Trump sat down to dinner with about 20 oil executives at Mar-a-Lago in April 2024. Harold Hamm, the founder of Continental Resources, put the dinner together. Trump asked the room to raise $1 billion for his campaign. He called it a deal. He would save them far more than that in taxes and rules once he was back in office. The Washington Post and the New York Times both reported the dinner on 9 May 2024.
The industry paid. Oil, gas and coal companies and their people gave about $201 million to Trump's re-election campaign. They gave another $19 million to his inaugural fund. Those are the numbers in a report Chuck Schumer and Sheldon Whitehouse released on Thursday. Schumer leads the Senate Democrats. Whitehouse is the top Democrat on the Senate environment committee.
Then Trump delivered, the senators say. They put what the industry got back at about $190 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over ten years. That is roughly 900 dollars back for every dollar the industry gave.
The newest rollback landed two days before the report. On Tuesday, Lee Zeldin's EPA repealed the limits on carbon from coal and gas power plants. Zeldin says the industry saves $370 million in compliance costs. The full list of what Trump handed over, and who ends up paying for it, sits below.
