About those Trump ballroom donors

[just-jim]

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[Rideback]

No doubt there is a markup on the costs to cover the favors they are buying.

[mister_coffee]

I am entertained how the construction cost of the ballroom ratchets up in $50 million increments. Now it is at $350 million. Only a matter of time before it is $400 million.

It is also a tell. Any number Trump puts out there only ratchets up. Thats how some idiots think there are 20 million undocumented people in this country. Nobody explains where that estimate came from except the voices inside Trump's head.

[Rideback]

https://www.citizen.org/article/banquet ... nd-favors/

there's a breakdown in the article, but here's the gist

"Trump has sought to reassure Americans, emphasizing that the ballroom would be built with private funds. “We’ve raised over $350 million. It’s a beautiful room,” he told reporters.

The White House has released a list of 36 donors to the ballroom project, including 21 corporations and 15 individuals and family foundations. The White House has not revealed how much they have each contributed. The White House list is also incomplete; CBS News has identified at least three additional corporate donors and there may be others.

Asked by CBS News if these private donations raised any conflict-of-interest concerns, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt replied in a statement: “The same critics who are wrongly claiming there are conflicts of interest, would complain if taxpayers were footing the bill.”

But the contributions from the corporate and super-rich donors in fact constitute massive, inescapable and irremediable conflicts of interest.

Public Citizen analyzed the government interests of the disclosed corporate donors, including the 21 corporations released by the White House and three identified by CBS News, for a total of 24. The analysis finds that:

Two-thirds of corporate donors – 16 out of a total of 24 – have entered into government contracts. Lockheed is the largest of these government contractors, having received $191 billion in contracts over the last five years. Altogether, the corporate donors benefited from nearly $43 billion in contracts last year and $279 billion over the last five years.
Most of the corporate donors – 14 out of 24 – are facing federal enforcement actions and/or have had federal enforcement actions suspended by the Trump administration. These include major antitrust actions involving Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and T-Mobile; labor rights cases involving Amazon, Apple, Caterpillar, Google, Lockheed and Meta; and SEC matters involving Coinbase and Ripple.
The companies and wealthy individual donors have invested gargantuan sums in combined lobbying and political contributions, totaling more than $960 million during the last election cycle and $1.6 billion over the last five years.
The companies self-report a stunningly wide array of interests before the federal government, involving everything from taxation to trade policy, battlefield domain awareness to telephone poles, consumer privacy to product liability rules, appropriations to cybersecurity – and much more.
The following are analyses of political spending, lobbying, federal contracts and federal enforcement actions of donors to Trump’s ballroom, as well as summaries of what each donor has at stake."