colleague Solomon Jones on why Black people who voted against Trump last November aren’t actively protesting him now. But Fisher and her team were particularly struck by the lack of younger protesters; she said the youngest of her research associates told her “they’re not turning out since they’ve given up on democracy.”

But, as Fisher notes, the deeper explanation may be even more complicated. There’s no question that the war in Gaza that began in the fall of 2023 animated college campuses in a way that the anti-Trump protests have not, and that then-President Joe Biden’s staunch support for Israel despite the killing of thousands of women and children turned some against both U.S. political parties. But the Gaza demonstrations also convinced scores of universities to tighten rules around protest, and that might be keeping some young people in their dorm rooms.

Fisher told me Monday night that the youth-oriented, climate-action Sunrise Movement is planning to join with labor unions and the broader anti-Trump group Indivisible for a national Day of Action on May 1, a Thursday. As the Trump regime unwinds decades of environmental progress and threatens to garnish the wages of student debtors, it’s not hard to imagine more young folks responding to this May Day alarm signal.

In honor of Earth Day, I’m going to cheat with a piece that almost ran on this date (it was April 21, 2020, to be exact) five years ago, hailing the 50th anniversary of America’s environmental awakening that was such a big deal here in Philadelphia it was actually expanded to Earth Week. The contrast is even more stark on today’s 55th anniversary, with the Trump regime not only attacking our ecology but possibly even going after environmental nonprofits. In 2020, I wrote: “While America in 1970 was hardly a nirvana...today’s climate denial and Republican-led war on science would have been unthinkable.” Read the rest: “What’s lost since Philly’s amazing 1970 Earth Week.”

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