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Money has always distorted U.S. politics, but the current Trump regime has entered new territory with an unabashed pay-to-play setup that’s stuffing the president’s political coffers while enriching him and his family. Donald Trump’s coldly transactional dealings have been on full display as he’s tapped billionaire allies and major corporations to shower his administration with donations to pay for his latest vanity project: a 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom set to be erected over the rubble of the White House’s now-demolished East Wing. Trump has wined and dined dozens of corporate executives and mega-billionaires across industries, from cryptocurrency to fossil fuels and telecoms to tech, as he’s solicited donations for the ballroom. Many corporate donors have been disclosed; others have sought to remain hidden. For all, the game is clear. Many donors have direct business interests that Trump’s decisions will impact. Together, the ballroom donors benefit from at least $279 billion in federal contracts. What’s less apparent is that key donors are paying for Trump’s ballroom with profits culled from enabling the detention and deportation machinery of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Israel’s apparatus of occupation and genocide against Palestinians. Other donors are among the most powerful Wall Street firms and their billionaire executives that are directly benefiting from Trump’s imperial posturing and his deregulatory agenda that’s opening up the retirement funds of tens of millions of workers to private equity profiteers. Wall Street Two Wall Street powerhouses have been identified as ballroom donors, and both are cashing in from their ongoing relationship with the Trump administration. One is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager and a universal top shareholder of corporate capitalism. BlackRock’s assets under management recently hit a record $13.5 trillion, more than the combined GDP of Germany, Japan, and India. In recent years, BlackRock has intensified its private capital spending spree, looking to gobble up data centers, utilities, and other critical infrastructure across the world. In 2024, BlackRock acquired Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), a massive private equity infrastructure firm led by Adebayo Ogunlesi, who sits on the board of OpenAI and, until recently, led the board of Goldman Sachs. BlackRock and GIP made headlines in March 2025 when they struck a deal to acquire a huge global portfolio of shipping ports that included two Panama Canal ports. Referring to the acquisition, Trump boasted to Congress that his administration “will be reclaiming the Panama Canal, and we’ve already started doing it.” The deal was a mutual victory for both Trump, who’s focused on reasserting U.S. imperial power across the Americas, and BlackRock, which snagged a chain of critical global infrastructure while entering Trump’s good graces. Cozying up to Trump and MAGA conservatives appears to be a priority for BlackRock and its powerful billionaire co-founder and CEO, Larry Fink. For a time, BlackRock became a poster child for the conservative backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and against environmental, social, and governance in corporate America. In 2024, for example, Texas pulled billions out of BlackRock funds. But since then, BlackRock and Fink have retreated from past postures of corporate responsibility, dropping diversity goals and pulling back from climate commitments. At a March fossil industry conference, Fink sported a “Make Energy Great Again” bracelet. On November 3, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) sent Fink a letter demanding more information surrounding BlackRock’s donation to Trump’s ballroom, which the White House did not originally disclose. Another big Wall Street donor to the ballroom is Stephen Schwarzman, one of the world’s wealthiest billionaires and the co-founder and head of Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm. Schwarzman is a longtime Trump ally and donor who chaired Trump’s CEO Council during his first term. Schwarzman and Blackstone are major beneficiaries of Trump’s agenda of corporate tax cuts and financial deregulation, especially in two ways. First, Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” preserved the carried interest tax loophole, which allows private equity barons to avoid billions in tax payments. In fact, Schwarzman, who owns luxurious mansions and estates across the world, once compared Barack Obama’s support for raising the carried interest tax rate to the Nazis invading Poland. Even more, Trump delivered a major boon to Blackstone and private equity firms in August by giving them access to trillions of dollars’ worth of 401(K) funds, a move that could supercharge risk and weaken oversight of savings for retirees. Investors in private equity funds are mostly wealthy individuals and large institutions like universities and foundations that have resources to gauge investment prospects and can weather greater risks, unlike many ordinary retirees. Whereas government regulations previously put safeguards between private equity firms and millions of 401(K)s, Trump’s new policy dissolves that boundary. Beyond Wall Street, cryptocurrency firms, which also populate the White House ballroom donor list, benefit from this regulation. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) recently sounded the alarm over Trump’s new policies that push “risky private market funds and cryptocurrencies into Americans’ retirement plans,” according to a press release. ICE Profiteers Major corporate interests that rake in profits through enabling ICE’s deportation machine are also bankrolling Trump’s ballroom. One major ballroom donor is Palantir Technologies, the data management company overseen by billionaires Peter Thiel and Alex Karp that sits at the core of ICE’s surveillance apparatus. Beginning with the so-called “war on terror,” Palantir has benefited from lucrative government contracts across both Democratic and Republican administrations. ICE uses Palantir’s software to integrate and store data on immigrants, collected through a vast surveillance system, that’s wielded to monitor, seize, and deport people. Palantir has been a top corporate beneficiary of Trump’s rule, snagging more $322 million in government contracts during the first half of 2025 alone. This included a $30 million ICE contract to develop its “ImmigrationOS” surveillance platform that will use artificial intelligence to hypersurveil immigrants, select targets for seizures and raids, and track “self-deportations.” Organizers across the U.S. have protested Palantir over its contracts with ICE as well as the Israeli military. Amazon also donated to Trump’s ballroom and attended his fundraiser dinner, while Amazon founder and mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos has placated Trump through gestures like shifting The Washington Post, which Bezos owns, to the right, and paying $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump featured on Amazon Prime Video. As the immigrant rights group Mijente reported back in 2018, Amazon provides critical data storage services for ICE through its Amazon Web Services cloud business. The MIT Technology Review went so far to call Amazon the “invisible backbone” of ICE’s attacks on immigrants. Amazon, as well as ballroom donors like Microsoft and Alphabet (the parent company of Google), continue to benefit from contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, though these are typically transacted through third parties that use their cloud services. In July, Amazon bragged that Customs and Border Protection is “using cloud computing, generative AI and machine learning to secure US borders.” Google, along with Apple, another ballroom donor, have also removed ICE-tracking apps from their online stores. Taken together, these Big Tech ballroom donors help undergird what the Mijente report called the “cloud industrial complex,” the checkered alliance between Silicon Valley and the state, wedded by a massive ensemble of government contracts, that props up ICE’s digital surveillance and data storage operation that guides its daily raids. Other ballroom donors such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Comcast also have ICE contracts. Genocide’s Corporate Backers In July, UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese published a scathing report, titled “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” that named key players composing the “corporate machinery sustaining the Israeli settler-colonial project of displacement and replacement of the Palestinians in the occupied territory.” The report shows that many of the same corporations enabling and profiting from occupation and genocide in Palestine are also bankrolling Trump’s White House ballroom. These include Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon that provide cloud storage and computing for Israel’s occupation and surveillance of Palestinians through the $1.2 billion “Project Nimbus” contract. “Tech billionaires leading Google and Amazon are yet again currying favor with the Trump administration to ensure that their quest for profit and endless expansion of their monopoly power remains unchallenged by the federal government,” a spokesperson from No Tech for Apartheid, a campaign of Google and Amazon workers organizing against the Project Nimbus contract, said in a statement to Truthout. Microsoft, which unsuccessfully bid for the Project Nimbus contract, has also provided technology for the massive surveillance operation that supports the Israeli military’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Albanese’s report also names other tech donors to Trump’s ballroom, including Palantir, with its long “tech collaboration” with the Israeli government and likely supplying of artificial intelligence systems and automatic predictive policing technology, and Hewlett Packard, which Albanese says has “long enabled the apartheid systems of Israel, supplying technology to the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the prison service and police.” Additionally, Albanese’s report also named companies like Lockheed Martin, which supplies Israel’s military with weapons and aircraft, and Caterpillar, which sells Israel equipment to demolish Palestinian homes — both of which are donors to Trump’s ballroom. The report also names BlackRock as a major purchaser of Israeli treasury bonds as well as a top shareholder in corporations like Palantir, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Lockheed Martin, and Caterpillar. The report concludes that BlackRock ranks “among the largest investors in arms companies pivotal to the genocidal arsenal of Israel.” It should also be noted that the Adelson Family Foundation — the philanthropic arm of mega-billionaire Miriam Adelson, an ardent and hawkish Zionist with influence over U.S. policy toward Israel — was disclosed as a donor to Trump’s ballroom. News reports suggest that Adelson supports Israel’s annexation of the West Bank, and she has referred to protesters of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza as “our enemies.” Miriam Adelson and her late husband Sheldon Adelson also influenced Trump’s 2017 decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Organize and Build Power The business that some of these corporate donors to Trump’s ballroom have with ICE and Israeli apartheid are not going uncontested. In the face of rising pressure from campaigns like the worker-led No Azure for Apartheid — which has engaged in protests and banner drops, and even kayaked to the homes of top Microsoft executives — Microsoft recently announced it was halting the Israeli military’s access to its cloud technology that facilitates Israel’s vast surveillance operation. No Azure for Apartheid called the decision an “unprecedented, but insufficient, win for our campaign,” saying it “only cuts a specific subset” of Microsoft’s “cloud and AI services to a specific unit in the Israeli military.” The Guardian reports that Israel may now be migrating its mass surveillance data to Amazon’s cloud platform. “Our bosses are not just aligning themselves closely with Trump and the U.S. empire, but embedding themselves as a key part of the fascist machinery by building the computing tools necessary to power ICE’s detention-deportation machine as well as Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” No Tech for Apartheid told Truthout in its statement. “This is why we believe that tech workers have a moral responsibility in this moment to come together, organize, and build power against the militarization of our companies and the weaponization of our labor. The stakes are simply too high.”
