As President-elect Donald Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, corporations and their executives are vying to get on his good side, with some companies donating seven-figure sums to his inauguration.

Silicon Valley giants like MetaAmazon, Uber and OpenAI have contributed at least $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund. As The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing donors and people familiar with the matter, companies that previously condemned the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and vowed to reconsider support for politicians who rejected the 2020 election results — like Ford, Goldman Sachs and AT&T — have similarly made large contributions to Trump’s 2025 inauguration. (A Mother Jones report last year found several corporations, including AT&T, gave money to at least one election-denying lawmaker during the 2022 election cycle after promising to pause contributions to such officials. Neither NBC News nor BLN has independently verified the Journal and Mother Jones reports.)

“People just really want to move forward and move on. The election results were very clear,” a representative at one of the companies mentioned in the Journal report told the outlet. The Journal did not specify which company employs the representative.

The donations to Trump’s inauguration have come at such furious pace that his inaugural committee is on track to raise more than $150 million, ABC News reportedciting sources familiar with the matter. That amount would dwarf the $62 million President Joe Biden’s inaugural fund raised in 2021 and surpass the $107 million in contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017.

Donations to inaugural committees are not restricted by federal law. With Trump expected to make drastic changes to federal policies that oversee a host of industries, several corporate executives — including Amazon’s Jeff BezosMeta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Tim Cook — have already paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago for some face time with the president-elect. They also likely see these corporate contributions as a chance to generate even more goodwill with the incoming president, whose approach to politics has been more nakedly transactional than most.

Clarissa-Jan Lim

Clarissa-Jan Lim is a breaking/trending news blogger for BLN Digital. She was previously a senior reporter and editor at BuzzFeed News.

Alarm bells sounded last week when Vice President-elect JD Vance and Trump adviser Elon Musk praised the far-right German party Alternative for Deutschland (AfD)just weeks before that country’s snap national elections are scheduled to take place.

“Only the AfD can save Germany,” Musk posted on X, prompting backlash from conservative and mainstream German leaders and the global Jewish community about a key Trump adviser’s endorsement of a party that has flirted with Nazi and white supremacist slogans and espoused dehumanizing and hateful rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. In the wake of the criticism, Musk doubled down, writing the next day that “AfD is the only hope for Germany.”

Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions.

Vance’s more tacit endorsement for AfD came in the form of a post responding to claims that AfD is dangerous. “It’s so dangerous for people to control their borders,” Vance tweeted sarcastically Saturday, implying support for the party’s anti-immigration positions. “So so dangerous. The dangerous level is off the charts.”

Make no mistake: It is extremely dangerous to have an American vice president-elect and a core Trump adviser voice support for the AfD, therefore normalizing very extreme political positions. The AfD has called for mass deportationsargued that children with disabilities should be removed from regular schoolsand runs social media ads blaming immigrants for crime and sexual violence. One anti-immigrant ad run by the AfD showed the belly of a pregnant white woman with the phrase “New Germans? We’ll make them ourselves.” Another campaign billboard used a 19th century painting of a slave market — depicting a nude, white woman having her teeth inspected by turban-clad, brown men — to warn that Europe could become “Eurabia,” a reference to a conspiracy theory favored by white supremacists.

State-level German domestic intelligence authorities formally monitor some local branches of the AfD as extremist organizations that are working against German democracy. One of the party’s regional leaders has been fined multiple times by German courts for using a banned Nazi phrase“Everything for Germany” (Alles für Deutschland), prompting another politician to refer to the AfD itself as a “Nazi” party earlier this year.

Even other European far- right parties have disavowed the party as too extreme. In May, the far-right coalition in the European Parliament expelled the AfD after its leading candidate stated that not all Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, the guards in World War II concentration campus) were criminals. On Dec. 20, an AfD supportera doctor and self-described “former Muslim” who was angry at the “Islamification” of Germany, drove his car into a Christmas market in Magdeburg, killing five, including a 9-year-old girl, and injuring dozens.

The overall risk of an AfD victory in the upcoming February snap election is very low. Most Germans view the party negatively, and thousands have marched in protest of its normalization of racist and xenophobic rhetoric. Still, the AfD has steadily gained voters, although it’s currently polling in second place nationally (with 19% support), trailing a conservative alliance that is widely expected to win.

The bigger risk is the normalization of democratic interference that falls outside any system of checks and balances.

Musk has already demonstrated that his social media engagement can shape political outcomes. In the weeks before and after the U.S. presidential election, he used his platform X to help amplify false election claims and push his preferred Cabinet picks for Trump’s administration. Vance has used X and other public venues to describe professional women who prioritize careers over children as choosing a “path to misery,” deride Democratic leaders as “childless cat ladies,” share widely debunked claims about immigrants eating pets in Ohio, and argue that American men have suppressed their masculinity.

We now have two key incoming administration officials using a private social media platform to tacitly or explicitly endorse an extreme foreign political party in ways that could impact a foreign election and geopolitics more broadly.

That should worry us all. America’s founding fathers sought to build a system of checks and balances to ensure that no single arm of government could operate without constraint or accrue too much power. But those founders were unable to imagine a world in which the most influential axes of power might not be in any single branch of government, but in privately-owned virtual platforms with unimaginable global reach.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss

Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, where she directs the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). Her most recent book is “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right.”