Last spring, Donald Trump presided over a meeting with the country’s top oil executives at his Mar-a-Lago resort. According to The Washington Post, Trump promised to fulfill a wish list of policies sought by their industry—while explicitly soliciting $1 billion in campaign contributions from them. Trump made similar promises to other ultrawealthy donors, vowing to keep their taxes low while urging them to cut large campaign checks.
Now that Trump has won the presidency again, it’s worth revisiting these episodes as a guide to what might be coming. It’s often said that Trump campaigned expressly on a platform of authoritarian rule, but this also applies to corruption: He didn’t disguise his promises to govern in the direct interests of some of the wealthiest executives and investors in the country—and he won anyway. Trump and his allies will likely interpret this as a green light to engage in an extraordinary spree of unrestrained malfeasance.
There are several reasons to fear this could amount to a level of oligarchic corruption that outdoes anything Trump did in his first term. In short, conditions are ripe for right-wing elites to try to loot the place from top to bottom.
First, Senate Democrats, who just lost majority control, are now bracing to hit a wall in their inquiries into Trump’s apparent quid pro quo dealings. The Senate Budget Committee has been investigating the aforementioned $1 billion solicitation from Big Oil executives, aiming to establish precisely what Trump promised them—he reportedly offered to systematically roll back President Biden’s green energy policies and other regulations—seemingly in direct exchange for campaign money.
With little fanfare, this investigation has been making progress: At least one major energy company confirmed that the gathering happened, and most of the other companies haven’t refuted the central allegation, according to a committee aide. Democrats have followed up with demands for company documents that might illuminate exactly what took place.
But there is zero chance the incoming GOP majority will continue down this road, which means it will be much harder for Democrats to compel these companies to illuminate the true nature of their transaction with Trump.
“Republican control of the Senate will unfortunately undermine congressional efforts to hold Trump and executives accountable for wreaking havoc on our planet and selling out American families and U.S. energy policy to the highest bidder,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, chair of the Budget Committee, told me in a statement. He added that this will hamper getting to the bottom of this “apparent quid pro quo.” Once these policy changes start in earnest, we’ll have no way to trace them back to it, let alone to shed congressional light on influence peddling in real time.
Or take the ongoing Senate Finance Committee investigation into Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s international business dealings. That probe has established that Kusher took in over $100 million from Saudi and other foreign investors without returning any profits on those investments.
This is raising questions for Democrats about whether the arrangement was a means for foreign entities to channel money to the family of the potential next president, raising obvious conflict of interest issues. (Kushner has provided an alternate explanation: that his firm moved slowly to invest the money he’d collected.)
GOP control of the Senate could make it significantly harder to get to the bottom of these arrangements, a Democratic aide tells me, even as Trump takes control over the nation’s foreign policies, inviting still more influence seeking.
“The next four years are going to be a smash and grab under Trump,” Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Finance Committee, told me in a statement. Wyden added that the “special interests who put Trump back in office expect a return on their investment,” which is “all the more reason not to let up on oversight.” But Republicans will now make this oversight a lot harder.
Then there’s Trump’s decision to tap billionaire Elon Musk to head the grandiosely and misleadingly titled Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental body that will push substantial cuts in regulations, spending, and personnel. As The New York Times reports, Musk has grown infuriated with oversight on his SpaceX company, yet he will now be in a position to get Trump to consider regulatory rollbacks that benefit him, even as he enjoys lucrative federal contracts. That, plus government oversight on his other companies, creates the potential for serious conflicts of interest.
Trump has suggested Musk’s role will only be advisory. But even if that proves true, it’s ominous that Trump would so conspicuously hand Musk so much public influence over decisions that could heavily impact Musk’s own bottom line, especially with Trump so heavily indebted to Musk for transforming Twitter into a pro-Trump propaganda and MAGA disinformation machine. At minimum, Trump is basically declaring that his administration will be open for business to those who boost and assist him politically.
“Trump is showing that he will reward people who help him by giving them tremendous influence over his administration,” Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “This will encourage more people to direct their largesse Trump’s way. We expect government to look out for the public interest. Trump is open about the fact that government is meant to serve his supporters, business partners, and friends.”
Other new openings for influence peddling will beckon. Bookbinder notes that during Trump’s first term, his publicly traded Truth Social platform did not exist. Now, Bookbinder points out, it provides an easy channel for wealthy people to curry favor with Trump by buying stock in it—even simpler than booking rooms at his hotels, which reaped millions for Trump’s businesses during his first term.
“A publicly traded stock in a large company provides an easy way to drop a lot of money and quickly affect Trump’s net worth,” Bookbinder said. “Every president before him has divested financial interests so there wasn’t a clear way to influence them. Truth Social stock makes that even easier.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s plan to purge the government of career civil servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists will create new avenues for sordid inside dealing. For instance, Biden initiatives like new federal protections for millions of workers from excessive heat—which are opposed by some business interests—are now in the rulemaking process and will be in the hands of the new administration. It’s easy to see MAGA appointees letting bogus information peddled by special interests undermine that regulation’s future. Career officials who remain—but whose protections against termination will be weaker under Trump—will be less likely to object when Trumpist appointees corrupt the rulemaking process more broadly.
It is of course possible that Trump’s administration will display no trace of such seamy schemes. But that’s unlikely. When Trump first ran in 2016, he similarly celebrated his own corruption—declaring that not paying taxes “makes me smart”—but positioned himself as a traitor-to-his-class figure who would employ his personal familiarity with insider corruption to benefit ordinary Americans. Now he is openly promising to directly reward his elite allies with governing spoils, and not bothering to make a serious case that this will benefit the public.
It is sometimes argued that Trump’s reelection was driven by revulsion at “elites.” However true that is, it’s not hard to see what’s coming next. If and when Trump’s initiatives—from canceling prosecutions of himself to unleashing hell on immigrants—spur widespread criticism, certain pundits will intone that the criticism merely reflects his success in “taking on the elite class.” Meanwhile, Trump will be selling the government off for parts to his oligarchic right-wing elite cronies, and the jarring incongruity of it all won’t disturb these pundits in the slightest. After winning the presidency again despite making these corrupt deals right out in the open, why would Trump feel remotely constrained?