As of March 3, six weeks into the second Trump term, Trump has defied his transition team’s public promise to disclose donors that paid for his transition planning.
While previous administrations had made agreements with the departing ones to disclose the names of transition donors within the first thirty days of the presidency, the Trump transition team has not made such a deal. The transition team also declined to say whether or not it would limit contributions to $5,000, unlike previous administrations.
A spokesperson for the General Services Administration, which works closely with presidential transitions, said in a statement that the “the Trump-Vance Transition Team is not required to publicly disclose transition-related donations since they did not accept the services and funds outlined in” the memorandum of understanding that the agency offered the transition last fall.
The New York Times
As a result of this lack of transparency, the details behind the second Trump transition are obscure. Working on an almost entirely private basis, and without the use of government servers, the transition team mostly worked in Florida’s West Palm Beach. Elon Musk was a significant presence in transition work.
Trump Vance 2025 Transition Inc., as the transition is formally known, was registered in Florida as a “dark money” nonprofit that does not have to disclose its donors to the Internal Revenue Service. The funds cannot be used to enrich the transition’s officers, but they can be directed to support political candidates or to pay Mr. Trump’s businesses for services provided.
The New York Times
Information behind the inaugural committee itself is only slightly more transparent. Though the committee has yet to file a report with the Federal Election Commission, several large donors have revealed their contributions. These include Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Coinbase, and Kraken, all of which donated $1 million.
It just so happened that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voluntarily dropped its lawsuits against Kraken and Coinbase, both cryptocurrency firms. This is indicative of Trump’s continued romance with the cryptocurrency industry, which he suddenly came to support, after harshly criticizing the alternative currency in his first term.
