Despite promising transparency on the president’s planned White House ballroom, the Trump administration has withheld the identities of several donors – among them individuals who conducted business with the administration, The New York Times reported Saturday.
“The rush of major business interests to fund a pet project of Mr. Trump’s has reinforced a perception in corporate America that the ballroom is a way to curry favor with, or seek protection from, a president who has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to use the levers of government to help allies and punish foes,” wrote Times reporter Kenneth Vogel.
President Donald Trump’s proposed ballroom – a 90,000 square-foot luxury event space that saw its price increase from $200 million to $300 million, and has been designed in a “hurried process” – is completely funded by donors in the private sector, with the White House releasing a list last month of its donors.
Staff at the Times, however, uncovered that several notable names and entities were omitted from the list, including the investment company BlackRock, which donated $2.5 million toward the project and is currently hoping to claim a stake in the Panama Canal, something the Trump administration would likely have to approve.
A major investor in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is another donor to Trump’s ballroom omitted from the White House’s list, who could personally stand to benefit from the Trump administration keeping the social media app accessible to Americans, as was the company Nvidia, which could stand to reap significant revenue were the Trump administration to ease its tariffs on China.
“Ethics experts have raised concerns about the donations, including the possibility that they could lead to special treatment for donors or test the bounds of a prohibition on federal agencies accepting gifts from private sources,” Vogel wrote.
The White House ballroom is currently behind schedule, with the project originally slated to break ground in September. Its construction also saw the destruction of the White House’s East Wing, images and videos of which have stunned critics across the political spectrum.