Trump at the Lobbyist Trough

The unifying thread of the team around the president is that they sell their services to corporations for money.

by

I obviously have many thoughts about the worst attributes of Trump attorney general nominee Pam Bondi. She was elected Florida’s attorney general to protect the public from fraud and abuse, and then fired two prosecutors in her office who were doing just that, because the fraudsters happened to be her campaign donors.

But after she was termed out as Florida AG, Bondi made the move of so many elected officials: spinning through the revolving door and becoming a lobbyist, explicitly serving the powerful rather than indirectly doing so as a politician. She joined Ballard Partners, a previously unassuming law firm led by Brian Ballard that shot into the stratosphere in the first Trump term because one of his former clients was none other than Donald J. Trump. Client receipts went from next to nothing to $10 million in Trump’s first year in office, and that was just for domestic clients.

In the last two years of Trump’s first term, Bondi represented Amazon, General Motors, private prison firm GEO Group, and other “Fortune 500 companies.” Many observers were correctly concerned about the closeness between Kamala Harris and her brother-in-law Tony West, the chief legal officer for Uber; but Bondi was one of Uber’s hired guns, a registered lobbyist for the firm. She also lobbied for the government of Qatar, the country where a literally uncountable number of migrant itinerant workers died constructing venues for the 2022 World Cup. And as recently as the third quarter of this year, Bondi was lobbying for a series of sheriff’s associations.

More from David Dayen

Susie Wiles, Trump’s co-campaign manager and choice for chief of staff, also worked for the same lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, and she continued official lobbying while she was running Trump’s campaign. Wiles had 42 different clients, including Republic Services, a waste management firm accused of dumping toxic waste into a landfill; two mining firms seeking to develop resource extraction operations in public lands and watersheds; Swisher Sweets tobacco, which has been attempting for years to block restrictions on its illegal candy-flavored cigars; and Globovision Tele Ca, Corp., whose owner was federally sanctioned in a $1.2 billion money-laundering case.

There are a lot of ways to group the men and (a few) women of Trump’s second term. Many of them, predictably, are authors of Project 2025, that blueprint for authoritarian governance. A number of them are right-wing television personalities, a by-product of the fact that the big boss is addicted to the boob tube. And yes, there’s a troubling tendency for cabinet hopefuls to be indirectly or directly associated with acts of sexual assault.

But the most coherent common thread among Trump’s team of advisers and officials is that they’re a bunch of lobbyists, helping corporations collect fat subsidies or avoid regulations. There are certainly rich people in Trump’s orbit better known for paying the lobbyists than being them, like Treasury Secretary nominee and Soros-linked hedge fund manager Scott Bessent and, you know, the guy who runs Tesla. But rather than those who sign the checks to push right-wing policy, the advisers are more often the ones who receive them. As in Trump’s first term, this election has led to a mass scramble on K Street to find “talent” with MAGA influence. One of the reasons is that the incoming executive branch is poaching the lobbyists with the most connections.

Since his first term, the gulf between Trump’s rhetoric about draining the swamp and reality has grown wider.

Sean Duffy, the nominee for transportation secretary, was a registered lobbyist with BGR Group, where he worked for Facebook’s aborted digital currency Diem; a consortium of large airlines (no wonder they’re excited about the next four years); and the electric-vehicle company Polaris. At Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, Duffy represented bondholders seeking to restructure Venezuelan debt.

Leaders of the energy transition team, former Trump Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and former Trump EPA chief Andrew Wheeler, have histories as an oil and coal lobbyist, respectively, representing companies like Halliburton, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, Murray Energy, and Whirlpool Corp. This was the brain trust that found a fracking executive to run the Department of Energy, and a business partner of oil billionaire Harold Hamm for interior secretary.

The things we’re hearing the most about defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth are sexual assault allegations and ties to Christian nationalism. But besides being a Fox News host, he’s the CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, a Koch-funded astroturf group that’s effectively a lobbyist for conservative veterans policies, which in the first couple of years under Trump spent tens of millions of dollars as an electoral and policy force.

Another astroturf group leader-turned-cabinet member is Doug Collins, the nominee for secretary of veterans affairs. Collins ran an organization called the Fair Election Fund during the 2024 election, which bought paid ads to assist third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein, while hyping up alleged donor fraud in the Harris-Walz campaign.

Brooke Rollins, the new nominee for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is currently CEO of the America First Policy Institute, a landing spot for Trump officials-in-waiting. (The Next Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, also had a chair at AFPI, which somewhat predictably was about education and not housing.) Before that, Rollins served for a decade and a half as president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a right-wing think tank funded by a network of corporations and billionaires to push a doctrinaire conservative policy agenda. TPPF also leads lawsuits through the conservative wormhole cut into the federal court system, ensuring friendly judges for far-right ideas.

The two co-chairs of the Trump transition are Howard Lutnick and Linda McMahon; in a Dick Cheney–like outcome of converting the chairmanship of a search committee into being selected, both are now poised to be in the cabinet, Lutnick at Commerce and McMahon at Education.

Cantor Fitzgerald, where Lutnick is CEO, has long been the Wall Street banker for Tether, a stablecoin that is allegedly pegged to the dollar and allows for easier trading of digital assets, but which has been viewed with suspicion over what assets actually back the coin. Tether also is at the center of a series of money-laundering and other financial schemes. Lutnick has also been accused of taking meetings about transition issues and using them to promote policy favorable to Cantor Fitzgerald and its crypto business, which could really be seen as a case of unregistered lobbying. McMahon’s husband, of course, is CEO of his own company, World Wrestling Entertainment, and McMahon herself has lobbied at the state and federal level on WWE’s behalf, despite denying having ever done federal lobbying.

Robert Lighthizer, who was U.S. trade representative in the first term and will likely get some position—maybe inside the White House as a trade czar—in the second term, was a tax lobbyist with Skadden, Arps, Meagher & Flom in the 1980s, working on the 1986 tax overhaul. That was nearly 40 years ago, but I present it in the interest of completeness.

And of course, it would be hard to close the books here without mentioning Elon Musk, the shadow president who, while not formally a lobbyist, is the richest man in the world, in large part thanks to government contracts and subsidies. Musk is certainly able and willing to use his role in government to protect and preserve his interests, whether to keep his companies out of legal and regulatory trouble or give them advantages at the expense of rivals, particularly in the electric-vehicle market.

There’s nothing really new going on here. In Trump’s first term, he nominated seven former lobbyists to his cabinet in the first three years. But in the interim, the gulf between Trump’s rhetoric about draining the swamp and reality has grown wider. “You have to stop listening to lobbyists,” he told a podcast in August. Maybe he meant that rather than listening to lobbyists, he’d just hire them.

I mean, if you’re willing to sell your services to the corporate monolith, that’s good practice for working with Donald Trump.

A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.

Quality journalism is expensive to produce, and we don't have corporate backers to rely on to fund what we do. Everything we do is thanks to our incredible community of readers, who chip in a few dollars at a time to make our work possible. Any amount you give today will help us continue reporting on what matters to our democracy.

You can help power this newsroom by making a one-time donation or by becoming a member today.