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Donald Trump is finishing what the British started. Despite promises that the White House would be unaffected by the addition of a $230 million ballroom, the historic East Wing has in fact been demolished. The images of the site are so jarring that the Treasury Department has reportedly ordered its employees to stop taking photos of it.
The president’s ambitions for the ballroom are not especially hard to parse: Trump wants to build something big that is undeniably his. “For more than 150 years,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday, “every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties.”
If the destruction of the East Wing is a shock, the money that’s paying for it might be even more of a scandal. The White House, eager to assure Americans that their tax dollars have not been diverted for a vanity project, has emphasized that the ballroom is being financed by individuals and major corporations. Instead of going through a process to obtain and disburse federal funds, Trump simply asked the companies his administration is supposed to be regulating to write checks. The list of donors released by the White House includes the usual deep-pocketed Republicans, such as casino magnate Miriam Adelson and private-equity mogul Stephen Schwarzman, but also a host of companies whose leaders have huge incentives to maintain good relations with an often vindictive head of state. They include telecom giants and the railroad giant Union-Pacific—which needs the Trump administration’s sign-off on a proposed $85 billion merger with Norfolk Southern. (Union-Pacific did not respond to a request for comment.) And then there’s the tech companies—Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta.
If the destruction of the East Wing is a shock, the money that’s paying for it might be even more of a scandal.
The tech companies themselves have been awfully quiet about the project they’re helping to underwrite. Just to make sure they hadn’t missed it, I sent a photo of the demolished East Wing—and requests for comment—to representatives of all of these companies. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed the company had made a contribution but offered no further comment. None of the others responded.
But Big Tech’s donations for Trump’s pet cause come at a time when the industry’s giants have a lot riding on their relationships with the White House. In a marked shift from Trump’s first term, tech leaders have spent most of the last 12 months singing the president’s praises as they navigate anti-trust cases, tariffs, and regulatory hurdles; fight for contracts; and push for policies that benefit their bottom lines. And one particular policy is rising above the others right now: All of these companies have staked their future to varying degrees on artificial intelligence. To accomplish what they want, they need to shore up supply chains, avoid new government restrictions, build a ton of stuff—power plants, transmission lines, data centers—and free up access to water and land. The Trump administration has made a big show of promising to help.
At a White House dinner earlier this year, a succession of tech company leaders took turns thanking Trump for his administration’s vow to cut “bureaucratic red tape” to “build, baby, build.” “Thank you so much for bringing us all together, and the policies that you have put in place for the United States to lead,” Microsoft’s Satya Nadella told Trump. “Thank you for setting the tone,” said Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, another corporate ballroom contributor. (Apple’s build-out is by far the least capital-intensive of the bunch, but it is still both heavily invested in AI and very much not looking to pick a fight with the president, as evidenced by Cook’s recent gift to the president of a 24-karat gold plaque.) “Thanks for your leadership,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who was also in attendance, gushed earlier this year that, “We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning, and that will defend our values and interests abroad.”
Right now they’re on Trump’s good side—Trump has even extended his highest honor, praising the tech moguls for their own construction projects. But tech leaders don’t need a reminder of what happens to people on his bad side—they can just go back to the recent past, when he took several of them to court, and threatened to send Zuckerberg to prison. Meta already paid Trump $22 million, in the form of a donation to his presidential library, to settle a lawsuit earlier this year. In that context, is it so surprising that when the president asked them to cut checks for his pet project, they said yes?
These tech companies haven’t offered an explanation for their donations to the Trust for the National Mall, the non-profit serving as the conduit for ballroom donations, nor have they or the White House disclosed how much they chipped in. (With a notable exception: We do know that YouTube, a Google subsidiary, contributed $22 million as part of its settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the company in 2021.) Perhaps they share the president’s passion for large event spaces. Perhaps they simply disliked the symmetry of the old building.
But taste and decorum aren’t the only reasons why none of the other previous inhabitants of the White House have personally asked the companies they regulate to finance a home renovation. There’s no way to avoid the appearance of massive conflicts when the president of the United States asks the trillion-dollar corporations he’s threatened and cajoled for a favor.
