Democrats Put Tech Giants That Courted Trump at the Top of Target List

Democrats are eyeing investigations into some of America’s largest corporations that tried to curry favor with President Trump. The Washington Post reports that now that Democrats won back control of Congress, they are planning to probe powerful entities in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the first targets could be Apple, Meta, and Elon Musk and all of his companies. The House is already preparing to investigate how President Trump used Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Post. House Democrats are also looking at Apple’s hosting of tracking apps used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and at Meta for demanding that local governments sign nondisclosure agreements regarding data centers. Corporate lawyers in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to meet with corporate executives to offer advice on the impending high-profile public investigations. Many firms are preparing pitches to attract Musk as a client, as he is not only the world’s richest man, but also holds billions in government contracts, has a close relationship with Trump, and led the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency initiative. One lawyer at a major D.C. firm told executives in a private online meeting Thursday that “this is a new era.”“If your company is caught up in this oversight, it’s likely to be much more highly publicized,” the lawyer said, according to the Post. Dozens of corporations and CEOs donated to Trump’s transition fund, his inauguration fund, and his White House ballroom project. Where that once may have protected them from regulations and investigations from the Trump administration, with this new Congress, the opposite is true. Trump also made millions investing in many companies and publicly praised companies that did him favors. “Lawyer up,” wrote Democratic Representative Robert Garcia, the next chair of the House Oversight Committee, in a brief statement on election night. Want to see just how far left the United States shifted in Tuesday’s midterm elections? Look no further. A map produced by Ground News using data from civicAPI showed just how far each U.S. county’s margin moved from the 2024 presidential election to the 2026 House vote. A whopping 94 percent of U.S. counties shifted left in Tuesday’s midterm elections. Screenshot/Ground NewsJurisdictions in all 50 states reported an average 13-point shift toward Democratic House candidates. No state showed an overall shift toward the Republicans in the House, although there were a handful of districts that moved right. The states that showed the largest shifts toward Democratic House candidates were New Jersey, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming. The states that saw the smallest leftward shifts were South Dakota, Vermont, and Oregon.The map indicated that even in states where Democratic candidates did not win, such as West Virginia, Indiana, and Kentucky, there were still heavy leftward shifts among voters.Voters under 30 swung sharply toward the Democratic Party, according to the AP Voter Poll, a survey of more than 100,000 voters across all 50 states. Republicans appeared to lose most—if not all—of President Donald Trump’s gains with Hispanic and Black voters in 2024. Moderate and lower income voters also turned up to support Democratic candidates. Read more about the elections:Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been pushing to build artificial intelligence data centers on public lands since he first joined President Trump’s Cabinet. A Friday report from ProPublica shows that Burgum might feel so strongly about the centers not because of worries about China or the future—but because he has somewhere between $18.1 million and $64.4 million invested in artificial intelligence companies.Burgum’s 2026 financial disclosure document shows that the vast majority of his wealth is held with Arthur Ventures, the investment firm he co-founded. While Burgum’s Senate confirmation ethics agreement forced him to resign from Arthur Ventures, he still maintained his financial interests at the firm. According to an analysis by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks that was shared with ProPublica, Arthur Ventures invests between $18.1 million and $64.4 million in AI companies—meaning that Burgum is pushing an unpopular policy that will personally enrich him. Burgum has blamed the mass rejection of data centers on a “foreign psyop.”The Trump administration, of course, denies ProPublica’s reporting.“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson said. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”Yet Burgum isn’t the only Trump administration member who stands to personally profit from his investments in AI and data centers. According to a ProPublica review, over 380 administration members or their spouses have investments in or other financial ties to Nvidia, 320 have ties to Alphabet, and over 240 are invested in Meta Platforms—all while the administration allows states to construct data centers and inject their technology into every level of everyday life unfettered.“Like every other goon in this administration, Data Center Doug is in it for himself,” California Representative Jared Huffman wrote online. “He wants to cover our public lands with AI data centers that will make him and Trump’s tech buddies richer.”More corruption stories in this administration:Dr. Amy Acton is washing her hands of Vivek Ramaswamy and his dirty campaign tactics.Ohio’s first female governor-elect told CBS Mornings Friday that she has “no intention” of speaking to the losing Republican after he produced a disturbing political advert featuring her estranged mother. “It was sad, I would like to say I didn’t expect this but there was no low my opponent wouldn’t sink to,” Acton said, noting that Ramaswamy’s other attack ads were filled with “lies” and “vitriol.”“I heard that he did leave you a congratulatory phone call,” said host Gayle King. “Have the two of you spoken since election night or at all?”“Gayle, I think we can’t normalize behavior like this. It was so beyond the pale. So I have no intention of speaking to him. I do believe that leaders’ words matter, and we need to hold folks accountable,” Acton said. As the days ticked down to the midterm election, Ramaswamy hatched a crackpot plan to damage Acton’s credibility by weaponizing the sexual assault she suffered during her childhood against her. Ramaswamy used Acton’s estranged mother, Donna Arthur, as part of a smear campaign to paint the Ohio Democratic gubernatorial nominee as a liar. He moved forward with the ad spot against the advice of his team, and while ignoring publicly available information demonstrating that Arthur abandoned her children to skip town with her husband—Cledith “Bud” Arthur—who was indicted for allegedly raping Acton when she was a young girl.The biological daughter of that man lent credibility to Acton’s account of the abuse days after the smear campaign was leaked. Speaking through tears during an interview with the Daily Mail, the Youngstown, Ohio–based woman said that Arthur had also raped her late sister, Christine, years before he married Acton’s mother.Acton has been very public about her broken family and childhood struggles. Over the years, she has discussed the horrific sexual abuse she endured from her stepfather (which she told The Youngstown Vindicator occurred between the ages of nine and 12), and also shared her experiences with homelessness in her youth. In a March 2020 profile by The Toledo Blade, Acton said that she spent one of her childhood winters living in a tent outside Youngstown.Ramaswamy—a biotech billionaire that attended one of Ohio’s largest private high schools—saw those stories as potential political fodder, and attempted to utilize them for his own personal gain. But in doing so, he ultimately hurt himself.The 41-year-old MAGA acolyte has since become a bit of a political pariah that is unwelcome on either the left or the right, as Democrats and Republicans alike condemned the low blow.Read more about Acton’s win:Donald Trump’s midterm bust has even his White House aides eyeing the exit.“There is no holding back on the desire to leave now,” one former White House official told MS NOW Friday. “Some are making calls to try and jump ship.”What happened on Tuesday has been described by some Republicans as an “extinction-level” event, as Democrats scooped up areas of the country that have been historically seen as deep-red, according to the news outlet. A White House official told MS NOW that the election results had amounted to “the worst-case scenario.”But as Trump approaches the lame duck portion of his second term, some members of his staff are looking for an off-ramp out of MAGA world.“In this current trajectory, there’s no shot this is salvageable,” a former White House official in touch with current staffers told MS NOW, speaking on the matter of the MAGA agenda. “What is the president’s focus these last two years? It’s probably renovations.”Trump has obsessed over his legacy throughout his second term, a fixation easily illustrated by the long list of vanity projects he’s cooked up instead of fulfilling the difficult job of steering the nation. So far, Trump has razed the White House East Wing, started construction on a $600 million ballroom (the price of which keeps growing), proposed a 250-foot “Triumphal Arch,” gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transformed the Palm Room from a lush green foyer into a sterile lobby, and mowed down Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s famous Rose Garden.The administration also spent more than $16 million on an unsuccessful and rushed renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, took a sledgehammer to the Harry S. Truman Bowling Alley, indiscriminately axed trees in the Washington area, and destroyed the Kennedy Center in a futile attempt to attach Trump’s name to the living memorial.“There is no holding back on the desire to leave now,” the former official continued. “Some are making calls to try and jump ship.” Others are reportedly seeking out legal counsel as a “precaution,” the official told MS NOW.Another former official summed up the current atmosphere succinctly: “pain.”“Everybody’s going to start infighting,” they told MS NOW.Read more about resignations: