Who Bought The Presidency?
A newsletter series on the industries who backed Trump’s campaign and will benefit from his plans, at people’s expense.
Billionaire oil and gas CEOs Harold Hamm, Kelcy Warren, and Jeffery Hildebrand all made significant donations to Trump’s campaign.
With less than two weeks until Trump’s inauguration, the Senate confirmation process for his roster of loyalists will be underway before we know it. The confirmation hearings for Trump’s energy picks are already set, with hearings for Interior nominee Doug Burgum, Energy nominee Chris Wright, and EPA nominee Lee Zeldin scheduled for January 14, January 15, and Wednesday or Thursday of next week respectively. This newsletter series will highlight the ties between Trump’s personnel picks and the exploitative industries and their billionaire CEOs who will be enriched by their appointments.
As ProPublica’s editor-in-chief noted after the election, the basic questions to ask under any presidential administration are the following: “Who is benefiting? Who is suffering? What are the unintended consequences?”
The consequences of elite corruption and greed will be all too clear in the coming years. As the transition gains steam, we’ll highlight here some of the elites and corporations poised to benefit most from Trump 2.0.
Who Bought The Presidency? Frackers, For One.
According to an estimate from the New York Times, the oil and gas industry poured over $75 million into Trump’s presidential campaign. This number doesn’t include dark money donations (e.g. from dark money groups like Securing American Greatness, whose leader Taylor Budowich was present at the private meeting where Trump asked the oil industry for $1 billion in donations, and is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff for communications and personnel) and closely related industries like mining. Some of the biggest names in that donor pool include billionaires Kelcy Warren of Energy Transfer Partners, Harold Hamm of Continental Resources, Tim Dunn of CrownQuest Operating, and Jeffery Hildebrand of Hilcorp Energy Co.
Watch out for a piece soon from our Toni Aguilar Rosenthal on the odious agenda of Kelcy Warren’s Energy Transfer, the Texas-based oil and gas pipeline company infamously behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, whose fingerprints are all over Trump’s energy priorities. (The Dakota Access Pipeline has been illegally operating without a key permit for years, after the last Trump administration rammed it through; its long-awaited environmental review is set to be finalized under this coming Trump administration.)
Harold Hamm told the Financial Times that he hand-picked Trump’s nominees for the Energy Department and Interior Department, fracking executive Chris Wright and billionaire governor of North Dakota Doug Burgum, and that Trump comes to him for “advice and help.” Hamm is worth $18.5 billion, and made his fortune from fracking crude oil, largely in Burgum’s state of North Dakota where Hamm holds outsized political power. Hamm and Burgum are friends, and are collaborating closely on Trump’s energy agenda.
As governor of North Dakota, Burgum has been a vocal backer of infrastructure projects in which Hamm’s Continental Resources was invested, including a major carbon pipeline that would transport the gas across the Midwest and sequester it underground in North Dakota—or allow fracking firms like Continental Resources to use it to extract remaining oil reserves from dwindling deposits. This pipeline project is opposed by landowners and environmentalists alike for seizing private land and being a false climate solution that keeps polluting industry afloat. Along with the disastrous climate impacts of prolonging the life of depleted oil deposits, carbon pipelines pose serious threats to human health, with leaks causing asphyxiation and prolonged health impacts, as the “Gassing Satartia” story about a Mississippi carbon pipeline leak explores in frightening detail.
Burgum and Wright are both poised to benefit companies like Hamm’s, with Energy overseeing substantial federal investment in carbon capture projects, and Burgum looking to expand the footprint of extractive industry on public lands and weaken environmental safeguards at Interior.
Tim Dunn is a fracking billionaire and far-right Christian nationalist who ranks among the top ten (publicly disclosed) donors to Trump. In October, Desmog published a deep dive into Dunn’s plan to turn the U.S. into a “theocratic petrostate” that’s well worth a read. Dunn is a board member of the J.D. Vance-endorsed Convention of States, an organization seeking to rewrite the constitution to remove federal regulations from extractive industries including fracking. As Texas’ largest donor, and an active participant in far-right Texan and national political groups, Dunn is poised to have an outsized influence on the incoming administration. For a look at Dunn’s entrenched political power in Texas and with Texas’ Attorney General Ken Paxton in particular, check out our Toni Aguilar Rosenthal’s piece in the Texas Observer earlier this year.
Jeffery Hildebrand, the “richest man in Houston,” owns one of the nation’s largest fracking companies, Hilcorp Energy, which was recently fined $9.4 million by the Biden administration’s Justice Department for violating the Clean Air Act in releasing thousands of tons of super-pollutants into the atmosphere while drilling 145 wells in New Mexico. Hilcorp is one of the largest polluters in New Mexico, as well as in Alaska, where Hilcorp was also recently fined by the Biden administration’s EPA for hazardous waste violations at one of their Alaskan oil fields. Hildebrand, who hosted several fundraisers for Trump and donated hundreds of thousands to his campaign, will be looking for the Trump administration to turn a blind eye as his firm continues to unrepentantly pollute.
Hildebrand is also chummy with Elon Musk, supporting Musk’s controversial efforts to acquire state park land for SpaceX as chair of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, a role he was appointed to in 2023 by Texas Governor Greg Abbott after years of major donations to Abbott’s campaigns. Efforts to transfer federal lands to states and private interests will likely increase under Trump, with House Republicans already making it easier for Congress to sell off public lands in a recent legislative provision.
What To Watch For
As the confirmation process begins to unfold, we’ll have our eyes on the nominees set to influence how land is used and abused, and which resources are extracted for whose benefit and at what cost. These include fracking billionaire Harold Hamm’s personnel picks—Doug Burgum for Interior Secretary and Chris Wright for Energy Secretary—as well as Lee Zeldin at the Environmental Protection Agency, Pam Bondi for Attorney General, and other high-level jobs across the executive branch, Senate-confirmed and otherwise. Democrats in Congress should get nominees to answer on the record about how their past policy positions and personal sources of wealth will affect their decision-making.
Will Zeldin, a climate denier, undermine the EPA’s enforcement actions against climate polluters and weaken regulations on polluting the air, water, and land?
Will Wright, a climate denier and fracking company CEO, disregard the Energy Department’s findings on the harms of exporting fracked gas for the climate and American consumers in order to benefit exporting companies?
Will Burgum, whose state sued the Biden administration for defining conservation as a valid use of public lands, reduce protected natural areas and public access to them as Interior Secretary?
Will Bondi oppose states’ rights to sue corporate polluters for violating state laws protecting consumers?
Trump’s personnel picks will sell out real people in tangible ways in order to enrich themselves and their buddies. As his presidency unfolds, we at RDP will relentlessly point out who is benefitting and who is suffering from the decisions that Trump and his surrogates make, and will push Democrats to do real opposition politics, embracing people’s anger, and working to become worthy of people’s hope.
Image Credits: Harold Hamm (2012) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Kelcy Warren (2017) is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Jeffery Hildebrand (2020) is in the public domain.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we have published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last two weeks:
The MAGA Think Tank Behind Linda McMahon’s Education Agenda
RELEASE: By Stepping Down Early, Michael Barr Preemptively Acquiesces to Trump’s Deregulatory Agenda
Trump's billionaires will have to navigate a complex web of possible conflicts of interest
Thanks! It has been happening for more than a century! See
https://www.legalreader.com/corporate-governance-inflation-the-fed/