Democracy watchdogs want to know the identities of people paying exorbitant fees to attend private dinners with President Donald Trump at his exclusive resort home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
While the existence of such pay-to-play dinners has been known about since reporting by Wired earlier this month, the events continue, including a $1 million per plate dinner over the weekend, which included an appearance by Trump's top lieutenant, the world's richest man and far-right ideologue Elon Musk.
According to Wired's more recent reporting on the latest high-priced "candlelight" gathering at Mar-a-Lago, the invitation asked "prospective guests to spend $1 million per seat" and "Musk, whose so-called Department of Government Efficiency( DOGE) has spent the last six weeks ransacking federal agencies, sat next to Trump at the dinner."
In response, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday demanded Trump "release the guest list of the Million Dollar-a-Plate candlelight dinners," speculating that any one of the wealthy attendees could be "government favor-seekers such as federal contractors or the CEOs of companies previously under investigation" before the Trump administration "stopped enforcement" or otherwise intervened.
"This exorbitant level of payment for presidential access raises serious concerns about the possibility of corruption by candlelight," said Jon Golinger, a democracy advocate for the group. "The American people have a right to know who was there and whether the Million Dollar Dinner menu for fat cats included a deep dish of juicy government contracts, a side of tasty tax breaks, or a sweet dessert of ending investigations and enforcement actions against their companies."
According to the reporting, the invitations for Saturday night's dinner—which was not placed on the president's official calendar—were sent by Make America Great Again Inc., a Super PAC aligned with the president, which spent an estimated half billion dollars supporting his 2024 run. "Donald J. Trump is appearing at this event only as a special guest speaker and is not asking for funds or donations," the invitation stated, though exclusive access to the president was the clear intent and troubling to those concerned about high-level corruption.
As Hafiz Rashid writes for The New Republic:
Trump holding fundraising dinners only two months into his presidency is historically unusual. Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, told Wired that he “can't recall a sitting president in the first weeks of his administration asking for millions of dollars in fundraising."The concern is less about fundraising and more about access and influence. People hoping to get favorable treatment view it in their interest to donate money to Trump," Moynihan said.
Why wasn't this dinner on the White House's schedule? Perhaps Trump didn't like the attention given to the previous one, or there was something else going on. Mar-a-Lago is the site of many of Trump's ethically questionable actions, including one-on-one meetings with business leaders who are willing to pay him $5 million for the privilege. Perhaps Trump wants his moneymaking schemes to get as little attention as possible.
For Golinger of Public Citizen, the secretive dinners—where fabulously wealthy people have exclusive access to the president that working-class Americans could never hope for—is part of a much larger and nefarious effort by the rich and powerful to further increase their stranglehold on elected officials, a process which has only become easier with the loosening of campaign finance laws, including the 2010 Citizens Uniteddecision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
"These pay-to-play dinners are only possible because of Citizens United and show how desperately we need to fix it," Golinger said. "These dinners demolish the fiction of independent expenditures that the Supreme Court relied on 15 years ago to justify its Citizens United decision, which abolished reasonable limits on campaign spending."