In this piece yesterday, I mentioned Trump’s meeting at the Bitcoin convention and his newfound love for crypto. As you can see from the above clip by Rachel Maddow, he’s just pretty much selling out all policies to the highest bidder these days. Here are a few other policies he’s put on the auction block:
Here are just a few of the policies he is selling to donors.
$1bn from oil companies
At a lavish dinner at Mar-a-Lago in April, the former president gathered with around two dozen executives from the biggest oil companies in the country. His campaign was facing a sizeable cash shortfall against his opponent, President Joe Biden, and he was desperate to make up the difference.
As the executives complained about how the Biden administration’s environmental regulations were hurting their business, Trump made a starkly transactional pitch: raise $1bn to send me back to the White House. If he won, he said he would immediately reverse dozens of Biden’s environmental rules and policies. The $1bn would be a “deal” for the companies, he added, because of the money they would save from deregulation.
The account of the meeting, first reported by the Washington Post, came from several people who attended. Among them were 20 executives from ExxonMobil, EQT Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies for the oil industry. It was reportedly organized by oil billionaire Harold Hamm. Specifically, Trump vowed to undo a Biden administration freeze on permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports “on the first day” of entering office, one attendee told the Post.
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TikTok flip-flop
As president, Trump spearheaded efforts to ban TikTok. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” the then-president declared to reporters aboard Air Force One in July 2020. Indeed, he signed an executive order in his last year in office that would have effectively prohibited the video app, which is majority-owned by a Chinese company. But just this month he joined TikTok himself. And more recently he has spoken out against efforts from both the Biden administration and his own party to regulate it.
On March 7, a House committee advanced a bill that would ban the app if it didn’t divest, even as TikTok users flooded congressional lines with thousands of calls urging lawmakers to back off. That same day, Trump wrote on Truth Social that “if you get rid of TikTok, (then) Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” referring to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last election, doing better,” wrote Trump, echoing a baseless conspiracy theory that social media platforms rigged elections against him. “They are a true Enemy of the People!” What prompted this dramatic change?
Some clues may be derived from the fact that his words came swiftly after a very public rapprochement with Republican mega-donor Jeff Yass. Yass has a $20bn stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and is the largest donor in this election campaign cycle. At the request of Yass, Trump spoke at a conference of the influential right-wing Club for Growth, which the former president previously blasted as “Club for No Growth”.
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West Bank-rolling
Perhaps the most brazen quid pro quo of Trump’s first term came with a giant donation from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party’s biggest funder over the past decade.According to New York Times writer Maggie Haberman in her book ‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,’ Adelson made a $20m donation to a political action committee to pressure then-president Trump to adopt the highly controversial decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. For his second term, Trump may be poised to sell another controversial policy to the Adelson family.
Sheldon died in 2021, but his wife Miriam has continued his cause and may even surpass Yass to become Trump’s biggest patron in this election cycle. A New York Magazine profile of Miriam, published last month, suggested that Trump’s support for the Israeli annexation of the West Bank was top of her wish list for a second term.
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“I’ve been the best president in history to Israel by a factor of ten because of all the things I do. The embassy, Jerusalem being the capital. Then you have Golan Heights … Nobody even thought that was going to be possible. I did that,” he said.Ten days after the publication of the New York Magazine profile, Politico reported that Adelson would fund a massive political action committee for Trump’s re-election.
Trickle-up tax cuts
During his presidency, Trump implemented sweeping tax cuts for the top 1 per cent of earners and cut the maximum corporation tax rate from 35 per cent to 21 per cent. His cuts were “one factor helping the fortunes of US billionaires grow by a collective $1 trillion during the pandemic, from March 18 to December 7, 2020,” according to the non-partisan group, Americans for Tax Fairness.
The group said that an analysis of donations to Trump found that he was “enabled with a total of almost a quarter billion dollars in campaign contributions from 134 of America’s billionaires during his short, violent political career”. Trump is looking to replicate that windfall by promising even more tax cuts for the wealthy, should he win a second term. Several billionaire donors backed off following the riot on January 6, 2021 — they are now finding their way back to Trump, largely thanks to that promise.
Speaking at a donor event at the luxury Pierre Hotel in New York last month, Trump warned the wealthy attendees that taxes would go up unless he wins in November because Biden has vowed to let his tax cuts expire at the end of 2025. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history,” he said. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it.”
The comments are part of a pattern of offers to wealthy donors from Trump. Donate to me, he says, and I’ll make you richer. Speaking at Mar-a-Lago in December last year, Trump drew laughs as he described the audience as “rich as hell” before declaring: “We’re gonna give you tax cuts!”
And as Maddow mentions in her piece, he’s suddenly done a reversal on electric cars, no doubt because Elon Musk has promised to write checks for 45 million dollars every month until the election.
He is a convicted criminal after all and has been found liable for almost half a billion dollars worth of fraud in Manhattan, not to mention his bogus charity and “university” so none of this should be surprising. What is still shocking is that tens of millions of Americans are fine with it.