Trump’s $1bn pitch to oil bosses ‘the definition of corruption’, top Democrat says
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse tells Guardian ‘quid pro quo is very evident’ amid investigation into Mar-a-Lago meeting in April
Mon 3 Jun 2024
First published on Mon 3 Jun 2024 The Guardian
Donald
Trump’s brazen pitch to 20 fossil-fuel heads for $1bn to aid his
presidential campaign in return for promises of lucrative tax and
regulatory favors is the “definition of corruption”, a top Democrat
investigating the issue has said.
“It certainly
meets the definition of corruption as the founding fathers would have
used the term,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said in an interview about
Trump’s audacious $1bn request for big checks to top fossil-fuel
executives that took place in April at his Mar-a-Lago club.
Whitehouse
added: “The quid pro quo – so called – is so very evident … I can’t
think of anything that matches this either in terms of the size of the
bribe requested, or the brazenness of the linkages.”
Whitehouse
and his fellow Democrat Ron Wyden have launched a joint inquiry, as
chairs of the Senate budget and finance panels respectively, into
Trump’s quid-pro-quo-style fundraising, which already seems to have
helped spur tens of millions in checks for a Trump Super Pac from oil
and gas leaders at a 22 May Houston event.
The
two senators have written to eight big-oil chief executives and the head
of the industry’s lobbying group seeking details about the Mar-a- Lago
meeting, as has representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the
oversight and accountability committee, who has begun a parallel
investigation into the pay-to-play schemes that Trump touted to big oil
leaders.
Amplifying those concerns, former
Federal Election Commission general counsel Larry Noble said that
Trump’s unusually aggressive money pitch “violates the letter and
spirit” of campaign-finance laws, and a veteran Republican consultant
called it “blatant pay to play”.
In a separate
fossil-fuel inquiry, Raskin and Whitehouse released a joint report in
April into long-running big-oil disinformation campaigns to undercut the
enormous threats posed by global warming, which Trump has falsely
labelled a “hoax”, and last week urged the justice department to
investigate big-oil tactics to deceive the public.
Trump
boasts a lengthy record of rejecting scientific evidence about the
links between fossil-fuel usage and climate change: he has pushed a
litany of bogus climate claims, including that windmills cause cancer
and that electric cars are “bad” for the environment, while promising to
end tax breaks for EVs if he wins this fall.
Further,
in a major rebuke to environmental advocates and international efforts
to curb global warming, Trump in 2017 announced the US was pulling out
of the Paris agreement to limit climate change, a much-criticized move
that Joe Biden reversed.
Trump’s “drill, baby,
drill” mantra and his deep animosity toward alternative energy sources
have been part of his fundraising pitches to oil and gas moguls,
triggering alarm about the dangers of another Trump presidency.
“The
totality of … Trump, the fossil-fuel industry and a [conservative
thinktank] Heritage Foundation blueprint advocate will put a dagger
through efforts to avoid catastrophic warming,” said Joe Romm, a senior
research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science,
Sustainability and the Media.
“Trump promises
to undo every constraint on global warming. Trump has pushed more lies
and disinformation about climate change than anyone ever has.”
Other climate scholars say Trump’s climate denialism is the culmination of years of fossil-fuel propaganda.
“Trump
is an apotheosis of decades of denial, not only on the part of the
fossil-fuel industry, but also by other industry allies, including
now-certain billionaires, to deny the reality of the harms of
unregulated, or very poorly regulated, capitalism,” said Naomi Oreskes,
the co-author of Merchants of Doubt and a Harvard historian of science.
“Donald Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of this rewriting of history, culminating in the big lie that he won the 2020 election.”
Trump’s
strong embrace of climate-change denialism and his pro-big-oil policies
were underscored by his aggressive $1bn pitch at Mar-a-Lago, which drew
CEOs from giants such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, and the fracking
multibillionaire Harold Hamm, the founder of Continental Resources, as
the Washington Post first reported.
Hamm, an
early Trump backer in 2016 and 2020 who took months before helping
Trump’s current presidential bid, joined with two other industry CEOs to
host a Super Pac bash in Houston that reportedly raised $40m on 22 May
from attendees who paid at least $250,000 each to hear Trump promise
more fracking and more pipelines if he wins.
Trump’s
full-court press for fossil-fuel funds and political backing was
palpable at an industry conference in North Dakota earlier in May, where
Hamm surprised attendees by announcing Trump would join them via a
video which featured bogus claims about the health of energy companies
and the economy.
“Under ‘Crooked Joe Biden’,
the American energy industry is under siege, it’s under crisis. [Biden]
has made clear that he wants to abolish your industry and, with it,
destroy our economy and send us into a new dark age of blackouts,
poverty and de-industrialization,” said Trump.
A view of an Exxon gas station in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
The
spotlight on Trump’s ardent pursuit of oil and gas donations comes
after Biden championed major new regulatory, tax and spending measures
to reduce global warming in a sharp break with Trump policies past and
present.
Ironically, even as Biden succeeded in
accelerating spending for green energy, and imposed new regulations on
fracking on US lands and a moratorium on natural gas exports, oil and
gas production in the US reached new highs in 2023 and major companies
notched healthy profits.
Still, the oil and gas
industry has been ponying up funds for Trump’s campaign faster than it
did in 2020, according to the nonpartisan OpenSecrets group, which
tracks money in politics.
The oil and gas
industry has donated $7.3m to Trump’s campaign thus far, or more than
three times the amount it gave at this point in 2020, OpenSecrets data
shows.
Further, some industry titans have
donated six- and seven-figure checks to a Trump Super Pac. Texas oilman
and multibillionaire Tim Dunn gave $5m to Trump’s Make America Great
Again Pac this year, and Hamm kicked in at least $200,000 last fall.
Campaign-finance watchdogs and some Republican veterans are dismayed by Trump’s fundraising tactics.
“Trump
views everything as a transaction, so I’m not surprised,” said ex-GOP
representative Dave Trott. “Any other politician who made these
statements would be deemed dead on arrival because they’d be viewed as
corrupt.”
Campaign-finance experts see other dangers in Trump’s heavy-handed fundraising appeals, which he links to favors.
“When
wealthy special interests, like the oil and gas industry, have special
access to candidates, and mechanisms to give them enough money to
control their policy choices, everyday voters suffer,” said Shanna
Ports, the Campaign Legal Center’s senior legal counsel for campaign
finance.
“Trump’s request to oil executives is a
troubling illustration of the quid pro quo corruption and
pay-to-play-style politics that federal campaign laws are meant to
prevent. Federal law includes strict contribution limits and bans
corporate contributions precisely so candidates do not trade policy
favors for campaign cash.”
Ports stressed that
“candidates are forbidden from soliciting contributions that would break
these laws – a prohibition that Trump may have violated”.
Likewise,
Noble, the former Federal Election Commission general counsel, said
Trump’s appeals for massive donations from oil and gas bigwigs [are]
“pretty blatantly offering policy favors in exchange for large
contributions”.
Little wonder, then, that top
Senate and House Democrats are inquiring into whether Trump’s bald $1bn
ask of big oil moguls broke campaign finance laws, as well as big oil’s
long track record of spreading disinformation about global warming.
In
Whitehouse and Raskin’s joint letter to the US attorney general,
Merrick Garland, urging the DoJ to investigate big oil’s history of
climate change disinformation, they drew parallels with the tobacco
industry’s years of disinformation about the dangers smoking poses to
human health.
“The DoJ is well situated to
pursue further investigation and take any appropriate legal action, as
it has in similar cases involving the tobacco and pharmaceutical
industries,” they wrote.
Looking ahead to the
November election, climate change experts predict another Trump
presidency would decimate efforts to curb global warming.
“If
Trump is elected and does what he has been saying and the fossil fuel
industry wants, that would be the ruin of the United States and the
world,” Romm, of the University of Pennsylvania, warned.
“Trump
wants to roll back” the ambitious climate change steps and spending
that the Biden administration has initiated, Romm added, saying: “We
have dawdled a very long time on climate change. We need very sharp
reductions. We can’t afford four years focused on raising emissions.”