The Washington Post got its greedy little mitts on an interesting list—the tab for the president's Temu Versailles, presently doing business as an ugly scar where the East Wing of the White House used to be.
A list obtained by The Washington Post reveals all the major donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project, including previously undisclosed contributors who have benefited from regulatory decisions, government contracts and, in one case, a pardon for a family member. Tech giants Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount, the list shows. The Adelson family, one of the GOP’s largest donor dynasties, committed that sum as well, as did billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network.
Try not to faint when you hear the next part.
Absent from the list is Trump himself, who has said that he is helping to pay for the project. “It’s being paid for a hundred percent by me and some friends of mine,” he said last year, days after demolition began on the old East Wing.
I am truly disillusioned.
The list and other documents offer a panoramic view of a fundraising campaign that is extraordinary both for its size and opacity. Ordinary political giving requires public disclosure and is subject to campaign finance rules. The ballroom donations are collected by a nonprofit and then channeled to the government and into a White House account the president directly controls.
Oh, I see.
Independent experts and scholars have expressed alarm at the potential the arrangement has for influence buying and coerced giving.
I am neither an independent expert nor a scholar, but I did spent several years hanging around the Massachusetts state legislature, and this arrangement sets all my antennae quivering. It also reeks of the kind of blackjacking money out of sources that was part of the fundraising of the Nixon campaign in 1972. (One of the primary victims of the latter shakedown was the late George Steinbrenner.) And the top of this scam is infinitely worse than Nixon ever was.
After reviewing the list obtained by The Post, White House spokesman Davis Ingle declined to discuss individual donations but described the ballroom donors as “a wide array of great American companies and generous individuals, all of whom are contributing to make the People’s House better for generations to come.
“The same critics who are alleging fake conflicts of interests, would also complain if American taxpayers were footing the bill for these long-overdue renovations,” he said. He added that the administration will “relentlessly pursue those responsible for this cowardly leak while continuing to protect all those who give.”
God help me, he believes it, One day, he might make a tough witness.