ABC News gave Donald Trump millions in the hopes he’d leave them alone. Needless to say, it didn’t work. But hey — at least it paved the way for others to try to soothe Trump with cash.

It’s not clear if this is pay-to-play, a protection racket, or some combination of both. In any case, it’s not exactly the hallmark of a functional democracy, and Trump’s first presidency, with its self-dealing and Emoluments Clause violations, is now positively quaint by comparison.

ABC had the dubious designation of being one of the first companies to bend the knee after Trump won last November. The company paid $15 million, earmarked for Trump’s nonexistent presidential library, to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump brought against the network. But if ABC thought that payoff would keep them safe from capricious attacks, they were very wrong.

Last week, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr announced an investigation into whether Disney and ABC — which is owned by Disney — are “promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination.” In support of this, Carr’s letter cites Christopher Rufo, who has made a career out of creating moral panics over diversity, and Trump’s executive order that Carr says “will end the radical and wasteful DEI programs that have spread across the federal government.”

It’s worth noting that (1) Rufo is a bad actor, (2) executive orders aren’t laws, and (3) an executive order about the government does not apply to private companies. But rules are for suckers. Carr’s letter references bland websites like Disney’s “Let’s Reimagine Tomorrow Together,” with vague mentions of amplifying underrepresented voices, as a stark example of discrimination that warrants him turning the might of the FCC on the company.

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The FCC letter also makes the lawless threat to investigate past practices at Disney/ABC. In June 2023, the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent by declaring affirmative action unconstitutional in higher education. That decision did not apply to companies, but conservatives have treated it as blanket permission to attack anyone anywhere they suspect of doing anything less than ensuring that only straight white men succeed.

Even had that decision applied to companies, Disney could not have been in violation of anything before June 2023. A threat to go spelunking through the corporation’s past practices should be met with nothing but mockery, but this administration’s comprehensive weaponization of government would likely give any company pause.

The millions ABC gave Trump were supposed to insulate it from this sort of attack. But the nature of a protection racket is that it doesn’t actually keep one safe. The cost to comply can always go up. The nature of what constitutes compliance can always be changed. And once you agree to pay, you can’t ever really stop, or the nominal protection entirely disappears, and you become an active target.

That’s part of why watching giant law firms give in to Trump is so distressing. It’s not just that it’s morally problematic for them to bend the knee to an aspiring authoritarian, though it is. It’s that doing so both emboldens Trump to go after more firms and because there’s no reason to believe Trump will hold to any deals.

Trump got $40 million in pro bono legal services from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison, along with an agreement to represent clients of any political affiliation. Doing so got Trump to reverse an executive order he’d issued against the firm stripping it of security clearances and restricting its ability to enter government buildings or talk to government employees.

Not to be outdone, apparently, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom decided to pay up before any similar executive order was issued against them. Skadden’s deal requires them to give a genuinely breathtaking $100 million in pro bono services to “causes both the President and Skadden both support,” including absurdly broad things like “ensuring fairness in our justice system” and “assisting veterans and other public servants.”

In other words, Trump gets to dictate how that $100 million gets spent. Skadden also had to engage in self-flagellation over past diversity efforts, promising never to do it again, while at the same time agreeing to fund five Skadden fellows dedicated to Trump’s pro bono wants.

Skadden fellowships allow new lawyers to do public interest work — a thing not typically well-remunerated in the legal world — for two years. Past fellows worked on things that are actually in the public interest, like housing, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ issues, and environmental law. These five new ones will just be there to adhere to whatever ideological grievance Trump has stuck in his craw.

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The shakedown presidency

While some are giving Trump money in the hopes of avoiding scrutiny, others are forking over staggering sums in the hopes he’ll pay attention. Though his mass pardons of the J6 rioters are inarguably the most repugnant that Trump has issued during his second administration so far, the pardon for a white-collar criminal who also just happened to be a large donor is pretty revolting.

Last week, Trump pardoned Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola, an electric vehicle start-up. In 2022, Milton was convicted of defrauding investors by lying about how close the company was to making trucks that ran on hydrogen. The company was never even close, but Milton made millions from eager investors. In late 2023, he was sentenced to four years in prison but has remained free pending his appeal. That was handy, because it allowed him to pump over $1.8 million into Trump’s reelection campaign back in October 2024.

Trump didn’t really offer much of an explanation as to why Milton deserved a pardon, just saying that it was “highly recommended by many people.”

One of those many people likely included Attorney General Pam Bondi, as Bondi’s brother Brad was a member of Milton’s defense team. Milton was also prosecuted in the Southern District of New York, which Trump has long fixated on, leading him to say Milton was actually prosecuted because “they say that the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for president.” It never seems to occur to Trump that not everyone is motivated by personal animus and a bottomless desire for retaliation.

Some understand that the only way to stay safe is to keep the spigot on and the cash flowing. Elon Musk donated over a quarter-billion dollars to usher in Trump’s second term and to get himself installed as the head of whatever DOGE is supposed to be. Musk knows, though, that Trump’s appetite for money and fealty is bottomless. Hence his decision, in late February, to give Trump $10 million — perhaps to the elusive library, perhaps elsewhere, details of the settlement weren’t revealed — to “settle” a lawsuit against X that X was definitively winning.

You’d think letting X become the premier destination for Nazis would have been enough to please Trump, but $10 million didn’t hurt. It also led to the spectacle of Trump and Musk sitting together, shooting the breeze about the settlement in a joint interview with Sean Hannity, with Trump saying that he wanted a bigger payout and Musk pretending he had nothing to do with the settlement but had “left it up to the lawyers and the team running Twitter.”

This is not, of course, how settlements between genuinely adverse parties look.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg also got the memo. After donating $1 million to Trump’s incredibly high-cost but simultaneously low-rent inauguration, Zuckerberg also chose to settle a frivolous lawsuit filed by Trump over being banned from Facebook after the insurrection.

Perhaps that $25 million — $22 million to Trump’s presidential library and the remainder to his legal fees — will protect Meta. Don’t bet on it, though. And the relatively paltry $1 million checks cut by the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google, Toyota, Uber, Microsoft and more will not be nearly enough in the face of the eight- and nine-figure amounts Trump has squeezed out of others.

Trump has learned exactly how much companies figure it is worth to avoid his wrath, and it’s way, way more than $1 million.

Trump 2.0 faces its first high-stakes election night

By Stephen Robinson

There are two special elections today in Florida for seats Republicans vacated to join the Trump administration. These are districts Donald Trump carried by double digits in a state that shifted even further to the right last November, so Democrats hadn’t realistically hoped to flip those seats. Yet Republicans will be sweating it out tonight.

You don’t have to take our word for it though. Just listen to Trump himself.

Read more