We Have No Idea Where Trump’s Massive Inauguration Haul Is Going

Donald Trump made nearly $240 million off of inauguration donations from billionaires and corporations eager to kiss the ring. 

The New York Times reported that this round of donations is more than double the already record-setting amount of money that Trump raised at his first inauguration, in 2017. 

The three biggest donations—made out to the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee—were from poultry company Pilgrim’s, which gave $5 million; crypto company Ripple Inc., which gave just under $5 million; and Republican donor, businessman, and potential ambassador to the U.K. Warren Stephens, who gave $4 million. Multiple other high-profile companies, including Meta, Amazon, JP Morgan, Target, also contributed to Trump’s massive inauguration haul. The record-setting donations underscore the level of corporate influence within this administration and raise the question of just how much it takes for President Trump to be bought. One million dollars sounds about right, as a whopping 140 people or companies each donated at least that. 

While the Trump-Vance Inaugural Committee is not legally required to disclose how it’ll use its newly acquired millions, some have hinted that the funds will go toward the Trump Presidential Library. 

Not long before Pope Francis passed away Monday, he met with Vice President JD Vance and lectured him about immigrants.

The 88-year-old pontiff seemed to initially snub Vance over the weekend, having his deputy Cardinal Pietro Parolin and the Vatican Foreign Minister Archbishop Paul Gallagher meet with Vance on Saturday. The Vatican described that meeting as “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.

“Finally, hope was expressed for serene collaboration between the state and the Catholic Church in the United States, whose valuable service to the most vulnerable people was acknowledged,” the statement from the Vatican added.

Vance’s office issued its own statement, saying that the group discussed “the plight of persecuted Christian communities around the world” and Donald Trump’s “commitment to restoring world peace”—making no mention of immigrants, refugees, or prisoners.

On Sunday, Vance met with Francis in a brief meeting, telling the pontiff, “It’s good to see you in better health,” and accepting Easter eggs for his children. But the Pope’s official Easter sermon that day criticized hostility toward immigrants and international aid, a trademark of the Trump administration.

“How much contempt is stirred up at times toward the vulnerable, the marginalized and migrants?” Francis said in his address.

Vance, who converted to Catholicism in 2019, has provoked tensions with the church with his defense of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, and even attacked the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in January for assisting immigrants, saying their concerns about the Trump administration were due to the fear of losing federal funding.

“Are they worried about humanitarian concerns, or are they actually worried about their bottom line?” Vance said at the time.

Vance further drew the ire of the Vatican when he invoked the Catholic concept of “ordo amoris”—the order of love—to defend the White House’s mass deportation policies, claiming in January that the well-being of Americans trumped any concern for that of immigrants.

Francis, the first and so far only Latin American pope, responded with a letter saying, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups.

“The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception,” the February letter stated, pointedly criticizing mass deportation.

Francis more explicitly condemned Trump’s mass deportations on an Italian talk show that month, saying, “If true, this will be a disgrace.… This is not the way to solve things.”

Last month, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top officials were exposed for using encrypted messaging app Signal to discuss sensitive information regarding an attack on Yemen—a significant breach of security. Now it’s been reported that Hegseth shared similar information in a second Signal chat, this time with his wife and brother present in said chat.

His response to this second national security bombshell has been to insist that it’s simply a politically motivated smear campaign rather than yet another massive faux pas.

“Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI—all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD,” Hegseth wrote late Sunday night, in response to the Democratic Party’s X account saying he “needs to go.”

A longer statement from the Department of Defense also downplayed the national security concerns of Hegseth’s actions.

“The Trump-hating media continues to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda. This time, the New York Times—and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage—are enthusiastically taking the grievances of disgruntled former employees as the sole sources for their article. They relied only on the words of people who were fired this week and appear to have a motive to sabotage the Secretary and the President’s agenda,” wrote Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell. “There was no classified information in any Signal chat, no matter how many ways they try to write the story. What is true is that the Office of the Secretary of Defense is continuing to become stronger and more efficient in executing President Trump’s agenda.”

Hegseth doubled down again Monday at the White House Easter Egg roll, of all places.

“What a big surprise that a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax; that won’t give back their Pulitzers—they got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies,” he told CSPAN reporters on Monday morning, while Easter festivities went on behind him. “This is what the media does. They take anonymous sources from disgruntled former employees, and then they try to slash and burn people and ruin their reputations.”

While the first Signal chat was created by national security adviser Mike Waltz, the second one was created solely by Hegseth.

“Every day he stays in his job is another day our troops’ lives are endangered by his singular stupidity,” Senator Tammy Duckworth commented.

This story has been updated.

Senator Chris Van Hollen set the record straight Friday on the shameless lies about his meeting with the Maryland man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. 

During a press conference, Van Hollen put to rest right-wing rumors started by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who claimed that Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia were “sipping margaritas” and shared a photo on X of the two men at a table with drinks topped with maraschino cherries. 

The Maryland Democrat said that when they sat down to talk at his hotel, “one of the government people came over and deposited two other glasses on the table with ice, and I don’t know if it was salt or sugar around the top, but they looked like margaritas.”

“If you look at the one they put in front of Kilmar, it actually had a little less liquid than the one in front of me, to try to make it look, I assume, like he drank out of it,” Van Hollen said.  

“Let me just be very clear, neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us. And if you want to play a little Sherlock Holmes, I’ll tell you how you could know that,” he continued. 

Van Hollen explained that if either of the men had sipped from the cups, there would be a gap in the dressing around the rims. 

“There’s no gap. Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” he said. “But this is a lesson. It’s the lengths that President Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on.” 

Van Hollen said that when Donald Trump was asked later Friday about the photograph, “he just went along for the ride.” 

Van Hollen also said that the so-called “margarita-gate” could have been even worse. 

“I should also just say, you know I mentioned the fake margarita scandal, they actually wanted to have the meeting by the side of the pool, right? In the hotel,” Van Hollen said. “I mean this is a guy in CECOT, this is a guy who has been detained. They wanted to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar, which of course is a big, fat lie.”

Abrego Garcia’s experience in CECOT was anything but luxurious: the senator said he’d been kept in a cell with 25 other prisoners. 

Abrego Garcia “said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell but he was traumatized by being at CECOT and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cellblocks who called out to him and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen explained.

Nine days prior, Abrego Garcia had been moved to another detention facility in Santa Ana, where the conditions were better. But Van Hollen stressed that Abrego Garcia had been given no contact with the outside world, and no opportunity to communicate with a lawyer or his loved ones since he was “abducted.”

“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said. 

The Trump administration continues to flout orders from a federal court, an appeals court, and the Supreme Court ordering it to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia, who was deported due to an “administrative error.”

Elon Musk’s latest pick to lead the Internal Revenue Service is being forced out after less than 72 hours, The New York Times reported Friday.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent reportedly complained to Donald Trump that Musk went behind his back to appoint Gary Shapley, a former supervisor at the agency who garnered attention for blowing the whistle on Hunter Biden’s tax investigation, without his knowledge. Trump gave Bessent the go-ahead to oust him from the IRS, which falls under Bessent’s jurisdiction as head of the Treasury Department.

Shapley’s meagre three-day tenure beats that of Anthony Scaramucci, who was famously booted from his role as Trump’s communications director after just 10 days during the president’s first term. It’s also yet another change in leadership for the IRS, which has now lost its fourth commissioner in three months.

Melanie Krause, the IRS acting commissioner before Shapley, was appointed in February but resigned earlier this month after the Treasury Department allowed Immigrations and Customs Enforcement access to IRS data to help deport immigrants. Doug O’Donnell retired amid agency cutbacks and chaos, and Danny Werfel, Joe Biden’s appointed IRS commissioner, resigned on Trump’s Inauguration Day. The agency is facing so much turbulence, it’s starting to become known as a “zombie agency” among tax attorneys, CNBC reported Thursday.

While Trump’s official pick to lead the IRS, Representative Billy Long (who suspiciously just had a six-figure debt paid off by campaign donors), awaits Senate confirmation, Musk and Bessent continue to publicly butt heads.

On Thursday, Musk shared a tweet from far-right activist Laura Loomer slamming Bessent for his reported association with a Trump hater. “Troubling,” Musk replied. It’s a sign that much of the Trump administration is not on the same page, as federal agencies fall apart at the seams.

Friday was not a good day in court for the Trump administration.

The White House suffered not one but two federal court setbacks: Judges paused President Trump’s plan for mass layoffs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and halted the administration’s deportation of immigrants to countries other than their place of origin without due process.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said she was “deeply concerned” about Trump’s attempt Thursday to fire nearly everyone at the CFPB, saying it would violate her earlier court order against the administration’s attempt to shut down the agency. Jackson has scheduled a hearing for April 28 to hear testimony from the officials behind the CFPB’s reduction in force.

“I’m willing to resolve it quickly, but I’m not going to let this [reduction in force] go forward until I have,” said Jackson.

The CFPB’s union estimated Trump’s layoffs could hit as many as 1,700 workers. The layoffs would result in the CFPB’s enforcement division being cut from 248 employees to just 50. The supervision division would go from 487 to 50 and be relocated from Washington, D.C., to the southeastern United States. In some cases, some of the agency’s legally required functions would only have one person assigned to them.

Hours before Jackson’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy issued a separate injunction against the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrants to countries such as El Salvador, regardless of where those immigrants are from.

“Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation,” Murphy wrote in his ruling.

“All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree,” Murphy added.

Last month, the White House cited the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan immigrants that it claims are gang members to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a Salvadoran prison known for human rights abuses, without court hearings for the accused. Many of the immigrants didn’t have criminal records and were considered gang members merely for having tattoos, which isn’t even a clear indicator of gang affiliation in Venezuela.

Trump won’t react positively to the rulings, and may even defy them, as he has done with other court orders. It’s another example of how recklessly his administration operates, taking action without any regard for legality or constitutionality. The question is whether Congress or the Supreme Court will eventually limit his authority as the Constitution demands.

Dr. Mehmet Oz made a particularly useless comment Friday, after being sworn in as Donald Trump’s administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

“It is your patriotic duty, I’ll say it again, the patriotic duty of all Americans to take care of themselves because it is important for serving in the military, but it is also important because healthy people don’t consume health care resources,” Oz said during a ceremony at the White House.

“The best way to reduce drug spending is to use less drugs ’cause you don’t need them, ’cause you’re healthy. And it feels a lot better, as well.”

Oz’s suggestion that Americans stay healthy is so simple, it might just be work—oh wait, no!

The health care programs that Oz now oversees provide coverage for about half of the U.S. population. During his confirmation hearing, Oz refused to say that he would oppose cuts to Medicaid that Trump and Republicans are intending to force through in order to fund an extension on the president’s 2017 tax plan.

Earlier this week, Trump signed an executive order promising to lower drug prices, but in fact handed a huge win to pharmaceutical companies, which will be permitted to set their own drug prices for an additional four years before they can be reduced as part of Medicare’s negotiation program.

Behind Oz stood Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services, who is spearheading the administration’s efforts to “Make America Healthy Again”—and folding his crusade against conventional medicine into the government’s health recommendations.

After Donald Trump has spent months promising to end Russia’s war in Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio just admitted that might not be possible.

“So we came here yesterday to sort of, begin to talk about more specific outlines of what it might take to end a war,” Rubio told reporters Friday in Paris, where he met with European and Ukrainian officials. “To try to figure out very soon—and I’m talking about a matter of days—not a matter of weeks, whether or not this is a war that can be ended.… If it’s not possible, if we’re so far apart that it’s not going to happen, then I think the president’s probably at a point where he’s going to say, ‘Well, we’re done.’”

A reminder: Before he was elected, Trump said he would have the war “settled in one day.”

But in his first three months as president, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have done little to help the situation. They’ve instead cut millions in military aid to Ukraine and berated the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for his supposed lack of allegiance to the United States.

The Trump administration is discovering that putting a stop to Europe’s largest war in decades is harder than it thought, and it’s growing impatient.

“We’re not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end,” Rubio told reporters. “We need to determine very quickly now, and I’m talking about a matter of days, whether or not this is doable. If it is, we’re in, if it’s not, we have other things to focus on as well.”

The president echoed Rubio’s message from the White House Friday, telling reporters he wants to “get it done.”

“People are dying. We’re gonna get it stopped ideally now,” Trump said before flipping the script. “If for some reason one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just gonna say, You’re foolish, you’re fools, you’re horrible people, and we’re just going to take a pass, but hopefully we won’t have to do that.”

Both Rubio and Trump clearly think it’s time to move onto more important things; there are visas to revoke and citizens to deport.

Donald Trump revoked a U.S. citizen’s Social Security benefits in the hopes he would leave the country.

A man who became a naturalized citizen shortly before Trump took office received a letter on February 13 from the Social Security Administration informing him that he was losing his Social Security and Medicare benefits, The Bulwark reported Friday.

“We cannot pay you benefits because you are not lawfully present in the U.S.,” the letter obtained by The Bulwark reads. The man’s English-speaking family appealed the letter, reversing the decision, but his case is yet another reminder that the president isn’t afraid to weaponize the federal programs in his war on immigrants … or really anybody he wants out of the country.

Last week, multiple news outlets reported that the Trump administration entered the names of more than 6,000 immigrants into the SSA’s “death master file,” stripping them of their legal ability to work and receive benefits in the U.S. (Meanwhile, Elon Musk continues to claim federal safety net programs are rampant with fraudulent information, such as incorrect death dates.)

“This is an outrageous abuse of power. It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people,” Nancy Altman, the president of the advocacy organization Social Security Works said in a statement. “Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more.… When Social Security incorrectly declares someone dead, it ruins their lives.”

The Bulwark’s report comes as Trump takes his deportation threats to a new level. The Department of Homeland Security is sending letters to U.S.-born immigration attorneys telling them to leave the country immediately, and last week, Trump mused about the possibility of sending American citizens to megaprisons in El Salvador, a stark reminder the president will stop at nothing to rid the country of his adversaries.

Donald Trump is once again sourcing administration officials from the talent pool at Fox News.

The president announced Thursday night that he had formed a “revamped” Homeland Security Advisory Council, including the likes of Fox News host Mark Levin and former Fox News contributor Bo Dietl.

The council would also include South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster and Florida state Senator Joseph Gruters, who serves on the Republican National Committee and is a close ally of Trump’s.

“Under Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s leadership, HSAC will work hard on developing new Policies and Strategies that will help us secure our Border, deport Illegal Criminal Thugs, stop the flow of Fentanyl and other illegal drugs that are killing our Citizens, and MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

It’s not exactly clear how the “revamped” group will differ from past iterations of HSAC, which has been a fixture of administrations since George W. Bush announced its creation in 2002, to generate counterterrorism strategy and oversee a reorganized department.

Joe Biden’s iteration of the same group had a whopping 33 members, from the private sector and law enforcement groups—but none from TV. The DHS website, which was last updated in January, lists no current members of the group.

Trump has been known to tune into Levin’s show Life, Liberty & Levin, where the ultraconservative attacks the president’s enemies and regularly makes recommendations for his administration. Now he will make those same recommendations in an official capacity.

In November, Levin suggested to border czar Tom Homan that the Trump administration should withhold federal funding from states that failed to comply with its draconian immigration policies. Levin was once described by Rolling Stone as a “bomb-throwing Trump sycophant.”

Bo Dietl is a former detective with the New York Police Department and actor, who served as a contributor on Fox News until 2016, when he it was revealed that he’d been hired to dig up dirt on Andrea Mackris and Gretchen Carlson in an attempt to discredit their sexual harassment allegations against former Fox CEO Roger Ailes.