U.S. President Donald Trump is constitutionally prohibited from being elected to a third term in office, but that's not stopping his super political action committee from raising eye-popping sums of money.
A report from the Brennan Center for Justice released on Tuesday found that MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump's political campaigns, raised an "unprecedented" sum of $200 million between last November's presidential election and the end of June 2025. This massive war chest is more than six times the amount that former President Joe Biden's super PAC raised between the November 2020 election and the end of June 2021.
The Brennan Center also said that MAGA Inc. has become "almost exclusively a game for the richest of the rich," with 96% of the money it's received over the last seven-plus months coming "from donors who gave more than $1 million each." This massive fundraising haul raises serious questions about where this money is going, presuming that Trump isn't going to try to run for an unconstitutional third term.
The biggest donors to the super PAC have been entities that might benefit from regulatory or policy changes that the government could enact: Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, donated $25 million; investor Jeffrey Yass, whose company Susquehanna International Group owns a large stake in the parent company of Chinese social media app TikTok, donated $16 million; and Foris Dax Inc., the firm behind Crypto.com, donated $10 million.
Advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday took a look at the donations pouring into MAGA Inc. and found that cryptocurrency companies, executives, and investors had forked over a total of $41.7 million to the PAC, while fossil fuel companies and executives had shelled out $26.8 million.
Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen, said that the massive sums being given to the PAC should raise real questions about corruption.
"The real question this mega-donor list raises is not 'how much,' but 'who from?'" he said. "By taking contributions from wealthy individuals and industries who want something from government, Trump's super PAC has used pay-to-play to raise big money from special interests like a legalized shakedown."
The Brennan Center similarly raised corruption concerns and said the super PAC's dealings were yet another example of how the
U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to scrap all limits on campaign donations from corporations and outsized interest groups had damaged the integrity of American politics.
"The degree to which wealthy donors appear to be using super PAC contributions to curry favor with the Trump administration once again illustrates how wrong the Supreme Court was... when it predicted that the 'independence' of groups like super PACs would prevent them from becoming vehicles for real or perceived corruption," the Brennan Center wrote.
A report from Politico last week suggested that the MAGA Inc. war chest could give Trump unprecedented power for an incumbent president to influence the 2026 midterm elections.
"Having millions of dollars at Trump's disposal—an unheard of amount for a sitting president who cannot run again—could allow him to become one of the biggest single players in next year's midterms, alongside long-standing GOP stalwarts like the Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund," explained Politico. "Trump could boost his preferred candidates in GOP primaries, or flood the zone in competitive general election races in an effort to help Republicans keep control of Congress."
Trump has not yet ruled out running for a third term in office even though the United States Constitution's 22nd Amendment explicitly states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
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