Meta and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (L), CEO of Apple Tim Cook, and Founder of Amazon and Blue Origin Jeff Bezos attend services as part of Inauguration ceremonies at St. John’s Church on January 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The very ripeness for scandal this time around calls for reasonable restrictions on the sources and amounts of inaugural donations.
U.S. President Donald Trump sounded a lot of populist notes on the campaign trail. But as he took the oath of office for the second time, he was joined onstage by billionaires and CEOs who’d spent millions to be there—leaving supporters who’d traveled across the country to attend literally out in the cold.
Presidential inaugurations have always been an opportunity for wealthy special interests to curry favor with the incoming administration with generous inaugural donations. But the nation has never seen influence peddling like we just witnessed at Trump’s second inauguration.
The sheer volume of today’s inaugural donations suggests that wealthy special interests believe it is worth the investment.
…
All the self-reporting donors—including Big Tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI—pledged $1 million or more. The cryptocurrency firm Ripple pledged $5 million. In fact, the cryptocurrency industry even hosted its own inaugural ball.
And of course, Wall Street is cozying up with major donations from Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin.
“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump marvels on his Truth Social account.
As the Washington Post faces a staff rebellion and plummeting subscription rates, billionaire owner Jeff Bezos has introduced a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
The Washington Post‘s new slogan, “Riveting Storytelling for All of America,” is “meant to be an internal rallying point for employees,” the New York Times (1/16/25) reported.
The new path forward, as introduced in a slide deck to staff by Suzi Watford, the paper’s chief strategy officer, demands that the paper “understand and represent interests across the country,” and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation” (New York Times, 1/16/25). It will do this as “an AI-fueled platform for news” that delivers “vital news, ideas and insights for all Americans where, how and when they want it.”
This appears to mean shifting resources toward opinion, specifically opinions from the right. According to the New York Times report:
Bezos has expressed hopes that the Post would be read by more blue-collar Americans who live outside coastal cities, mentioning people like firefighters in Cleveland. He has also said that he is interested in expanding the Post’s audience among conservatives.
The Post has already begun to consider ways to sharply increase the amount of opinion commentary published on its website, according to two people with knowledge of the talks. An adviser to the Post, Lippe Oosterhof, has conducted brainstorming sessions about a new initiative that would make it easier to receive and publish opinion writing from outside contributors.
How AI is meant to play into this is unclear.
The Post already has more columnists than you can shake a stick at. This new direction sounds like the Foxification of the Washington Post, a move away from any attempt to hold the powerful to account, toward inexpensive clickbait punditry.
‘Make money’
The red area represents the proportion of Jeff Bezos’s total wealth that would be required to cover the Washington Post‘s losses for a year.
Watford’s slide deck presented three pillars of the Post‘s new model: “great journalism,” “happy customers” and “make money.” The Postlost roughly $77 million in 2023. (It also lost some 250,000 subscribers after Bezos killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris—FAIR.org, 10/30/24.)
In order to make money, its new “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (yes, that’s what the Post slide deck apparently called it) is to reach 200 million “paying users.” The paper currently has about 3 million subscribers, making it an “audacious” goal indeed. As the Times pointed out, even if the Post could achieve the impossible task of monetizing every visit to its website, no major corporate media outlet has been getting more than 100 million monthly unique visits—paying and non-paying—outside of the spike in traffic around the election.
Back in 2019, the Post was claiming 80–90 million unique visitors per month. Those visits peaked in November 2020 at 114 million, but quickly and steadily dropped after Biden’s inauguration. The Post stopped posting its audience numbers online after January 2023, when they were down to 58 million.
Of course, most online corporate media have been struggling. The thing about the Post is that its absurdly wealthy owner, the second-richest person on Earth, can easily afford to lose $77 million a year. That’s 0.03% of Bezos’s current net worth.
‘We are deeply alarmed’
Guardian (1/15/25): “The plea from staff…comes a week after the Post laid off roughly 100 employees…roughly 4% of the publication’s staff.”
No doubt the Post needs help. Just days before the new mission statement was revealed, over 400 staff members signed a letter to Bezos asking for a meeting (Guardian, 1/15/25). The letter read:
We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent.
Bezos’s response—a slide deck about “riveting storytelling” on “an AI-driven platform” that prioritizes churning out opinions to draw in conservatives—is hardly likely to ease the mind of any serious journalist at the paper.
Nor is trying to “expand the Post audience among conservatives,” while still paying lip service to “great journalism,” likely to solve the Post‘s problems. As CNN‘s former CEO Chris Licht discovered (FAIR.org, 6/8/23), you can’t do good journalism while trying to appeal to both sides in the context of an increasingly radical right, because that side demands acceptance of lies and conspiracy theories that are incompatible with actual journalism.
When Bezos bought the Post (Extra!, 3/14), he assured the paper’s employees that “the paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.” That sentiment was repeated in Watford’s slide deck this week. But Bezos’s actions in the past months—including the killing of the Harris endorsement, Amazondonating $1 million donation to Trump’s inaugural fund and paying Melania Trump $40 million for her self-produced documentary, and, most recently, Bezos appearing onstage with other multibillionaires at Trump’s inauguration—make clear that the principle is as meaningless to Bezos as the slogan that debuted after Trump’s first election: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
That slogan will continue to adorn the front page for the time being, perhaps in the hope that readers searching for an actual news organization that holds those in power to account will be fooled into subscribing.
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Green Party co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, October 2022. Image: Bristol Green Party, Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Green Party Co-Leaders, Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer released a joint statement ahead of President Trump’s inauguration saying:
“We must stand up for peace and democracy in what will be a dangerous turn toward right-wing populism in the wake of Donald Trump taking office.
“The antidote to Trump in the US, and the likes of Reform in the UK, is to offer people a real hope for real positive change that will transform their lives.
“That means a new offer to people beaten down by decades of low wages, insecure work, decimated public services and a realisation that the impact of the climate crisis is all around us in the form of floods, wildfires and a devastating loss of nature.
“We need the green investment to deliver the jobs of the future – well-paid, meaningful and secure – and we need the UK government to invest properly in schools and the NHS, and stand up for international law and human rights.
“A greener future is a more just and fairer future.
“The Green Party is clear – President Trump is a misogynist, a racist, a convicted criminal and, we believe, a fascist.
“We will be pressing the Labour government to recognise that to defeat fascism, political parties that believe in democratic values must work together to keep the flame of democracy alive and show people that democratic politics can deliver real change.”
Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated and charged Donald Trump, spoke to the media on August 1, 2023. (Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” the report states.
The special counsel who investigated and chargedDonald Trump over his attempts to subvert the 2020 election said in a final report released by the U.S. Justice Department early Tuesday that the former president would have been convicted for “a series of criminal efforts to retain power” had he not won another White House term in November.
“But for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” wrote Jack Smith, who resigned from the Justice Department late last week ahead of Inauguration Day.
Smith pointed to the Justice Department’s view that “the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president,” a position he said is “categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind.”
The report, which Trump’s legal team sought to bury, is the first of two volumes that Smith’s team produced following the completion of its investigations into the former president’s unlawful election interference and hoarding of classified documents. Smith dropped the two cases shortly after Trump’s victory in the 2024 election.
According to the Justice Department, Smith has urged that the volume on the classified documents probe not be released to the public while the case against Trump’s former co-defendants is still pending.
“Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office.”
In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to “induce state officials to ignore true vote counts,” manufactured “fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost,” directed “an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election,” and leveraged “rioters’ violence to further delay it.”
“In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office,” the report added.
Trump responded furiously to the report’s release, ranting on social media that “Deranged Jack Smith was unable to successfully prosecute the Political Opponent of his ‘boss,’ Crooked Joe Biden, so he ends up writing yet another ‘Report’ based on information that the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs ILLEGALLY DESTROYED AND DELETED, because it showed how totally innocent I was, and how completely guilty Nancy Pelosi, and others, were.”
In his introduction to the report, Smith rejected as “laughable” Trump’s claim that the investigations were politically motivated or influenced in any way by the Biden administration.
“While we were not able to bring the cases we charged to trial, I believe the fact that our team stood up for the rule of law matters. I believe the example our team set for others to fight for justice without regard for the personal costs matters,” Smith wrote. “The facts, as we uncovered them in our investigation and as set forth in my report, matter. Experienced prosecutors know that you cannot control outcomes, you can only do your job the right way for the right reasons. I conclude our work confident that we have done so, and that we have met fully our obligations to the department and to our country.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), President-elect Donald Trump, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Vice President-elect JD Vance attend the Army-Navy football game at Northwest Stadium on December 14, 2024 in Landover, Maryland. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“The record-shattering abuses of the 2025 Trump-Vance Presidential Inaugural Committee, Inc. should signal the immediate need for legislation to prevent this influence peddling,” said one ethics expert.
With Inauguration Day less than a week away, a watchdog group on Tuesday published research shining light on the unprecedented level of financial support President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund has received from corporations and executives seeking to court favor with the incoming administration.
The new research from Public Citizen includes a tracker that lists known corporate donations or pledged contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee, which is tax-exempt and not subject to contribution limits.
Amazon, Apple, Chevron, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Google, Meta, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the pharmaceutical lobby, Pfizer, Microsoft, and Coinbase are among those that have pumped money into Trump’s inaugural fund, which has raked in a record-shattering $150 million since Election Day—and could bring in over $200 million by January 20.
“These million-dollar donors come from a small class of very wealthy industries in Big Tech, cryptocurrency, government contractors, and others with lucrative contracts or business pending before the federal government,” Public Citizen found. “Some of the biggest donors had long been critics of Trump, especially following the January 6 Insurrection by Trump supporters, and who are now fearful of retributions by a vengeful president.”
Some of the companies that have donated to the inaugural fund are also facing federal investigations, amplifying suspicions that the contributions were made with the goal of receiving favorable treatment from the next administration.
“The record-breaking cesspool of special interest financing for the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee raises serious concerns about the ability of corporations and wealthy special interests to purchase influence over public policy or lucrative government contracts,” Craig Holman, a government ethics expert at Public Citizen, said in a statement Tuesday.“The record-shattering abuses of the 2025 Trump-Vance Presidential Inaugural Committee, Inc. should signal the immediate need for legislation to prevent this influence peddling.”
“The possibility for corruption exists any time an officeholder accepts large donations from those who have business pending before the official.”
Trump’s inaugural fund has easily surpassed the then-record-setting $107 million he raised for his inauguration in 2017, The New York Times reported earlier this month. On Monday, the Times reported that “Harold G. Hamm, the billionaire oil and gas executive who helped bankroll Donald J. Trump’s campaign and stands to profit from his energy policies, is hosting an exclusive fossil fuel industry celebration on Inauguration Day.”
“Among the invited guests to Mr. Hamm’s celebration is Doug Burgum, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Interior Department,” according to the newspaper.
The president-elect has openly boasted that prominent figures in corporate America—from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—have lined up to show support for his second administration, which is set to be packed with billionaires and others with close business ties. Trump is reportedly keeping close track of major companies that have yet to donate to his inaugural fund.
Public Citizen noted Tuesday that “while the self-serving motivations of inaugural donors has a long and troubling precedent, the scope of donations and, in many cases, the fear of retribution driving the donations to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee represents a worrying shift.”
“Buying access to the president and the president’s inner circle is the name of the game,” the group says in its new research brief. “For corporations and wealthy special interests attempting to influence public policy or secure lucrative government contracts, writing big checks to Trump’s inaugural committee—or any presidential inaugural committee—provides a bonanza of access to leading government officials and influence over public policy. This is a level of influence peddling only available to those who can afford to pay the price and is denied to those who are not wealthy.”
To “ensure that undue influence-peddling through Inaugural donations is mitigated,” Public Citizen called on lawmakers to pass legislation banning corporate and lobbyist donations to inaugural funds, implementing contribution limits, and strengthening disclosure requirements, among other reforms.
“The possibility for corruption exists any time an officeholder accepts large donations from those who have business pending before the official,” Public Citizen said. “Congress should end the double standard for presidential inauguration fundraising. The celebration of an election victory should be viewed as part and parcel of the process of selecting our president.”
