Inaugural Committees Are An Extortion Racket

The trouble with making campaign contributions in an election year is that you don’t know whether your candidate will win. That worry is absent when you contribute to a presidential inauguration. The person to whom you give may or may not feel appropriately grateful, but he or she will absolutely be president. And unlike political campaigns, to which government contractors are barred from making contributions, contractors are free to give as much as they want. The private-fundraising inaugural committee is a recipe for political corruption, and it ought to be outlawed.

The corruption hardly begins with Trump. The standard for legalized extortion was set by Ronald Reagan. Prior to Reagan, no private inaugural committee raised even so much as $5 million. Richard Nixon’s raised $4 million, and Jimmy Carter’s $3.5 million. Reagan’s more than quadrupled that, raising $17.3 million in 1981. Carter placed a ceiling of $25 on ticket prices; Reagan jacked that up to $500. “The best always costs more,” one Reagan official explained to The Washington Post. Writing in The New Republic at the time, (“Let Them Wear Adolfos”), Mickey Kaus observed that the festivities “looked more like an inauguration for the president of the country club than one for the president of our country.”  Four years later, Reagan’s inaugural committee raised $20 million in private money, or about $60 million in today’s dollars.

The next giant leap was Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017. Trump’s inaugural committee raised $107 million, about twice as much as Barack Obama’s inaugural committee raised four years earlier. A third giant leap will come next week. Although we won’t have an official accounting until 90 days after Trump’s inauguration, Trump’s inaugural committee has already raised $170 million in private funds and, The New York Times reported last week, the final tally could easily reach $200 million. The only inhibiting factor is that Trump’s inaugural committee is quite literally running out of access to sell. “Some seven-figure donors have been placed on wait lists ,” the Times reported, “or have been told they probably will not receive V.I.P. tickets at all because the events are at capacity.” So many dollars! So little time!

The only brakes on private giving to a presidential inauguration, apart from a statutory ban on contributions from foreign nationals, are self-imposed. In 1997, Clinton limited individual contributions to $100 but allowed tickets for inaugural balls to sell for as much as $3000. In 2009, Obama’s inaugural committee refused all contributions from corporations, PACs, unions, and lobbyists, and imposed a $50,000 cap on individual contributions. Four years later, Obama tossed aside these prohhibitions save the one about lobbyists. The bulk of his donors remained individuals, but nine corporations made contributions, two of them (Microsoft and Chevron) of $1 million or more. 

Trump followed the same no-lobbyist rule for his 2017 inauguration but raised much, much more. Trump raked in 48 contributions of $1 million or more, including $5 million from Sheldon Adelson. More than 200 of Trump’s inaugural committee’s contributors were corporations, 63 of them government contractors. Of these 63 government contractors, seven contributed $1 million or more, with AT&T topping the list at $2.1 million. The dam had burst.

The money-and-politics nonprofit Open Secrets noted in a 2017 report that several of the 63 government contractors that contributed to Trump’s inauguration brought in significantly more business during the following year. Lockheed Martin, which gave $1 million, saw a 14 percent increase in government business; the private prison firm CoreCivic, which gave $250,000 through a subsidiary, saw a 935 percent increase. (Granted, Trump didn’t always stay bought; he spent much of his first administration denouncing AT&T because it owned CNN, at one point even calling for an AT&T boycott.)

In years past, corporations have tended to stay silent about their inaugural donations until April, when the government makes public every contribution of $200 or more. This year, however, Trump is fairly blunt about running a protection racket (“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”), so corporations are more vocal, fearing their contributions might otherwise escape the jefe’s notice. 

The Nader-affiliated nonprofit Public Citizen tallied a $5 million pledge from the crypto firm Ripple, plus $1 million donations from the crypto firms Coinbase, Moonpay, and Kraken. According to The Washington Post, Trump plans on his first day in office to revoke a Biden policy requiring banks holding crypto to record them as liabilities. Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and OPEN AI’s Sam Altman have all given Trump’s inaugural committee $1 million; all of them have regulatory business before the incoming administration. Other members of the $1 million club include Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Ondo Finance, all fighting off assorted banking regulations.

There have been some calls on Capitol Hill for the imposition on inaugural committees of contribution limits, a ban on contributions from government contractors and lobbyists, a ban on contributions from corporations, and so on. These all make excellent sense. Corporations are already barred explicitly from contributing to ceremonies related to the swearing-in of any member of the House of Representatives or (more indirectly) the Senate.  Similar restrictions apply to elected officials in various states and localities. In the District of Columbia, where local government is seldom judged less corrupt than the federal government, nobody’s allowed to give more than $4000 to help celebrate the inauguration of a new mayor. Why can’t we have rules like that for presidents?

Better yet, we could outlaw inaugural fundraising committees altogether. The corporate world might welcome being freed from this quadrennial shakedown. The swearing-in, the congressional luncheon, and the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue are all paid for by the federal government. Do we really need more pomp than that? In 2020, amid the Covid epidemic, the inaugural balls were cancelled. I didn’t miss them. Did you?

But what about tradition, some will cry. What about history? Here’s some history. In 1801, Washington, D.C. saw its first presidential inauguration; the first two presidents had been inaugurated in New York City and Philadelphia. Thomas Jefferson walked from his boarding house at New Jersey Avenue and C Street to the Senate, where Chief Justice John Marshall swore him in. Jefferson gave his inaugural speech (“We are all republicans, we are all federalists”) then ambled back to his boarding house and ate his dinner. One of the diners there offered him a seat closer to the fireplace, but Jefferson said no thanks, I’m good. He wouldn’t move into the White House for another two weeks. If that suited the sage of Monticello, it should suit us all.