Mom-and-pop shops struggled to obtain PPP money, but Kanye West, Grover Norquist’s anti-spending group, and a number of Trump allies didn’t seem to have any trouble obtaining taxpayer funds.
Last month, the Trump administration backtracked on its earlier vow to disclose the recipients of taxpayer-funded Paycheck Protection Program loans meant to help small businesses weather the economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin claimed at the time that reporting the names of beneficiaries, and amounts received, would risk revealing “confidential information.” But under pressure from congressional committees, the administration reversed again, releasing its PPP records Monday.
It turns out, the White House may have had good reason to want to keep the data under wraps. While much of the nearly $660 billion went to the small businesses it was designed to help prop up, a sizable slice of the pie went to large corporations, organizations with connections to political elites, and—predictably—companies linked to Donald Trump and his associates and allies.
According to the Associated Press, up to $273 million in PPP funding went to the companies of major Trump donors—including Newsmax, the right-wing website whose CEO, Christopher Ruddy, is a longtime friend of the president and a big contributor to PACs that support him. Allies of the president on Capitol Hill and the media also cashed in. The Daily Caller, the conservative news organization co-founded by Tucker Carlson, one of Trump’s favorite Fox News personalities, secured up to a million dollars in taxpayer funds; its sketchy nonprofit arm, the Daily Caller News Foundation, accepted between $150,000 and $300,000. A winery partly owned by Representative Devin Nunes, the Trump ally who recently lost a legal case to a fictional cow, received at least $1 million in PPP funding. So did the companies of several other members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, including that of Republican Representative Kevin Hern—the owner of a company that operates fast food franchises who, in March, pressed Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer to boost the loan sizes available to franchisees, as the Washington Post reported.
Companies associated with top Trump officials also reaped benefits of the program. Multiple businesses, including two hotels, owned by the family of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, benefitted from PPP money. (The Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in New Jersey, named after the powerful Trump adviser’s grandfather and supported by his parents’ family foundation, received up to $2 million.) The family business of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao—who is married to McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader—received as much as $1 million in taxpayer dollars, as well. The trucking company founded by Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and bearing his name got between $150,000 and $300,000. Trump’s own companies did not apparently receive any funding, but several organizations that operate out of properties owned by his real estate company did, as did the law firm headed by his longtime lawyer Marc Kasowitz, who helped defend the president during Robert Mueller’s Russia probe.
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Just as you think the swamp couldn't get more miasmic, the stench simply overwhelms.https://t.co/styjF6bMXN via @VanityFair
— toomas hendrik ilves (@IlvesToomas) July 8, 2020
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