All the donors funding Trump’s ballroom as he tears down the White House

WASHINGTON – The White House on Thursday released a list of all the private donors who have agreed to pay for the construction of President Donald Trump’s $300 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom and the complete demolition of the East Wing, which is now complete.

The donors on the list include CEOs, real estate moguls, many corporations, and otherwise really rich people. Defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton are contributing money to the president’s project, as are telecommunications companies like Comcast and tobacco industry companies like Reynolds American. Tech companies like Amazon and Apple are in the mix, along with crypto companies.

Here is the full list, provided by a White House official:

Trump has boasted that his ballroom is funded entirely by private donors and his own money, not public dollars. But the White House has not shared how much money each of these companies and individuals have committed to give, or what they expect in return.

Some donors were reportedly given the option to have their names permanently engraved in brick or stone from the White House ballroom.

The only individual donation that has been made public is linked to Google’s parent company, Alphabet, which contributes $22 million to Trump’s ballroom. That money comes from a recent legal settlement the company reached with Trump after he was banned from Alphabet-owned YouTube after he incited the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.

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News themezone reached out to every company on the list, and as many people as we could locate, with the same two questions: how much they’re donating to Trump’s ballroom and whether they have any comments about Trump’s destruction of the East Wing (and American history in the process) to make way for his project.

Most did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but some did.

“I can confirm that Microsoft contributed to the ballroom, as publicly reported,” company spokeswoman Kaitlin Haskins said in an email. “That’s all I have at the moment, but if anything changes, I’ll come back.”

T-Mobile confirmed it donated money to the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit that oversees donations to fund Trump’s ballroom. But beyond that, a spokesperson said the company had no say in how those dollars were spent.

“Ahead of America’s 250th birthday, T-Mobile made a donation to the Trust for the National Mall, which partners with the National Park Service to restore and enrich the historic landmarks that define our nation’s capital, like the White House Ballroom,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

“T-Mobile has no role in the use of those funds or decisions related to the construction of the ballroom,” they said. They did not share how much money T-Mobile donated.

A Betty Wold Johnson Foundation employee who returned a phone call to News themezone said she was “not authorized to discuss the donation.”

The woman, whose name we did not learn, seemed to wish she had not called us.

“I have a lot of activity today and a lot of phone calls to return,” he said. “I really wasn’t aware of the nature of this call.”

When asked if the foundation’s president, former US ambassador Woody Johnson, was aware that the East Wing of the White House had been completely demolished on Thursday to make way for Trump’s ballroom, the woman said he “generally doesn’t talk about his philanthropy.”

Johnson, whom Trump appointed as ambassador to the United Kingdom in his first term, also owns the New York Jets.

“I don’t know how familiar you are with the nature of the construction details,” he said before hanging up.

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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Trump is committed to being transparent about donations to his ballroom. He also courted new donors.

“Maybe there are more people who want to contribute generously to this project,” Leavitt said at his daily press conference.

Outside the building, a single protester shouted loudly that Trump had broken laws by razing part of the White House.

““This demolition is illegal,” shouted Suzanne Jordan, a Virginia resident holding a cardboard sign that read: GENEVA. “This demolition is a federal crime.”

She told News themezone that she was a student at George Washington University on 9/11 and had to evacuate the school when the Pentagon was hit by a plane. The images of part of the Pentagon in rubble after the attack, with rescue workers spraying hoses on the rubble, stayed with her, she said, and now she is seeing similar images with Trump’s destruction of the White House.

“The look and feel of the hose on a pile, I feel that too. Like a trigger on the extreme end,” Jordan said. “Today I was thinking about the New Testament. Like Jesus said, ‘Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.'”