Then-president Donald Trump meets with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019. Meta has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Credit: Flickr/whitehouse45 (public domain)
Some of the richest people in the country have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s presidential inaugural committee. It’s a reminder to Trump, as he begins his second presidential term, who is the real power behind the throne.
Coronating a capitalist executive
According to recent media reports, the presidential inaugural committee, which is set up to finance and coordinate the varied balls, dinners, and general pomp and circumstance of the presidential inauguration, has swollen to more than a record $170 million and is expected to hit $200 million. This colossal amount of money is nearly twice what Trump collected for his first presidential inauguration in 2017, which was itself nearly twice what his predecessor, Barack Obama, collected ahead of his 2009 inauguration: $53 million.
The money has come from some of the wealthiest people in the country, many of whom have coughed up millions of dollars each. Unlike with political campaigns, there is no limit to the amount of money a person or company can donate to a presidential inaugural committee.
The full list of donors to Trump’s presidential inaugural committee and the volumes of money they gave will eventually be published 90 days after the inauguration, but media leaks and research from Public Citizen have given us some idea of the names on the list.
They include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Uber CEO Dara Khosorwshahi, hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, and corporate donations by auto giant Ford and Robinhood, the amateur stock trading app. According to Public Citizen, Amazon, AT&T, Google, GM, Microsoft, and Toyota, among others, have each contributed $1 million. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have given $2 million.
Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, told the New York Times after the election that he was “very optimistic” about a Trump presidency.
“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”
Their message is clear: When Trump takes the presidential oath of office on Jan. 20, his job is to work for them. As Karl Marx wrote in “The Communist Manifesto” in 1848, “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
‘He just wants America to win’
The person Trump has put in charge of this slush fund is Kelly Loeffer, who is also his pick to head the Small Business Administration. Loeffler made her name first as CEO of an asset management firm, then as a far-right U.S. senator from Georgia. She initially supported Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, but reversed course following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, emotionally denouncing Trump’s attempted coup before the U.S. Congress.
But, like many in the capitalist ruling class, Loeffler later buried the hatchet with Trump and became a top donor to his 2024 election campaign, giving him $4.7 million.
Other finance chairs for the committee include billionaires like Diane Hendricks, who donated generously to Trump’s 2016 election campaign, got millions in tax write-offs signed into law by Trump once he was in office, and turned around and gave him even more for the 2024 election campaign. Another is Miriam Adelson, a billionaire GOP mega-donor who spent $100 million on a pro-Trump super PAC. Adelson is also a major financier of American Zionist institutions, the publisher of Israel’s largest newspaper Israel Hayom, and author of an October 2023 op-ed in Forbes that denounced Palestinians and their supporters as “dead to us.”
Zuckerberg, who postured as “standing up to Trump” by implementing misinformation and violent speech controls on Facebook and Instagram during Trump’s first presidency, has also been cozying up to Trump ahead of his second term. Meta gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and Zuckerberg recently traveled to his Mar-a-Lago resort to pay him a personal visit.
“It’s one of the things that I’m optimistic about with President Trump is, I think he just wants America to win,” Zuckerberg told pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan earlier this month. Meta recently announced it was rolling back its speech controls to allow hate speech against women and LGBTQ people, two groups in the crosshairs of the far-right as Trump comes back into power.
Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have also visited Mar-a-Lago in recent weeks to patch things up with Trump. Gates similarly butted heads with Trump over issues like vaccine efficacy and U.S. funding for the World Health Organization — an entity whose partners Gates has invested billions in — but after the Nov. 5, 2024 presidential election, Gates tweeted: “Congratulations to President Trump and VP-elect Vance. America is at its strongest when we use ingenuity and innovation to improve lives here in the U.S. and around the world. I hope we can work together now to build a brighter future for everyone.”
Billionaires afraid of Trump? Hardly.
In the capitalist press, these massive donations and personal visits have been portrayed as corporate moguls trying to “curry favor” with Trump out of fear.
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, told CNBC the donors “very much fear that Donald Trump may take retribution against them.”
“‘Zuckerberg wants to get off Trump’s enemy list,” CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter said recently. “That’s the simple explanation.”
Of course, that is exactly how Trump has framed it as well. He recently told a reporter Zuckerberg had “probably” had a change of heart about the president-elect after Trump threatened to have him thrown in prison during the campaign “if he does anything illegal” during the election.
In fact, during his interview with Joe Rogan, Zuckerberg let the cat out of the bag about why he likes the fact that Trump “wants America to win.”
“I do think that the American tech industry is a bright spot in the American economy. I think it’s a strategic advantage for the United States that we have a lot of the strongest companies in the world and I think it should be a part of the U.S.’ strategy going forward to defend that,” the Meta CEO said.
What Stelter went on to say got much closer to the truth. “He wants favorable treatment for Meta from the U.S. government, he wants the FTC [Federal Trade Commission] case against his company to go away, and I think everything he’s doing should be viewed through that lens,” the CNN analyst said.
Zuckerberg’s blatant admission, a moment of “saying the quiet part out loud,” reveals why rabid Zionists like Adelson, tech moguls like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Gates, and a myriad of mega-financiers, stock traders, and businessmen have united to sponsor Trump’s re-election and buy their way into inauguration balls and parties where they can rub shoulders with Trump and his coterie: they are trusting Trump to defend their interests as the chief executive of the largest capitalist empire on the planet.
Crushing Chinese competition
During his first administration, Trump waged a trade war and demonization campaign against China intended to cut Chinese companies off from major markets, most especially the U.S. market. Under Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden, Americans were effectively banned from buying from hundreds of Chinese tech firms, including global leaders like Huawei, Tencent, Xiaomi, and the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation. U.S. defense analysts also identified Chinese companies taking the lead in artificial intelligence research — part of a state-directed program to turn China into an AI powerhouse by 2030 — as part of the strategic threat China supposedly poses to the United States.
In his second administration, Trump has pledged to implement strong tariffs against Chinese imports. While the decrease in purchases will definitely hurt Chinese companies that sell in the U.S., the real victims of this policy will be American buyers, for whom prices on those goods will go up even more than they already are.
The impending ban on TikTok, variously rationalized by U.S. lawmakers as a crackdown on the spread of pro-Palestine and pro-LGBTQ content or supposed “national security” concerns about data collected on the app, is just the latest part of this drive.
Only the people can stand up to the billionaires
Regardless of the excuses given or the party in the White House, the point is the same: to protect American businesses from foreign competition, most especially from China. The richest people in the country have entrusted Trump with the task of managing this competition in a way that protects their profits, and this is the only purpose behind their decision to pour money into Trump’s campaign and presidential inaugural committee. They expect a strong return on their investments.
Trump’s second administration promises to be an all-out war on the working people of America and the planet as it seeks to help billionaires loot the public treasury and maximize their profits at our expense. More than ever it is clear that working and oppressed people must unite to fight this effort and to reject every attempt at division they attempt to sow among us. The ruling class doesn’t have us outnumbered, they just have us out-organized.
