The Ballroom Bribery Scheme: Trump’s Donors Get What They Pay For

Trump is making himself, and the federal government, available for straight up bribery.

Our campaign finance system is broken, and the United States does have impactful rules about lobbying, at least on paper. Companies and interest groups seeking favorable terms from the government are required to register designated lobbyists and disclose the amounts they’ve spent and legislation they’ve tried to influence. Transparency is supposed to be a check on pay-to-play corruption.

Trump keeps giving his patrons a way to bypass all of that. His soon-to-be-built White House ballroom, paid for by a long list of corporations and mega-donors, is a glaring example of how Trump is making himself, and the federal government, available for straight up bribery.

As widely reported, Trump has demolished the iconic East Wing of the White House as part of his plan to build a ballroom that he’s said will cost between $200-$300 million. The Trump administration’s list of donors who will pay for its construction include many major corporations like Amazon, Black Rock, and Google, as well as MAGA super-donors who stand to benefit from Trump Administration decisions, like Jeffrey Yass, a major investor in TikTok. It’s tempting to start to become numb to all the grift, but it’s worth pausing to consider the ramifications of these donors directly buying favor from Trump. These same rich people and industries can pose serious harm to our democracy and to ordinary people.

Many of the donors ponying up funds to fulfill Trump’s vision for his ballroom have business before the federal government. These corporations range from Lockheed Martin, the defense contractor that has received government contracts with hundreds of billions of dollars, to Reynolds American, a tobacco company that has pushed against industry oversight. And many of them represent industries whose business dealings shape fundamental parts of our lives – including the erosion of our rights and protections.

Let’s look at the numerous cryptocurrency and Big Tech donors to wrap our heads around the scale of the corruption.

Cryptocurrency: At least seven Trump ballroom donors are heavily involved in the cryptocurrency industry: Coinbase, Ripple, Tether America, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edwin and Shari Glazer, the Lutnick Family, and Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss.

Donations from Coinbase, one of the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, shows how the Trump administration is normalizing corruption. In recent years, the company has drawn significant scrutiny from government regulators. In 2023, Coinbase paid a $50 million penalty to New York state for failures in its compliance program that made its platform vulnerable to criminal activity, including money laundering and sharing child sexual abuse material. Also in 2023, during the Biden Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Coinbase with unlawfully making billions of dollars by operating as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, and agency. If it lost the case, Coinbase stood the chance of needing to pay back huge sums of ill-gotten gains – and significantly, it could have needed to register its cryptocurrency business with the SEC, which would mean being subject to much more regulation.

Coinbase has gone all in on electing and currying favor with its chosen politicians. The company spent over $79 million on federal elections and over $3 million lobbying in 2024 (at least in disclosed spending). Then, Coinbase donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. Think about how much money has to be at stake for a company’s leadership to decide that’s a good investment.

The donations to Trump worked. His administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its lawsuit against the company. So, Coinbase will get to keep the billions it made allegedly operating as an unregistered securities exchange. And, who knows what other favors await the company, because it also donated to help build Trump’s ballroom. In this case, though, we don’t even know how much the crypto exchange is giving. Unlike the more traditional (corrupt as they are) political donations mentioned above, the size of the ballroom donations, nor the requested favors associated with them, aren’t being made public. The White House has said that some of the donors are anonymous.

Big Tech: At least 8 Big Tech companies have reportedly donated to build Trump his new ballroom, including: Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palantir.

Many of those companies have business before the federal government:

• Google received a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense to provide AI technology infrastructure.

• Meta Platforms received approval to have its AI model used across the federal government.

• Microsoft has received $1.4 billion in federal contracts over the past three years.

• Nvidia, reportedly a non-disclosed donor, has had government contracts.

• Palantir has received many government contracts, including one for $10 billion over the next decade for military software and data.

Palantir is a chilling example. During this Trump administration, Palantir has received a reported $113 million in federal spending, plus a $795 million Department of Defense contract. The New York Times reported this spring that Palantir is potentially planning to build technology that would collect our personal information from government agencies like the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and store it in a master database.

The Trump administration also awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to track immigrants’ movements in real time. As Democracy News previously reported, Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff and the main architect of Trump’s immigration policy, owns significant shares of Palantir stock.

This all takes on a whole new dimension as we witness countless scenes of ICE detaining people, including American citizens, separating parents from their children, and deporting people without due process. As J.B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, put it: “They’re not grabbing people that they know to be undocumented. They’re just looking at somebody and assuming, because you’re brown-skinned, there’s some likelihood that you might be undocumented. And then they’re grabbing these people, they’re harassing them, they’re abusing them. And then later, a couple hours of being detained, they’re let go, oh, because they’re a U.S. citizen.”

The surveillance state also takes on a whole new meaning after Trump and his administration’s calls – and direct actions – to prosecute those he deems his enemies, including public figures like New York Attorney General Leticia James and former FBI Director James Comey, as well as progressives and Democrats in general.

Palantir, one of the main companies providing the infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance apparatus, just gave a gift to the president so that he can fulfill his dream of having a new ballroom. We don’t even know how much money Palantir gave. This isn’t the old-fashioned kind of transactional politics that we’ve all, very unfortunately, gotten accustomed to over the years. This is a whole new situation. The company building the surveillance technology that may be used to prosecute our neighbors for their political beliefs is helping our president buy new chandeliers.