The Washington Post recently had some interesting additional insight into the various “pay to play” shenanigans related to Trump’s $330 million ballroom. They got a hold of a broader donor list, noting that Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount. As did GOP donor mainstay the Adelson family. Crypto companies are also well represented.
I was more interested in the until-now undisclosed contributions by billionaire Charles Ergen, co-founder and chairman of telecommunications company Dish Network. Ergen committed $25 million to the venture, but didn’t want his help publicized. The donations came as Ergen was being forced by the admin to offload spectrum assets to AT&T and Elon Musk by FCC boss Brendan Carr:
“In December, with the sale still pending, Ergen committed $12.5 million to Trump’s ballroom, according to the donation list. Records indicate Ergen requested that the source of the donation remain anonymous. The donation has not been previously reported.
He committed another $12.5 million in February, according to the list.”
I covered Carr’s dubious “investigation” into Dish network early last year. Carr, who never really engages in meaningful corporate oversight of telecom misbehaviors, suddenly and uncharacteristically put pressure on Dish for not meeting build out goals for its 5G network. But Carr knew Dish would lag on the build because the whole effort was a regulatory head fake concocted by the first Trump administration (more on that later).
The Washington Post reveals that the second Trump administration leveraged the “investigation” into Ergen to convince him he needed to pony up the ballroom cash:
“Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote Ergen in May to inform him that the agency had begun investigating EchoStar. Carr threatened to yank government licenses that were critical to the survival of the business, accusing EchoStar, owner of Dish Network, of not following through on promises it had made to upgrade its cellphone network.
The following month, Ergen met with Trump and Carr behind closed doors to discuss the investigation, according to Bloomberg. The outlet, citing unnamed sources, said the June 11 discussion included a brief exchange about Ergen’s political donations and whether he gave to candidates in both political parties.
The company referenced a June 11 meeting between Ergen and Carr in a regulatory filing and wrote that Trump “subsequently encouraged the parties involved to reach an amicable resolution.”
Part of that “amicable resolution” apparently involved Ergen throwing money at the president’s costly and legally dodgy vanity project if he wanted to avoid “government oversight.” Carr dropped the “investigation” shortly after Dish and Echostar sold large swaths of spectrum to both AT&T (which the Post mentions) and Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which the Post does not).
The Ergen stuff is particularly interesting because Ergen was a massive beneficiary of the first Trump administration, only to have his alliance with authoritarians blow up in his face later on in the relationship (as is often the case). I use the term “blow up” loosely, as Ergen will still net billions of dollars from the assistance provided him by the Trump administration.
If you recall, in 2019 Trump’s DOJ and FCC rubber stamped a massive, competition and job killing merger between Sprint and T-Mobile. If you also recall, a cornerstone of that deal involved an elaborate stage play where Dish, with the Trump DOJ’s and FCC’s help, insisted that it was going to build a viable new 5G wireless competitor across the whole United States.
As I predicted repeatedly at the time, that network was never going to succeed. Dish’s gambit existed largely as a prop to justify the competition harm of Sprint/T-Mobile consolidation. And while some think Dish really wanted to build a 5G network, others (like myself) believe it was an elaborate attempt to string regulators along while the company’s massive spectrum hoard appreciated in value.
So in the first Trump term, Dish found itself a direct beneficiary of regulatory capture. But in the second term, with AT&T and Elon Musk eyeing Dish’s under-utilized spectrum assets, Carr uncharacteristically pretended to care about corporate oversight and public welfare, and utilized his office to help Trump pressure Ergen and Dish to offload a significant chunk of spectrum assets to Musk and SpaceX (for their likely-doomed wireless play), and AT&T — and donate to the ballroom.
The broader backstory tying all of this to the Sprint and T-Mobile merger won’t really be discussed by what’s left of the U.S. press, and the latest ballroom revelations barely had enough juice to carry an hour-long news cycle while consumers and labor bore the costs of regulatory capture. Just another day in a country being devoured alive by corruption and the shittiest rich people imaginable.
