'A for sale sign around his neck': Trump sells 'policy in exchange for campaign contributions'

26 October 2024

If he's elected to a second term, former President Donald Trump may have the most blatantly transactional administration in modern history, according to new reporting.

The New York Times recently did a deep-dive on all of the policy positions Trump has flipped on in an effort to court more campaign cash. In their investigation, the Times' Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan found several areas in which the former president bent his own views to fit the preferences of wealthy donors he was courting.

"[Trump] is sometimes making overt promises about what he will do once he’s in office, a level of explicitness toward individual industries and a handful of billionaires that has rarely been seen in modern presidential politics," they wrote.

One major area where the former president has flip-flopped in favor of donors is cryptocurrency. The Times noted that he previously called crypto a "scam against the dollar" that's only good for enabling criminal activity. But he has since changed his tune, promising to be a "crypto president" while pitching himself to tech industry titans at San Francisco fundraisers. CNBC reported that a pro-Trump PAC has received the equivalent of more than $7 million USD in cryptocurrency donations since June.

“Former President Trump has a ‘For Sale’ sign around his neck and appears to be willing to sell basically any policy in exchange for campaign contributions,” Dennis Kelleher, president of the pro-regulation nonprofit Better Markets, told the Times.

Despite Trump's public stances against smoking, the tobacco industry has thrown its weight behind his candidacy. According to the Times, a subsidiary of tobacco conglomerate Reynolds American — RAI Services Company — has given roughly $8.5 million to the ex-president's main super PAC. President Joe Biden's administration has sought to ban menthol cigarettes, though Trump has yet to explicitly come out against the proposed ban. He has, however, become warmer to the concept of legalized recreational marijuana.

In his new adopted home state of Florida, voters are weighing a ballot measure that would allow for the regulated sale of recreational cannabis in the Sunshine State. Trump was anti-legalization in 2015, though he's since endorsed the Florida measure.

The Times further reported that the ex-president has changed his tune on the social media app TikTok while soliciting donations from one of its top investors. Billionaire Jeff Yass, who is a major investor in TikTok parent company ByteDance, has long been a supporter of Republican causes in his home state of Pennsylvania. He has not yet disclosed any donations to Trump, though he has given roughly $6 million to two Republican-aligned super PACs supporting the GOP's down-ballot candidates.

Trump has made the accommodating of wealthy donors and billion-dollar industries a central theme of his 2024 candidacy. this spring, he hosted an event with oil executives and lobbyists at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, offering them a slew of favorable policies in exchange for $1 billion in campaign donations. Politico reported that industry titans have a ready-made list of executive orders for Trump to sign once he takes office, should he win the election in 10 days.

Click here to read the Times' report in its entirety (subscription required).

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