Kissing Trump’s ass is paying off big for corporate donors
Recent filings with the Federal Election Commission have revealed the scale of record-breaking corporate donations to the Donald Trump-JD Vance Inaugural Committee. Trump smashed his previous inaugural donation record of $107 million for his first presidency, raising more than twice as much, with 650 donors—140 of whom gave no less than $1 million. This includes the tech billionaires who ponied up and got VIP seats at the dreary event.
Trump’s top donor, Elon Musk, has benefited from his co-presidency , growing even wealthie r while not worrying about conflicts of interest when it comes to protecting his companies and government contracts. Then there are individual billionaires, like crypto mogul Justin Sun, who has had his criminally fraudulent activities wiped away with help from large donations to Trump. But there are a whole lot of others filling up the swamp and wetting their beaks.
The crypto industry donated a total of $18 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, and has been one of the biggest winners so far. Trump courted cryptocurrency firms during his campaign, promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.”
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, which dropped a cool $1 million on Trump, watched the Securities and Exchange Commission drop its lawsuit against them after Trump came into office. And Trump Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently announced that the Justice Department’s unit that investigated cryptocurrency fraud-related crimes would be disbanded.
Companies with a large investment in the electronics market such as Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook gave $1 million to Trump , have received a respite from potentially crushing China tariffs on popular products like the iPhone, though Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said there’s a good chance that will change.
Intuit, maker of TurboTax, got more than their $1 million donation’s worth . Reports have indicated that the Trump administration plans on ending the IRS’s Direct File program . The move benefits tax-filing companies by eliminating the free filing option for Americans.
Pilgrim Pride, a poultry company owned by Brazilian meat conglomerate JBS, reportedly made the largest donation to Trump’s inaugural committee, $5 million. What did they get in return so far? Trump recently paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law that has allowed the U.S. to investigate and prosecute foreign corruption tied to America’s trade interests since 1977. JBS knows this law intimately, having already paid out more than a quarter of a billion dollars in criminal bribery charges under the FCPA.
And there is no end in sight for billionaires who want to make payments to Trump in some form or another. Major companies like Meta, Amazon , Tesla, and X, which all face ongoing government lawsuits, are settling cases, many of which are considered by critics to be baseless, with Trump himself.
Both Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta and Elon Musk’s X went so far as to settle long-standing, questionable lawsuits from Trump, with Meta sending $22 million to his presidential library and X sending another $10 million in settlement money.
Related | Elon Musk is not done buying Donald Trump
At the same time Musk, whether or not he decides to step out of the political spotlight to try and repair the terrible branding effect he’s had on Tesla , is still reportedly ready to hand over $100 million to Trump-controlled super PACs.
With hundreds of billions of dollars in government contracts on the line, and many companies coincidentally linked to investors with names like Musk, Vice President JD Vance, and venture capitalist Peter Thiel , you don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to connect the swampy dots in Trump’s White House.
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The Guardian view on GPs: the importance of being face to face | Editorial
Relationships matter to people, and public services must be designed with this in mind
That members of the public value access to in-person GP appointments sounds like a statement of the obvious. But the findings of an Institute for Government report about general practice in England have more complex implications too. One striking finding is that waits for appointments seem to matter less than is often assumed. Successive governments have pushed for same-day consultations. If this was done to please the public, the research suggests they should not have bothered. Surprisingly, it found no statistically significant relationship between patient satisfaction and length of wait. For many people, there is no substitute for a face-to-face conversation with the family doctor who they may have known for years. A higher number of online and telephone consultations is correlated with lower satisfaction. The shift away from in-person consultations, which accelerated during the pandemic and has not reversed, has coincided with falling confidence in general practice – though the reduction on spending on primary care, relative to hospitals, must also be factored in.
Appointments with other staff do not boost patient satisfaction to anything like the same degree. Once again, this finding raises a question over recent policy, which has been to substantially increase the “direct patient care” workforce, including pharmacists, in England’s 6,200 GP surgeries. The most popular appointments of all are those in smaller practices with higher numbers of GP partners. People’s preferences are not, in themselves, a mandate for change. This study found that practices with higher satisfaction scores also meet more targets. But measuring outcomes in primary care is complicated and previous research has raised doubts about some of the care offered by the smallest practices.
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