NYT:

President Trump raised $239 million for his inauguration festivities in January, a norm-shattering amount fueled by corporate America’s desire to curry favor with a famously transactional president.

The total, disclosed in a filing with the Federal Election Commission on Sunday, is more than double the previous record of $107 million set by Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017. About 140 different people or companies gave at least $1 million to the effort, including blue-chip companies like JPMorgan Chase, Delta Air Lines and Target.

The committee, known formally as the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee, is required by federal law to report the names of donors and the dollar amounts for contributions over $200 to the F.E.C. no more than 90 days after the Jan. 20 ceremony. It is not required to report how it spent the money.

Many of the donations to Mr. Trump’s inauguration were previously announced — such as $1 million each from tech giants like Meta and Amazon — in part because companies wanted it known widely that they were backing Mr. Trump’s formal return to power. But the report revealed a few names not well-publicized, including several friends of Elon Musk, such as tech investors like John Hering, Ken Howery and Keith Rabois, who each gave $1 million. (Neither Mr. Musk, a top presidential adviser, nor any of his companies donated.)

The three largest contributions came from a poultry producer, Pilgrim’s, which donated $5 million; a crypto company, Ripple Inc., which donated just under that; and Warren Stephens, a Republican donor who gave $4 million on the same day, Dec. 2, that Mr. Trump named him as his pick to be ambassador to Britain….

John Martin has posted this draft on SSRN (forthcoming, University of Pittsburgh Law Review). Here is the abstract:

Money in politics is ever-increasing in the United States, and the ways in which it manifests is ever-changing. The 2024 election cycle was no different in this regard, with numerous unique issues in campaign finance having arisen. The election now being over, a retrospection of these newer problems seems due. This Paper provides just that. Specifically, this Paper reflects upon a number of newfound ways we saw money in politics complicate the 2024 elections, and, on a higher level, corrode our democratic processes. Structurally, this Paper is organized as a series of five smaller essays that each describes a particular issue we saw in 2024, contextualizes the issue within existing law, and finally offers some thoughts on how we might address the issue going forward either doctrinally or legislatively.

The breakdown of covered topics is as follows: Part I looks at a phenomenon we saw in the 2024 presidential primaries that I call “cash for donations,” where multiple candidates offered gift cards in exchange for $1 donations that helped them gain a spot on the debate stage. Part II similarly analyzes Elon Musk’s “cash for registration” scheme, in which he offered cash prizes to registered voters in swing states who signed a petition put out by his super PAC. Part III maintains a focus on Musk, discussing his use of X to ban accounts raising money for Kamala Harris’s campaign. Part IV shifts focus to self-funded candidates, in two parts: The first considers Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offering his running mate position to Nicole Shanahan in exchange for her enormous self-funding capabilities, and explores the implications this apparent quid pro quo should have on how current campaign finance doctrine treats regulations on self-funded campaigns. The second section meanwhile examines the rise in self-loaning among federal candidates following the 2022 Supreme Court decision FEC v. Cruz, which struck down the federal limit on self-loan repayment. Lastly, Part V discusses the uncertain future of regulations that limit the ability of “foreign-influenced corporations” from engaging in political spending.

The Lever:

President Donald Trump’s choice for Internal Revenue Service director just had his six-figure debt paid off by campaign donors whose firms have significant, often contentious business before the tax agency he would lead, according to federal records reviewed by The Lever. 

The revelations come as lawmakers call for a criminal probe of how tax credits were used by these donors’ firms — many of which have previous ties to U.S. Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.), Trump’s IRS nominee whose confirmation is pending in the Senate.

In new campaign finance filings, Long disclosed an outstanding personal loan of $130,000 that he had made to his failed 2022 U.S. Senate campaign. The dormant Senate campaign committee had raised less than $36,000 in the last two years, which could have forced Long to absorb the losses on the loan. 

But after Trump named Long to head the IRS, the committee suddenly raked in nearly $137,000 in less than three weeks in January — money that Long then used to remunerate himself, according to disclosure documents filed this week.

“Making political contributions to aid Billy Long seems like a surefire way to ingratiate yourself with the man poised to lead the IRS, especially when we’re talking about contributions to help repay campaign debt that is just loans to the candidate himself and contributions to his leadership PAC,” said Michael Beckel, the senior research director of the campaign-finance reform organization Issue One, who first spotlighted the donations. “People often criticize campaign contributions for being legalized bribery, but in this case, we’re truly talking about money being given to Long to repay himself.”..

I have written this piece for Slate. It begins:

Although it has been more than a decade since judicial and administrative rulings freed the ultrawealthy to contribute unlimited sums to outside political groups, 2024 marked a sea change in the financing of federal elections—and those changes are already spreading to state and local elections, including the upcoming high-stakes Wisconsin Supreme Court race. It’s not just gimmicks like Elon Musk’s offer of $100 to registered Wisconsin voters who sign a petition against “activist judges,” and $100 more for each additional voter they persuade to do the same. Musk and other megadonors have blown past previous spending records in a way that threatens a new American oligarchy.

In the 2024 elections, the top six donors supporting or opposing federal candidates each reported contributing at least $100 million, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Those donors—Musk ($291.5 million), Timothy Mellon ($197 million), Miriam Adelson ($148.3 million), Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein ($143.5 million), Ken Griffin ($108.4 million), and Jeffrey and Janine Yass ($101.1 million)—all exclusively supported Donald Trump and other Republican candidates (with the exception of the Yasses, who gave a nominal $1,500 contribution on the Democratic side). The biggest donor on the liberal side was former New York City mayor and publisher Michael Bloomberg, who gave $64.3 million total, with all but $1 million going to the Democratic side.

We have never seen so many nine-figure donors in an election, and with such lopsided giving. In the 2022 midterm elections, the sole nine-figure donor was George Soros ($178.8 million), with his contributions going to Democrats. In earlier election seasons, donations of this size were also rare: There were two in 2020 (Sheldon and Miriam Adelson and Michael Bloomberg) one in 2018 (Sheldon Adelson), and none before that.

These numbers do not take into account all the spending and contributions by these ultrawealthy individuals (or the amounts given to non-disclosing political organizations). Take the expenditures of the world’s richest man, Musk. Even the $291.5 million figure does not include the value of content on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter), which reaches hundreds of millions of users. Researchers found that Musk seems to have tweaked the platform’s algorithm to promote content favorable to Trump, something quite valuable but hard to precisely value. Nor do these figures include the value of the publicity for his controversial get-out-the-vote efforts in swing states, among them a $1 million a day lottery for registered voters that could well have violated federal law.

The rise of the nine-figure donor raises two fundamental questions: Why is this happening now? And how will this new spending affect American elections and public policy?….

One might pooh-pooh the rise of the nine-figure donor and say it doesn’t matter. In the 2024 presidential election campaign, according to OpenSecrets data, Kamala Harris and her allies raised nearly $2 billion compared with Trump and his allies’ $1.45 billion. Overall, money was not as big a factor in the outcome of the election as other aspects that influenced voter choice, given that each side had ample funding to get out their message and run their campaign.

This minimization of the problem ignores two key points. First, the presidential election is unique in that it always attracts large amounts of money with high stakes and high interest. Money, even from a megadonor, is unlikely to be determinative: Both sides will be amply financed. But this is not necessarily true of other races. When Musk, for example, seeks to spend significant sums to influence the outcome of a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, or when Nicole Shanahan (RFK Jr.’s running mate for president) threatens to fund super PACs supporting Republican candidates to challenge incumbent senators who do not support Trump’s Cabinet nominees for confirmation, money can be much more influential—especially in otherwise noncompetitive general elections in which the real fight is for the party primary.

More important is what the money buys. Even putting aside the possibility of quid pro quo deals, the money secures influence and access. Musk has gained unprecedented access to Trump and unparalleled influence over the new administration through his White House office and activities for the amorphous Department of Government Efficiency, which is cutting federal employees and programs and engaging in the deep mining of governmental data (in many cases on issues with which Musk, the world’s richest man, has a financial conflict of interest). Republican senators toed the line and voted for Trump’s Cabinet nominees potentially out of fear of a Shanahan- or Musk-funded GOP primary….

Axios:

Anyone who thinks President Trump‘s mesmerizing hold over the GOP will slip if his poll numbers slide is missing one of his biggest innovations in American politics:

• The creation of a cash-flush political operation that has raked in around a half-billion dollars — about the same amount the GOP’s House and Senate campaign arms spent during the entirety of the last midterm campaign.

Why it matters: It’s unheard of for a president not running for reelection to raise that kind of money. But the cash is just one piece of a bigger power play that’s arguably the most powerful, well-funded political apparatus ever.

• The day after Election Day, Trump — at a time most presidents-elect are scrambling to get their transitions rolling — started calling major donors to start building an enforcement machine for his agenda.
• “Right now, there’s a huge price to pay by crossing Donald Trump,” said Republican strategist Corry Bliss, who formerly led the Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC. “When you combine a 92% approval rating among Republican voters with unlimited money, that equals: ‘Yes, sir.'”