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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.
Shattering all records, the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc. raised and spent over $200 million in special interest money celebrating the 2024 election victory. (The all-time previous record was $107 million for Trump’s first inauguration in 2017. By contrast, former President Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration raised and spent nearly $62 million.)
The sheer volume of today’s inaugural donations suggests that wealthy special interests believe it is worth the investment.
Nearly all this financing comes from companies and wealthy business leaders who have business pending before the incoming administration. Rarely are small donations received from citizens simply excited about a new president.
The public won’t get a full picture of Trump’s inaugural donors until the spring, when the one-and-only disclosure report is filed 90 days after the inauguration. But the ones we know about so far are painting an ugly picture of corporations, government contractors, billionaires, and millionaires seeking to endear themselves to Trump and his administration.
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.
Some of these new friends previously expressed opposition toward Trump, who has a history of seeking revenge against his adversaries and even said he might seek retribution in his second administration. “When this election is over… I would have every right to go after them,” Trump said of his political opponents over the summer.
In addition to being former Trump critics, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Sam Altman of OpenAI have their sights on major government contracts from the new administration. Each has now donated $1 million to Trump’s Inauguration. Zuckerberg and Bezos even partied with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and at the inauguration in DC.
What else does all this money buy? Access. Access itself does not necessarily mean success at buying official favors. But the sheer volume of today’s inaugural donations suggests that wealthy special interests believe it is worth the investment.
Presidential inaugurations have not always been such a soiree for the wealthy. Former President Richard Nixon in 1973 spent less than $4 million on his inauguration. Former President Jimmy Carter in 1977 spent $3.5 million. Thomas Jefferson in 1801 simply walked to the Capitol to be sworn in and then walked home.
The very ripeness for scandal this time around calls for reasonable restrictions on the sources and amounts of inaugural donations. Corporations, and certainly government contractors, should be banned from donating.
Contributions should be limited to avoid even the appearance of buying favors. The disclosure requirement should be vastly expanded to include disclosing expenditures as well as donations. And rules should be established on how surplus funds are dispensed.
Presidential inaugurations should be celebrations for the nation as a whole, not influence-peddling opportunities for the very wealthy.
"It is the American people who lose when corporations succeed in keeping their taxes low," according to the report's authors.
With portions of President Donald Trump's 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that favored high income households and corporations set to expire in 2025, the watchdog group Accountable.US and the coalition Americans for Tax Fairness released a report Wednesday detailing how top corporations benefited from corporate tax law in the five years following the 2017 reform.
These corporations, which include household names such as Apple, Bank of America, Microsoft, Meta, and General Motors, make a disproportionate share of national profits and pay a big chunk of total corporate taxes, though at low rates, according to the report—as in, the "corporate tax ten" identified by the report have a lot at stake when it comes to corporate tax policy.
Ahead of the coming debate around taxes in 2025, "the American public should be aware that the debate over corporate tax policy is less about national economic impact—as corporate lobbyists tend to insist—and more about the narrow profit interests of a few mammoth corporations," according to the report's authors.
While Trump's 2017 tax law permanently lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%—and this provision is not among those set to expire this year—Trump and House Republicans have expressed interest in dropping the corporate tax rate further, to 15%. Researchers at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that even after Trump dropped the corporate tax rate to 21%, most profitable corporations paid considerably less than that, "mainly due to loopholes and special breaks that the 2017 tax law left in place and, in some cases, introduced."
"We've seen how Trump's tax scam played out before—after promising to deliver for Main Street, he turned around and gave trillions in tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy and mega-corporations," said David Kass, ATF's executive director in a statement Wednesday. Regular American families "will be hurt by Republicans' plans to give trillions in additional tax cuts to make the rich richer and pay for it by cutting essential programs," he added.
Citing the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the report notes that of the hundreds of billions in total subsidies received by corporations from 2018 through 2022—defined as "the difference between what they would owe over that period without special breaks in the tax code and what they actually paid with them in place"—over $150 billion of those total tax breaks were claimed by just 25 corporations, with Bank of America topping the list at nearly $24 billion in subsidies over those five years
Those breaks help explain how Bank of America paid a federal income-tax rate of just 3.8% on almost $139 billion in profits over that time period, according to the report.
Trump's 2017 legislation also lowered the tax rate for corporate income that comes from intangible assets that are held in the U.S. but generate sales overseas, so-called Foreign Derived Intangible Income (FDII) earnings, according to the report. The authors report that "of the over $50 billion the top 15 corporate beneficiaries of the FDII loophole have received over the first six years of the Trump law, almost one-quarter was reaped by Alphabet"—the parent company of Google.
The authors also note that if the 15% corporate tax rate was already in effect, Apple alone would have saved $3.5 billion on its taxes in the most recent annual reporting period.
The report gives other examples of how these top ten corporations benefit from subsidies already in place and how much they stand to gain from a potentially lowered corporate tax rate.
The report's argument that corporations approach tax policy first and foremost with their own profit margins in mind "is an important realization because it is the American people who lose when corporations succeed in keeping their taxes low: through cuts to public services because of the lost revenue; widening income and wealth gaps from increased corporate profits and stock prices; and in the growth of concentrated corporate power," the authors write.
Trump campaigned on a promise to lower costs for Americans, but instead, Republicans are laser-focused on passing another round of massive tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
As U.S. President Donald Trump takes office, his Republican allies in Congress are already hard at work readying his legislative agenda.
Trump campaigned on a promise to lower costs for Americans. But so far, the GOP hasn’t proposed a single plan to do that. Instead, Republicans are laser-focused on passing another round of massive tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and corporations.
It’s shaping up to be 2017 all over again.
If Trump and the GOP get their way, we know exactly what to expect: Income inequality will worsen, crucial government programs will be starved, and corporations and the ultra-wealthy will amass even more outsized power over our economy and democracy.
Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail in 2016 too—and quickly broke most of them. But he did fulfill one: His 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, his only signature legislative accomplishment, was a field day for the oligarchs and CEOs who helped elect him.
That law delivered a tax cut for the richest 0.1% of Americans that was 277 times larger than the one teachers and firefighters got, nearly doubling billionaire wealth in this country and spiking inequality.
Meanwhile, corporations got a 40% discount on their taxes, which they used to send record stock buybacks to their wealthy shareholders and pad their profits while they overcharged consumers on everything from gas to groceries.
The bill never delivered the wage gains or economic growth Trump promised. But it did add $1.9 trillion to the deficit.
Key provisions of this tax scam expire next year. That would be welcome news for the vast majority of Americans, who are sick and tired of tax cuts for the wealthy. But Trump and his Republican colleagues are readying a supersized set of high-end tax breaks that would make his 2017 legislation look like child’s play.
Republicans plan to give the richest Americans a fresh round of individual tax breaks, slash the corporate tax rate yet again, and cut taxes on capital gains and dividends, which would let their Wall Street friends keep even more of their winnings when they sell a stock or are showered with dividends.
Then they’ll move to step two: draconian budget cuts for the programs Americans rely on.
GOP leaders will point to falling revenues from their own tax cuts as evidence for the need to cut spending on life-saving programs that families rely on, like Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps more than 42 million families afford their groceries.
In fact, Trump is putting unelected and unaccountable billionaires—Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy—in charge of the “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) to decide the painful cuts we’ll have to face. And surprise, surprise: They’re almost exclusively targeting programs that help working people, veterans, students, families, and other non-billionaires.
If Trump and the GOP get their way, we know exactly what to expect: Income inequality will worsen, crucial government programs will be starved, and corporations and the ultra-wealthy will amass even more outsized power over our economy and democracy.
But we can learn something else from our experience in 2017. Democrats united in their opposition to Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, pushing Trump’s approval rating to the lowest point in his presidency and ousting supporters of his corporate tax cuts in the next year’s midterms.
Tax giveaways for the wealthy and corporations were deeply unpopular with voters in 2018—and that’s only intensified after this recent wave of corporate price gouging that has squeezed American families. Lawmakers must make it as difficult as possible to enact this next tax giveaway.
This year, we need to make sure every single member of Congress understands that supporting Trump’s tax plans means turning their backs on working Americans.