While running for president in 2024, Donald Trump told oil and gas executives that he would pursue their policy priorities if the industry raised $1 billion for his campaign—and after returning to office last year, the Republican did just that, enriching those invested in fossil fuels, including himself, at the expense of the public and planet.
That’s according to “The Billion Dollar Deal: How the Fossil Fuel Industry Bought the Trump Administration, Cashed In, and Left Americans to Pay the Price,” a report released Thursday by US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Committee on Environment and Public Works Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). “The fossil fuel industry and their allies bought their way into the Trump White House with hundreds of millions of dollars in political donations, after Trump promised fossil fuel bigwigs at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that he’d do anything and everything they wanted, for the right price,” Whitehouse said in a statement.
The report names key figures from “the fossil fuel donor class” and includes their estimated contribution to Trump’s latest election:
- Oil and banking heir Timothy Mellon: $151.5 million
- Energy Transfer executive chair Kelcy Warren: $11 million
- Elliott Management co-CEO Paul Singer: $8 million
- CrownQuest Operating CEO Tim Dunn: $5 million
- Continental Resources executive chair Harold Hamm: $4 million
- Midland Energy founder and CEO Syed Javaid Anwar: $2 million
- GeoSouthern Energy CEO George Bishop: $2 million
- Alliance Resource Partners CEO Joseph Craft III: $2 million
- Hilcorp Energy executive chair and founder Jeffery Hildebrand: $1.7 million
- Sunoco board chari Ray Washburne: $611,000
There’s also former Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright, who is now Trump’s energy secretary and gave an estimated $795,000. According to the report, “Lobbyists say that many CEOs now keep Secretary Wright’s personal phone number on speed dial.”



Surely no Democrats are getting kickbacks from rampantly allowing deregulation of fossil fuels at the behest of the oil and gas industry they would never.