WASHINGTON—The recent headline in the Wall Street Journal said it all: “Wall Street’s big names, once wary of Trump, now want in.”
But it’s not just Wall Street that carted carted campaign cash to the Republican President-elect and convicted felon, Donald Trump. It’s Elon Musk and Amazon. It’s hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who openly demands privatizing the federal government’s two big mortgage guarantors and lenders, popularly known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“He’s surrounded by a lot of old friends,” Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., said of Trump. The one-time Trump foe turned golfing buddy told AP after one Trump Mar-a-Lago soiree for the rich that “I just know that everybody I know wants some job.”
Against the onslaught of pro-Trump corporate cash and clout, labor is drafting fight-back plans, relying on people, not money. It’s crafting pro-worker statewide organizing coalitions, uniting state federations, local central labor councils and unions with like-minded outside groups.
“It is up to us—not politicians in Washington—to fight for a raise, or better health care, or security on the job. The labor movement must be poised to help workers see that unions can and will deliver the change they need,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond wrote in their year-end report, available on www.aflcio.org.
“Everybody wants to be my friend” Trump said after he hosted Meta/Google CEO Mark Zuckerberg—who hadn’t donated before the election–Amazon founder and majority stockholder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Google CEO Sundar Pichai at another black-tie bash for Silicon Valley execs only.
“The top executives, the top bankers, they’re all calling,” Trump said. “It’s like a complete opposite” from four and eight years ago. What do they want? Start with another big tax cut for corporations and the rich, followed by rollbacks of pro-worker and pro-consumer policies and rules.
Though Trump won’t re-enter the White House until January 20, he’s already spreading favors to those who gave him money. Trump has nominated at least one big donor for an ambassadorship. That bipartisan political tradition stretches back through financier Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK’s father, to Republican William Howard Taft’s “dollar diplomats” more than a century ago, if not before.
Topping the Trump donor list, of course, is multibillionaire Musk, owner of Tesla and twitter, now called X, among other enterprises, and estimated to be the world’s richest person.
Musk openly gave an estimated $118 million to Trump’s campaign according to pre-election campaign finance reports. He added even more than that in so-called “independent expenditures,” including his publicized $1-million-per-new-voter scheme, funneled to Trumpites before the election.
In return, Trump has already given Musk more power than virtually any other mogul and not just as co-chair of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” tasked with cutting up to three-quarters of a million federal workers and turning 50,000 top ones, and eventually the rest, into a “spoils system” reminiscent of the Gilded Age.
Revealed his clout
Musk revealed his clout with Trump by demanding that as part of an end-of-the-year federal funding law, Congress suspend the U.S. debt limit—the equivalent of your bank raising your credit limit—so lawmakers could approve more Trump-GOP tax cuts for corporations and the rich, next year.
Trump obliged. Congress didn’t, as ultra-right House Republicans revolted, but not before Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wis., a Painters Union member, posted a graphic, created by artificial intelligence, of Trump as a dog on a leash, held by Musk.
Musk has another “ask,” which has received less publicity. He’s also a rabid worker and union hater. Musk’s Tesla and Bezos’s Amazon have been hauled before the National Labor Relations Board for labor law-breaking—so much so that Musk, joined by Bezos and other moguls, is arguing before Trump-named federal judges in deep-red Texas and Louisiana that the NLRB is unconstitutional.
By contrast, Amazon’s Bezos, again before the election, donated $170,129 to Trump, a far cry from the $2,305,830 he donated, personally, to the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris. And hedge fund mogul Ackman gave Rep. Dean Phillips, DFL-Minn., a Biden-Harris challenger, $1 million. He later turned to Trump and trekked to Mar-a-Lago to kowtow, post-election.
OpenSecrets.org, which tracks campaign finance in detail, reported “about 44% of all the money raised to support Trump came from just 10 individual mega-donors.
“The president-elect and affiliated outside groups took in over $481 million from 10 individuals, including just over $118 million from Musk.” Conservative billionaire Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon family banking fortune and an “independent investor,” was second, with $150 million to pro-Trump outside “dark money” groups.
“Las Vegas-based billionaire and Las Vegas Review-Journal owner Miriam Adelson was the third, at just over $100 million in support of Trump,” OpenSecrets added. She “even helped finance Trump’s legal battle against Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election.”
Adelson has another motive for backing Trump, unmentioned by OpenSecrets: The right-wing nationalist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a big and open Trump pal.
Adelson owns The Jerusalem Post, Israel’s oldest newspaper, which she’s turned sharply into Netanyahu’s corner. At yet another Trump Mar-a-Lago soiree, Netanyahu’s wife Sara was the guest of honor. Both Netanyahus face indictments for bribery, corruption and influence-peddling.
Ackman, like Bezos, was a Democratic donor who’s now cozying up to the GOP. Ackman donated $1 million to the failed presidential campaign of Rep. Dean Phillips, DFL-Minn., who challenged Democratic President Joe Biden in party primaries, before Biden dropped out in favor of Harris.
Ackman tweeted on X that he believes Trump will privatize the two mortgage guarantors and lenders. He predicted privatization would net the federal government “$300 billion of additional profits.” He didn’t say how much financiers like himself would garner from privatization—or what would happen to individual homebuyers and homeowners if the federal corporations were turned over to Wall Street.
Ran out of time
“During Trump’s first term, [Treasury] Secretary Mnuchin took steps toward this outcome, but he ran out of time,” Ackman, a major Fannie Mae stockholder, told The Independent. “I expect that in the second @realDonaldTrump administration, Trump and his team will get the job done.”
Trump’s Republican platform, also known as Project 2025, from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, backs Ackman up.
“Treasury plays a role in funding the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” it says. “It should work to end the conservatorships and move toward privatization of these massive housing finance agencies. This would restore a sustainable housing finance market with a robust private mortgage market that does not rely on explicit or implicit taxpayer guarantees.”
Labor will try to counter the clout of corporate cash with people power, especially by organizing.
“The AFL-CIO will continue to fight any efforts to overturn gains we’ve made together with the Biden-Harris administration over the past four years, and to prevent the radical Project 2025 agenda from harming our members and wrecking our right to organize,” federation President Shuler and Secretary-Treasurer Redmond vowed.
“And we will not stop fighting for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act and labor law reform to rewrite the rules that systematically locked workers out of organizing.
“Now we must keep that momentum going, even in a rougher political landscape.”
To do so, the federation is “investing in ground infrastructure to support organizing through state federations and central labor councils in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee” to start with, creating long-term pro-worker coalitions with like-minded groups. It wants to extend that nationally.
“We’ll use the capacity we’ve built for our electoral program—including more than 1,800 union staff, members and retirees with release staff experience from 30 unions who served as leaders just in recent months—to block and tackle in red states as our rights are under attack, and to defend and push forward a pro-worker agenda in blue states.”
There is one difference between Trump’s harvest of campaign cash for federal favors and those of a certain notorious Republican predecessor, Richard Nixon. Trump’s trawling is out in the open.
Nixon finance chair Maurice Stans’s shakedowns of corporate moguls wasn’t, and was accompanied by threats of retaliation and federal problems against those who didn’t donate.
The late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a shipbuilder, got caught. And Minneapolis industrialist Dwayne Andreas’s $25,000 check turned up in Watergate burglar Bernard Barker’s bank account, starting the unraveling of the mess. “Follow the money,” was the mantra. It led to Nixon.
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