Trump gets record donations from big oil but far less than $1bn he wanted

Donald Trump has raised more money from the oil and gas industry than at this stage of his previous campaigns for the US presidency, with a surge of fossil fuel funding coming in the six months since he directly requested $1bn from oil executives and then promised he would scrap environmental rules if elected.

While the Republican nominee hasn’t quite managed to get to that $1bn figure, he has received $14.1m from the oil and gas industry in the period up to 31 August, donation filings show. This is more than he got from the industry at the same stage of his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

Support from just a handful of oil executives has become vital to the overall Trump campaign, with Kelcy Warren, the billionaire chief executive of the pipeline operator Energy Transfer, giving nearly $6m to help elect the former president and Timothy Dunn, boss of the Texas-based oil firm CrownQuest, handing $5m to a Trump-aligned Super Pac.

Harold Hamm, another billionaire and the founder of Continental Resources, has helped push a further $1.2m to the campaign. Hamm has reportedly hit the phones to drum up industry support for Trump, whose campaign mantra has been “drill, baby, drill”, while railing against the policies of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. “We’ve got to do this because it’s the most important election in our lifetime,” Hamm has said.

The oil and gas industry is now Trump’s fourth-biggest source of cash, up six places from the 2020 election cycle, according to an analysis of donations to candidates and their affiliated groups by OpenSecrets.

Further, more recent Federal Election Commission filings emerged this week, which are still being fully analyzed. But Climate Power, a climate advocacy group, pointed out the latest filings show that Trump garnered another $5m from Energy Transfer’s Warren in September, as well as $400,000 from Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental Petroleum and $400,000 from Jeff and Melinda Hildebrand of the oil and gas firm Hilcorp.

The fundraising haul follows an April dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida where the former president asked more than 20 executives, from companies including Chevron, Exxon and Occidental, for $1bn and promised, if elected, to remove barriers to drilling, scrap a pause on gas exports and reverse new rules aimed at cutting car pollution.

Democrats have called this apparent deal “the definition of corruption” and have launched a congressional investigation. Last month, Democrats from the Senate and House of Representatives wrote to eight oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute to complain of their “woefully inadequate” responses to a request for information on the alleged quid pro quo.

“Trump basically has a ‘for sale’ sign around his neck and we know the fossil fuel industry is keenly interested in political influence, so we need to know if this is bluster or the solicitation of a crime,” Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic chair of the Senate budget committee, said. Whitehouse conceded, however, the investigation would not advance before the election.

“Trump talks some very stupid nonsense about climate, just loud noises to the fossil fuel industry that he will be their boy,” he said. “The industry is getting more desperate to keep a political leash on Congress and government generally so we are seeing a significant step-up in influence and money-seeking.”

Along with watered-down regulations, an estimated $110bn in tax breaks for the fossil fuel sector could also be provided if Trump returns to the White House. When he was last president, Trump opened up new areas for drilling and intervened to broker a deal with other countries to cut production to support crude oil’s value after prices crashed during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

In the past two weeks, the former president and his running mate, JD Vance, have attended four fundraisers thrown by oil executives in Texas, even as they both had to cancel other events due to the impact of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, which scientists say were both worsened by global heating from the burning of fossil fuels.

At recent rallies, Trump has vowed to unleash a wave of new oil and gas activity and has dismissed the climate crisis “one of the great scams of all time”. The former president has also, falsely, said that the planet is cooling down and has repeatedly attacked wind energy, calling it “bullshit” and “horrible”.

Trump has referred to oil and gas as “liquid gold under our feet” and has accused Biden and Harris of a “war on American energy” even as oil and gas production have hit record highs.

Harris, meanwhile, has largely steered clear of climate in her campaign appearances, even though she does acknowledge the dangers posed by global heating. The latest donations data, according to OpenSecrets, shows the Democratic presidential campaign, initially led by Biden, has has raised $1.3m from the oil and gas industry.

Industry donations to the vice-president account for more than $500,000 of this total since she took the Democratic nomination over from Biden, even though Harris pledged in 2019 to not take more than $200 from fossil fuel entities.

The largest contributions from oil executives to Harris have been from Richard Slifka of Global Petroleum and Lee Fikes of Bonanza Oil. Harris’s campaign, which has so far raised more than $1bn in total donations from all sources, did not answer questions as to whether taking this cash had broken her previous pledge, or if it still applied for this election.

A Trump campaign spokesperson said that Harris was “controlled by environmental extremists” while Trump was “supported by people who share his vision of American energy dominance to protect our national security and bring down the cost of living for all Americans”.