Donald Trump has added something new to the practice of extracting money from major donors: fear.
Traditionally, high-dollar contributors write big checks for a mix of reasons: to curry favor, to support their political party, to promote an agenda, to win favorable tax and regulatory policies, to defeat the opposition, to be seen as powerful — a blend of self-interest and principle.
This year, Trump’s own history in the White House, combined with the agenda for 2025 that he and his allies have been putting together, amounts to a warning to wavering supporters.
According to The Washington Post, Trump has candidly warned onlookers that he will turn the federal bureaucracy into an instrument to punish those who fail to toe the MAGA line:
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family.
The events described in the Post story
Trump has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to “forgotten” Americans.
Faced with the prospect of a chief executive prepared to abandon the rule of law for the rule of revenge, many affluent donors — for whom the machinations of government determine bankruptcy or wealth — seem to think they have little choice but to pony up to the self-proclaimed “dictator for a day.”
Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House — armed with the bristling Heritage Foundation playbook, which conservatives are using as a tool to pressure Trump to remain true to the hard-right agenda, as well as long, revealing lists compiled by Axios and The Times of prospective MAGA appointees — is the embodiment of the politics of intimidation.
How so?
At the core of what both Trump and Heritage’s Project 2025 have proposed is an escalation of the power concentrated in the presidency and in the executive branch generally. This includes the politicization of the bureaucracy, whose mission would become, in part, to wreak revenge on Trump’s adversaries and the adoption, throughout federal departments and agencies, of policies rewarding ideological supporters and defunding ideological opponents.
Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor at Princeton of sociology and international affairs, summed up the Trump-driven changes in the politics of raising money in an email: “Most business leaders unfamiliar with autocratic government believe that when they support someone running for office, that person will owe them something if elected, tax cuts, deregulation, whatever the business leaders want.”
But, Scheppele continued, “autocrats turn the tables. Once elected, autocrats use the power of the state to squeeze business.”
In these circumstances, she added, political leaders “can threaten businesses with tax audits, more regulation, even criminal charges, unless they give in to the autocrats’ demands.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, Scheppele wrote in her email,
The Trump campaign has made it clear that Trump is not committed to adopting all the policy and personnel proposals described in Project 2025 or other documents produced outside his campaign.
At the same time, nowhere is corporate acquiescence to Trump more evident than among Republican megadonors who swore after Jan. 6, 2021, that they would never again support Trump, but who are now swallowing their pride, trickling back in obeisance to the leader who betrayed them with his encouragement of the insurrection.
In February 2023, Eric Levine, one of the founders of the law firm Eiseman Levine and a prominent Republican fund-raiser, told Politico:
As if that were not enough, Levine continued, Trump “is probably the only Republican in the country, if not the only person in the country, who can’t beat Joe Biden.”
Less than a month ago, however, Levine sent out a memo to fellow Republicans telling them he has had a change of heart:
Levine is not alone in his return to the Trump fold. On March 29, Josh Dawsey, Jeff Stein, Michael Scherer and Elizabeth Dwoskin, reporters for The Washington Post, published “Many G.O.P. Billionaires Balked at Jan. 6. They’re Coming Back to Trump.”
“As hopes of a Republican alternative have crumbled,” the four Post reporters wrote, “elite donors who once balked at Trump’s fueling of the Capitol insurrection, worried about his legal problems and decried what they saw as his chaotic presidency are rediscovering their affinity for the former president — even as he praises and vows to free Jan. 6 defendants, promises mass deportations and faces 88 felony charges.”
Some examples:
And similarly, “After Jan. 6, billionaire developer Robert Bigelow said Trump had ‘lost me as a supporter. … He showed that, in that particular hour, he was no commander.’” This year, “Bigelow has pledged $20 million to a pro-Trump campaign group and has given $1 million to cover the former president’s legal costs.”
Bigelow was on the host committee for a record-setting $50.5 million fund-raiser for Trump and the Republican National Committee in Palm Beach on Saturday night. The suggested price of admission: from $250,000 to $814,600.
Most of the commentary on the megadonors’ return to the Trump fold suggests that self-interest and greed are the primary motivators. In describing donors’ calculations, The Washington Post wrote: “The financial upside of going with the former president may win out. Trump has discussed further cutting the corporate tax rate, and he toyed in his administration with unilaterally lowering the capital gains rate paid by investors.”
Jonathan Chait, a columnist at New York magazine, is more explicit:
Similarly, Chris Cillizza told readers of his Substack newsletter, “I will now explain to you how these wealthy people overcame their principled stances against Trump as a threat to democracy.”
How?
The Post writers, Chait and Cillizza are right, up to a point. The about-face of these superrich donors is a mixture of greed and terror: terror of sparking the anger of a volatile politician who proudly declares “I am your retribution.”
Just as Trump has cowed congressional Republicans — many of whom privately voice strong criticism of him — with the threat of a MAGA-driven primary challenge, he has turned himself and his agenda into weapons of intimidation for businesses seeking to survive and thrive in a second Trump administration.
A primary goal of business is predictability, if not certainty, based in part on consistent rules, regulations and laws so that corporations can make plans and investments without worrying about arbitrary government interventions based on the revenge-seeking whims of a leader many see as a malignant narcissist.
American businesses are fully aware of Trump’s willingness to govern by caprice, a modus operandi he demonstrated repeatedly during his term in the White House.
In those years, however, he was held back by his own ineptitude, the incompetence of his most loyal advisers and the interventions of his more reasonable aides and key civil servants — a combination that kept him largely in check.
Catherine Rampell summed up some of the most egregious initiatives of the Trump White House in a November 2023 Washington Post column, “Take Trump at His Word When He Threatens to Punish His Enemies”:
Trump’s allies, especially those working on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, are working tirelessly to make sure that if Trump wins in November, he will not be restrained by aides or career civil servants and that instead of taking office unprepared, he will have a complete MAGA agenda from Day 1.
Separately from the report, Project 2025 has been assembling names of Trump loyalists who will take his commands seriously — and not deep-six them — to fill key spots in a second Trump administration, while simultaneously assembling an across-the-board agenda of legislative initiatives, executive orders and regulatory changes running the gamut from anti-abortion policies to a strategy “to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will,” in the words of one of the project’s authors.
Perhaps most important, Project 2025 asserts that “President Trump’s Schedule F proposal regarding accountability in hiring must be reinstituted.”
Schedule F, which Trump sought to initiate by executive order in 2020, would turn the top 50,000 or so civil servants, who are currently protected from arbitrary firing or demotion, into political appointees under the control of his administration. Trump lost the White House before Schedule F could be applied, and President Biden withdrew the executive order creating it.
For corporate America, application of Schedule F would radically escalate uncertainty. Federal officials making decisions ranging from penalties for failed occupational safety violations to initiation of antitrust proceedings, from I.R.S. rulings to the application of sanitary regulations in nursing homes would presumably have to prioritize loyalty to Trump to keep their jobs.
Fear of the consequences of Schedule F is the strongest weapon of intimidation in Trump’s fund-raising armament. A significant campaign contribution might well serve as a useful shield.
“One practical consequence of undermining the civil service is a rise in cronyism,” Vanessa Williamson, a senior fellow in governance studies at Brookings, wrote by email in response to my inquiry. “Usually we think of that in terms of the ‘winners,’ the insiders getting special deals, but it is equally true that cronyism creates ‘losers,’ the business elites that do not get favors or face punishment for their lack of loyalty to the ruling party.”
Trump and others on the American right, Williamson wrote,
Elaborating on this theme, Jasper Theodor Kauth, a political scientist at Nuffield College, Oxford, wrote by email: “Trump’s threats to use state coercion to go after perceived personal and political opponents is evidence of his agenda to disrupt democratic norms.”
Kauth noted that he and Desmond King, a political scientist at Oxford, describe these practices as “disruptive illiberalism” in their 2021 paper “Illiberalism”:
What drives the willingness of wealthy executives to abandon their principled concerns over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 insurrection?
Rawi Abdelal, a professor of international management at Harvard Business School, argues that the combination of “fear and, frankly, naïveté are far more powerful influences than simple greed.”
Abdelal wrote by email:
Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, noted that some of the conservative victories in campaign-finance law have had the unintended consequence of strengthening “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors.”
There has always been, Cain wrote by email, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund-raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”
Until recently, Cain argued, the potential for extortion
Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on donors in the belief that such loosening of the law “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it,” adding: “Trump’s mafia m.o. can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”
While greed and fear are powerful motivations behind the decision to make campaign contributions to a candidate, they are not antithetical. Rather, they reinforce each other, something Trump appears to be acutely aware of.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at N.Y.U., described this dynamic in an email to me, which I will leave as the last word:
