President Donald Trump paused an Oval Office event on Monday to deliver an unprompted on-camera endorsement of Scotts Miracle-Gro, telling the room — and national audience — he owed the lawn-care giant a plug because it had worked on the White House grounds at no charge.
The moment came as Trump was boasting about renovations to the building, including a new ballroom and what he described as a rooftop drone port.
“The best grass you can get. Scotts, you know Scotts? Scotts Miracle-Gro, they’re doing it. They do great grass,” Trump said. “I got to give him a plug because they did the White House for free.”
In a separate clip, Trump gestured to the South Lawn and said the grass was “being all replaced with the top stuff.” He also declared Washington, D.C. had been turned into “Shangri-La.”
The Ohio-based company had already drawn ethics scrutiny before Monday’s shout-out. In June, Scotts Miracle-Gro committed $1 million in cash and product to help the National Park Service repair the South Lawn after it was torn up by the June 14 UFC Freedom 250 event Trump hosted on the grounds. The White House said no taxpayer money would be used.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington flagged the arrangement at the time. “Major corporations generally don’t do things out of the goodness of their heart,” CREW vice president Jordan Libowitz told The Washington Post. “It’s generally — they do things for the government because they want something from the government.”
Scotts chief executive Jim Hagedorn has been an outspoken Trump ally. In a July 2025 interview on Fox Business, he called himself a “major fan” of the president and said he had spoken with Trump “multiple times” about federal marijuana policy, an issue central to Scotts’ Hawthorne cannabis-cultivation subsidiary.
Campaign finance filings tracked by OpenSecrets show Scotts Miracle-Gro and its affiliates donated roughly $770,000 during the 2024 cycle, including $500,000 to Make America Great Again Inc., the main pro-Trump super PAC.
Scotts, founded in 1868 in Marysville, Ohio, describes itself as the leading marketer of branded consumer lawn and garden products in North America, with roughly $3.4 billion in annual sales.
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