Donald Trump has added something new to the practice of extracting money from major donors: fear.
Traditionally, high-dollar contributors write big checks for a mix of reasons: to curry favor, to support their political party, to promote an agenda, to win favorable tax and regulatory policies, to defeat the opposition, to be seen as powerful — a blend of self-interest and principle.
This year, Trump’s own history in the White House, combined with the agenda for 2025 that he and his allies have been putting together, amounts to a warning to wavering supporters.
According to The Washington Post, Trump has candidly warned onlookers that he will turn the federal bureaucracy into an instrument to punish those who fail to toe the MAGA line:
He wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John F. Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the F.B.I. and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
The events described in the Post story
reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 88 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
Trump has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to “forgotten” Americans.
Faced with the prospect of a chief executive prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge, many affluent donors — for whom the machinations of government determine bankruptcy or wealth — seem to think they have little choice but to pony up to the self-proclaimed “dictator for a day.”
Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House — armed with the bristling Heritage Foundation playbook, which conservatives are using as a tool to pressure Trump to remain true to the hard-right agenda, as well as long, revealing lists compiled by Axios and The Times of prospective MAGA appointees — is the embodiment of the politics of intimidation.
How so?
At the core of what both Trump and Heritage’s Project 2025 have proposed is an escalation of the power concentrated in the presidency and in the executive branch generally. This includes the politicization of the bureaucracy whose mission would become, in part, to wreak revenge on Trump’s adversaries and the adoption, throughout federal departments and agencies, of policies rewarding ideological supporters and defunding ideological opponents.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton of sociology and international affairs, summed up the Trump-driven changes in the politics of raising money in an email: “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government,” she wrote, “believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected, tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want.”
But, Scheppele continued, “autocrats turn the tables. Once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.”
In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Scheppele wrote in her email,
is a blueprint for autocracy. In fact, it’s a direct copy of the plan that Viktor Orban used to take over the Hungarian government in 2010. If it is carried out, Project 2025 will concentrate huge power in the hands of the president, giving him the power to control the whole federal government at his whim. If business leaders think that this will benefit them and that giving up the rule of law is good for business, they will quickly learn that they are wrong. But it will be too late.
The Trump campaign has made it clear that Trump is not committed to adopting all the policy and personnel proposals described in Project 2025 or other documents produced outside his campaign.
At the same time, nowhere is corporate acquiescence to Trump more evident than among Republican megadonors who swore after Jan. 6, 2021 that they would never again support Trump, but who are now swallowing their pride, trickling back in obeisance to the leader who betrayed them with his encouragement of the insurrection.
In February 2023, Eric Levine, one of the founders of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a prominent Republican fund-raiser, told Politico:
I don’t think it is fair to call Donald Trump a damaged candidate. He is a metastasizing cancer who if he is not stopped is going to destroy the party. Donald Trump is a loser. He is the first president since Hoover to lose the House, the Senate and the presidency in a single term.
As if that were not enough, Levine continued, Trump “is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”
Less than a month ago, however, Levine sent out a memo to fellow Republicans telling them he has had a change of heart:
The adage of “never say never” is a wise one. I repeatedly said, since the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, that I will never vote for Donald Trump. Today, however, due to a dramatic change in circumstances, albeit reluctantly and with reservations, I have decided I will vote for Trump in November.
Levine is not alone in his return to the Trump fold. On March 29, Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein, Michael Scherer and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporters for The Washington Post, published “Many G.O.P. Billionaires Balked at Jan. 6. They’re Coming Back to Trump.”
“As hopes of a Republican alternative have crumbled,” the four Post reporters wrote, “elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free Jan. 6 defendants, promises mass deportations and faces 88 felony charges.”
Some examples:
The day after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, billionaire and G.O.P. megadonor Nelson Peltz called the insurrection a “disgrace” and expressed remorse for voting for Donald Trump: “I’m sorry I did that.” In early March, nonetheless, Peltz hosted a breakfast meeting at his Palm Beach mansion with Trump and such billionaire Trump backers as Steve Wynn and Isaac Perlmutter.
And, similarly, “After Jan. 6, billionaire developer Robert Bigelow said Trump had ‘lost me as a supporter. … He showed that, in that particular hour, he was no commander.’ ”This year, “Bigelow has pledged $20 million to a pro-Trump campaign group and has given $1 million to cover the former president’s legal costs.”
Bigelow was on the host committee for a record-setting $50.5 million fund-raiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Palm Beach Saturday night. The suggested price of admission: from $250,000 to $814,600.
Most of the commentary on the megadonors’ return to the Trump fold suggest that self-interest and greed are the primary motivators. In describing donors’ calculations, the Post wrote: “The financial upside of going with the former president may win out. Trump has discussed further cutting the corporate tax rate, and he toyed in his administration with unilaterally lowering the capital gains rate paid by investors.
Jonathan Chait, a columnist at New York magazine, is more explicit:
Joe Biden is running on a plan to increase taxes on the very wealthy, while Trump is promising to cut those taxes. In 2025, most of the Trump tax cuts will expire, as will Obamacare subsidies extended by the Inflation Reduction Act. The 2024 elections will therefore determine whether hundreds of billions of dollars remain in the pockets of wealthy people or instead fund things like health insurance for the middle class.
Similarly, Chris Cillizza told readers of his Substack newsletter, “I will now explain to you how these wealthy people overcame their principled stances against Trump as a threat to democracy.”
How?
The answer to all of your questions is money. Most rich people want to stay as rich as possible. Or get even richer. THAT is their main focus. So, when rubber meets road, that is their default setting. Principles go out the window.
The Post writers, Chait and Cillizza are right, up to a point. The about-face of these super rich donors is a mixture of greed and terror: terror of sparking the anger of a volatile politician who proudly declares “I am your retribution.”
Just as Trump has cowed congressional Republicans — many of whom privately voice strong criticism of the former president — with the threat of a MAGA-driven primary challenge, Trump has turned himself and his agenda into weapons of intimidation for businesses seeing to survive and thrive in a second Trump administration.
A primary goal of business is predictability, if not certainty, based in part on consistent rules, regulations and laws so that corporations can make plans and investments without worrying about arbitrary government interventions based on the revenge-seeking whims of a leader many see as a malignant narcissist.
American businesses are fully aware of Trump’s willingness to govern by caprice, a modus operandi he demonstrated repeatedly during his term in the White House.
In those years, however, he was held back by his own ineptitude, the incompetence of his most loyal advisers, the interventions of his more reasonable aides and key civil servants — a combination that kept him largely in check.
Catherine Rampell summed up some of the most egregious initiatives of the Trump White House in a November 2023 Washington Post column, “Take Trump at His Word When He Threatens to Punish His Enemies”:
Trump also frequently deployed economic and regulatory powers against businesses deemed insufficiently loyal.
For example, his administration launched a bogus antitrust investigation into some auto companies when they did not support his rollback of fuel-efficiency standards. He likewise reportedly instructed his top economic aide to interfere with the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, as punishment for critical coverage from CNN, which was then owned by Time Warner.
Trump also openly mused about revoking the licenses of broadcast news outlets for, among other things, reporting that his secretary of state had called him a ‘moron.’ Again, his underlings did not go along with him.
Elsewhere, he tried to use the government procurement process to damage Amazon. According to a memoir by a top aide to then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Trump “called and directed Mattis to ‘screw Amazon’ by locking them out of a chance to bid’ on a defense contract.”
Trump’s allies, especially those working on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, are working tirelessly to make sure that if Trump wins this November, he will not be restrained by aides or career civil servants and that instead of taking office unprepared, he will have a complete MAGA agenda from day one.
Separately from the report, Project 2025 has been assembling names of Trump loyalists who will take his commands seriously — and not deep-six them — to fill key spots in a second Trump administration, while simultaneously assembling an across-the-board agenda of legislative initiatives, executive orders and regulatory changes running the gamut from anti-abortion policies to a strategy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” in the words of one of the project’s authors.
Perhaps most important, Project 2025 asserts that “President Trump’s Schedule F proposal regarding accountability in hiring must be reinstituted.”
Schedule F, which Trump sought to initiate by executive order in 2020, would turn the top 50,000 or so civil servants, who are currently protected from arbitrary firing or demotion, into political appointees under the control of his administration. Trump lost the White House before Schedule F could be implemented, and President Biden withdrew the executive order creating it.
For corporate America, implementation of Schedule F would radically escalate uncertainty.
Federal officials making decisions ranging from penalties for failed occupational safety violations to initiation of antitrust proceedings, from I.R.S. rulings to the application of sanitary regulations in nursing homes, would presumably have to prioritize loyalty to Trump in order to keep their jobs.
Fear of the consequences of Schedule F is the strongest weapon of intimidation in Trump’s fund-raising armament. A significant campaign contribution might well serve as a useful shield.
“One practical consequence of undermining the civil service is a rise in cronyism,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “Usually we think of that in terms of the ‘winners,’ the insiders getting special deals, but it is equally true that cronyism creates ‘losers,’ the business elites that do not get favors or face punishment for their lack of loyalty to the ruling party.”
Trump and others on the American right, Williamson wrote,
have become enamored of Hungary’s Viktor Orban in recent years, and his regime provides a good example of how cronyism can be used to consolidate political power — not just in terms of the punitive use of regulations, but in licensing and government contracting as well. Whether Trump would be able to achieve these kinds of results is deeply debatable, of course. But the model is there.
Elaborating on this theme, Jasper Theodor Kauth, a political scientist at Nuffield College, Oxford, wrote by email: “Trump’s threats to use state coercion to go after perceived personal and political opponents is evidence of his agenda to disrupt democratic norms.”
Kauth noted that he and Desmond King, a political scientist at Oxford, describe these practices as “disruptive illiberalism” in their 2021 paper “Illiberalism”:
They keep up the appearance of honoring democratic procedures (elections) while eroding democracy through the back door — although in the case of Trump this erosion is now taking place in plain sight. These warnings need to be taken seriously regardless of their intention as they heighten the risk of a future transition to authoritarianism.
What drives the willingness of wealthy executives to abandon their principled concerns over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection?
Rawi Abdelal, a professor of international management at Harvard Business School, argues that the combination of “fear and, frankly, naïveté are far more powerful influences than simple greed.”
Abdelal wrote by email that
What is most interesting to me is that this is not as much about Donald J. Trump, the individual, but about a moment in history. These sorts of anti-systemic challenges to democratic practice are emerging across the developed world and in developing countries as well. There exists in these societies — including ours — a deep frustration with the system. Many believe that the system is simply unfair, and often it is exactly that.
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted that some of the conservative victories in campaign-finance law have had the unintended consequence of strengthening “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors.”
There has always been, Cain wrote by email, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund-raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”
Until recently, Cain argued, the potential for extortion
was limited by stricter campaign contribution laws before we loosened the system up post the Citizens United decision. The irony of inviting large donors and businesses to give large or unlimited donations is that the court strengthened the implicit hostile dependency relationship between donors and Trump.
Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on donors in the belief that such loosening of the law “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it,” adding: “Trump’s mafia m.o. can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”
While greed and fear are powerful motivations behind the decision to make campaign contributions to a candidate, they are not antithetical. Rather, they reinforce each other, something Trump appears to be acutely aware of.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., described this dynamic in an email to me, which I will leave as the last word:
Trump governs in a swirl of corruption and intimidation. Everyone knows this and understands that in such regimes, proximity to power is key to government largess. In oligarchic regimes we see this in the sheer population concentrations in the capital city. Here, aspirants flock to Mar-a-Lago.
Stable democracies rely on institutions. Fragile democracies have poorly formed institutions. Unfortunately, the new populist wave sees the unwinding of institutions in favor of personalist rule. One cannot afford to be distant from the heart of power when perks are doled out on a one-by-one basis by cronies of the top commander of the country.
The rush to Trump does not, in my view, represent policy agreements with the Trump tax cuts or anything of the like. Many of those rushing to Trump actually had their taxes go up because of his retaliation against blue states through the elimination of the local tax property deduction. They are eager to contribute, and to be seen as contributing, because power and privilege flow from proximity. Trump may view himself as a latter-day Louis XIV, including in his love of gilt. But in more recent times, this is the governance style of the banana republic dictators of the 20th century and the populist anti-democrats of the 21st.
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