Trump's Trials - Trump's biggest ballroom donors revealed: who are they?

Episode Date: October 16, 2026

NPR's Steve Inskeep speaks with Washington Post investigative reporter Sarah Blaskey about new documents obtained by the Post that detail donors to the White House ballroom project.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

I'm Scott Detrow, and this is Trump's terms from NPR. Every episode, we bring you one story from NPR's coverage of the Trump administration with a focus on actions and policies that take the presidency into uncharted territory. Here's the latest from NPR. I'm Stevenskeep in Washington, D.C. When President Trump demolished the east wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom, he said who was going to pay for it. Quote, 100% by me and some first.

friends of mine. A Washington Post investigation has found a list of all the private donations for the ballroom so far, and some of the biggest ones came from Apple, Navidia, and Lockheed Martin. Sarah Blaskey is one of the post reporters on that investigation. She's on the line. Good morning. Good morning. Okay, so what is the secret document, as you describe it in your headline, that you're reading from here? So this is a spreadsheet that's used internally by the Ballroom fundraising campaign to track donations. and pledged donations to this. And all in all, it's got about $333 million of donations logged on it,

principally from about 57 major donors. The top donations are $25 million by Apple, Nvidia, as you just mentioned. But there are others as well. You know, this list, a lot of the names were known, but not all of them. The White House released those names last year. but this list also has the names of companies who actually requested to remain anonymous. Oh, that's very interesting. There's like a separate category for the people who don't want their contributions to be known. Do these companies have some kind of business with the federal government?

Almost all of them are subject to federal regulations in some way, either through the need to have agencies approve mergers or acquisitions or to, in Vindia's case, sell chips to China. And in one case, there is the daughter of a man who was actually pardoned for a crime by President Trump after his daughter made the first payment on one of these donations. I want to sort that through and make clear what you think is happening or what is not. Is there in any case a quid pro quo where someone is explicitly giving money for the ballroom because they want something from the president? I want to be clear that nothing that we have seen so far makes that explicit.

We have no evidence of a quid pro quo. Simply put, it's a bunch of companies and individuals on this list who have business in front of the government or sometimes even government contracts at the time that they're making these donations. But there is no evidence that something was given and gotten in return. We just don't know. Are we then describing the way that Washington influence more commonly works? They are doing business with the government and someone calls up and says, would you like to contribute to this project and the answer becomes self-evident?

In some ways, this is very much like campaign fundraising, right? This is a type of political donation in a way. The difference is corporations can't give to individual politicians for the most part for their political campaigns. In this case, we have corporations giving unlimited, amounts, in some cases, entirely secrecy. There are no transparency rules around this kind of giving. And it's going into an account funneled through a couple of intermediaries, an account that the president directly controls himself. How has the administration responded to your reporting? The administration has not denied the list or anything like that. They have called the donors

patriots, people dedicated and companies dedicated to making America great again. And they've pointed out that, you know, basically they feel like they can't win. If they fund this ballroom through private donations, then people will complain. People complain. Or tax dollars also. There'll be another concern. Absolutely. Washington Post investigative reporter Sarah Blaskey, thanks so much for your reporting. Really appreciate it. Thank you. And before we wrap up, a thank you to our NPR Plus supporters who hear each show without sponsored messages and, of course, who help protect independent journalism. If you are not a supporter yet, you can visit plus.npr.org to find out how you can get a ton of podcast perks across dozens of NPR shows, like bonus episodes, exclusive merchandise, and more. Again, that's plus.npr.org.

I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's Terms from NPR.