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The official list of tribute offered donations made to the Trump-Vance inauguration was published yesterday by the Federal Election Committee. While some of these were very old news, the full list was eye-opening (and well-covered in MainFT).
You’ll likely already know by now that heavy hitters like Sam Altman, Tim Cook and Ken Griffin gave personal donations of $1mn, as did Meta, Amazon, Google, BlackRock, and Coinbase. But the full list is very, very long and hard to digest.
Luckily this is what dataviz was made for, so let’s get going.
Most of the donations by count are from individuals. These range from a lowly $500 donated by Kurt Foulds, to the outlandish $4mn given by Warren Stephens. In total, 37 people gave $1mn or more to the inaugural committee, and six of these have either been given a role in the Administration or have been nominated for a role and await Congressional confirmation.
The treemap below displays all of these individual donations, and highlights in red those who have been awarded a US government job, or are in the running for one. We may have missed some and didn’t even bother checking those who donated less than $200k:
Who are these people? East coast old money? Rustbelt Maga diehards? West coast tech accelerationists? Let’s have a look. Matching zip codes from the addresses they registered, we’ve projected these donations on to a map of the United States (although one falls off the bottom, coming as it does from a Mexican residence).
Again, we’ve highlighted folks we see have been given or nominated for jobs in government in red. You can zoom into the map or just hover your cursor over the bubbles to get more information on individual donations:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are big concentrations of donors registered in Florida, New York and California. Because, like Willie Sutton said, that’s where the money is.
But the bulk of the donations by value came from corporate bodies. We count 323 corporate bodies, including trade associations, non-profits and four native American tribes. To make visual sense of all this, we had a go at assigning them into GICS Level 1 sectors. Most of these entities are unlisted, so our efforts are bound to have some mistakes. But here’s how things look as a treemap:
While the $20mn of tech firm donations have captured the headlines, they are dwarfed by the $32mn coming from financial firms.
JPMorgan, Goldman, BofA, Citi? Check.
BlackRock, Blackstone, KKR? Check.
Crypto firms? All the cheques.
Consumer brands like Coke and Pepsi are also well-represented. In fact, we could spend the rest of the day running off lists, but frankly the whole point of the dataviz was to let you explore the data on your own.
Perhaps surprisingly, 29 of the donations — accounting for $13mn — came from firms with a foreign parent. We’ve popped a filter into the top left of the chart above so you can look just at these donations in isolation. They include $1mn from Gotion Inc, the US subsidiary of Chinese battery firm Gotion High Tech — whose articles of association include language to “carry out Party activities” — as well as car companies with foreign parents like Toyota and Hyundai. Maybe the hope was that donations would cause Trump to go easy on them? If so, this looks not to have worked well.
And just like the individual donations, there is a big East coast, California and Florida bias to the corporate donees locations:
The largest single donation came from Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, who gave their address as the headquarters of JBS Foods. According to their website, they are the world’s largest producer of both beef and poultry, and the world’s second-largest producer of pork. While it looks radically unlikely that Donald Trump will be flying to Beijing on their behalf to open up new pork markets anytime soon, the Administration has been so whimsical that it’s hard to rule anything out.
But not all donors made the cut. Just over $6mn of attempted donations were refunded. Because there aren’t that many of them, we’ve popped these all into a single treemap:
These rejects are almost more interesting than the accepted donations, given what they might tell us about where Trump’s team drew a line in the sand.
It’s not immediately obvious to us what differentiates the corporate rejects from the accepteds. Sure Freedom Holding Corp is a Kazakhstani retail broker, but it has a US listing and presumably pays US taxes. Maybe something came up in the due diligence? Hanwha Defense USA is owned by a South Korean parent, but that didn’t stop Samsung Electrics America or Hyundai Motor America from being able to splurge cash. What makes the Catawba Indian tribe unacceptable (Don Jr. doesn’t seem to have any issue with them), while others are fine?
When it comes to individuals, it’s even harder to understand the rationale for accepting or rejecting donations. This is partly because we’re not really sure who these people are.
Is the Wang Tianyi who tried and failed to give money to Trump the same Wang Tianyi who was stripped of his xiangqi grandmaster title following a match-fixing and bribery scandal? We’re not sure, and it looks like no one at the Federal Election Commission could ascertain Wang Tianyi’s address, so there’s no easy way of checking.
And is Justin Malkin the Libertarian politician who ran for office thirteen years ago? Why was his attempt to donate $1mn rejected? It can’t be because accepting the donation would imply that Trump would offer some kind of favour in return, can it? That would be ridiculous.
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