Hundreds of large companies and wealthy individuals donated to the inaugural fund of Donald Trump and JD Vance after their election last year, more than doubling President Trump’s previous record and raking in $248 million. Since the Trump administration has taken power and reeled off executive orders and regulatory changes, more enormous donations from companies looking to curry favor with the White House have piled into Trump’s presidential library nonprofit—and recently, to the nonprofit behind his ballroom project.
What favors have Trump’s inaugural and ballroom donors received from his administration this year? We dug in to find out: Trump’s Corporate Colluders.
In collaboration with the nonprofit More Perfect Union, we researched the regulatory handouts, legal relief, and policy wins of more than 150 top donors to the groups. The website lets visitors search by company or donor name and see the range of benefits that accrued to them this year—which also include industry-favorable laws signed, ambassadorships bestowed, and dozens of halted enforcement actions.
A new video by More Perfect Union covers how the CEOs of tech giants like Amazon and Meta appeared alongside Trump after making million-dollar donations, then saw their Federal Trade Commission cases ended or Consumer Financial Protection Bureau investigations frozen. Not just Big Tech—companies like Chevron, Boeing, and Delta notched wide-ranging wins this year in Washington:
The crypto industry donated more than any other industry to Trump’s inauguration fund, according to a categorization by OpenSecrets, giving at least $14 million. In March, donors Ripple Labs ($4.9 million) and Solana ($1 million) had their crypto tokens (SOL and XRP) included in the president’s US Digital Asset Stockpile, a decision that some crypto analysts called a surprise. A few months later, the exchange Crypto.com, whose parent company Foris Dax donated $1 million, was selected by Trump Media and Technology Group to be the custodian of its crypto exchange-traded fund.
Private equity and investment firms kicked in more than $10.1 million to the inauguration, with security brokers, investment banks, and investors giving an additional $18 million, according to OpenSecrets. Under the Trump administration, the private equity industry is banking steps toward a long-sought lobbying dream: increased access for alternative assets in 401(k) retirement accounts, including private equity funds, real estate, and cryptocurrency. The pool of retirement savings in play reaches $12.2 trillion, and firms like Blackstone and KKR have been making moves to tap into the savings.
The full accounting of donations to Trump’s inauguration, which can be unlimited in dollar amount and are expected to flow to his presidential library nonprofit, was not publicly released for months—and the cash is bound by little in the way of ethics guidelines.
A few more favors given to inauguration donors, in brief:
- DuPont and Dow Chemical received exemptions, by way of a July presidential proclamation, from a hazardous air pollution rule for their facilities in Louisiana. DuPont gave $250,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Fund, Dow Chemical gave $500,000, and their trade association the American Chemistry Council (ACC) gave $50,000.
- Intuit triumphed in its long lobbying campaign to kill the IRS Direct File Program, a free option for taxpayers to file directly to the government. The company, which makes TurboTax, gave $1 million.
- Merck’s blockbuster drug Keytruda is expected to be a top beneficiary of the “orphan drug provisions” passed in the Republican “One Big, Beautiful Bill” Act (OBBBA), which will delay Medicare price negotiations for certain drugs. It donated $1 million.
- Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase were let off the hook when the Trump administration dropped a CFPB lawsuit against the companies, and Wells Fargo, over failing to protect their customers from fraud through their mutual project Zelle. Bank of America donated $500,000 and Chase gave over $1 million.
… and that’s just the start of the encyclopedia of favors we found. Check out more benefits flowing to donors like CoreCivic and GEO Group, Robinhood, Google, ExxonMobil, Uber, and billionaires like oil magnate Harold Hamm and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. Hat tip to the research in the great Corporate Enforcement Tracker from watchdog Public Citizen, cited throughout the new site, which details the many inauguration donors, like Coinbase and Toyota, that had federal cases halted or dropped.
