MONEY TALKS

Trump’s ‘Princess of Darkness’ Cash Grab Exposed

The president has a secret weapon to wring money out of his donors.

Donald Trump is leaning on a woman he’s dubbed his “princess of darkness” to squeeze hundreds of millions of dollars for his vanity projects from companies with business before his administration.

Meredith O’Rourke, 54, is the 80-year-old president’s chief political fundraiser. She is not a government employee. She is nevertheless a regular presence at the White House, and Trump, who praises her as a “killer” with donors, calls her every night to ask how much money she has raked in for him.

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An explosive new report by the Wall Street Journal, published Thursday, lays bare the shocking extent of O’Rourke’s operation. Some donors, it’s $5 million. Others, it’s $50 million. Their money has gone toward D.C. refurbishment projects like Trump’s tacky White House ballroom, events like his self-centered Fourth of July celebrations, legacy plans like his presidential library, and political action committees (PACs) aligned with his MAGA agenda.

Many of those companies and individuals have gone on to benefit from regulatory decisions made by the White House after their donations landed. The eyewatering sums, which the Journal’s analysis puts at a total of more than $800 million and counting, have also bought them unprecedented access to the president, securing them seats at the table for glitzy events at his Mar-a-Lago resort and at the White House.

The newspaper writes that Trump had little appetite for fundraising during his 2016 run for office, modeling himself as the anti-establishment outsider who would “drain the swamp.” While still a presidential candidate, he waved PACs away as little more than a “scam” and even instructed his team to pressure unauthorized groups raising funds for his run to return that money to donors.

“I am self-funding my campaign, and therefore I will not be controlled by the donors, special interests, and lobbyists who have corrupted our politics and politicians for far too long,” he reassured his supporters back then.

Trump broke that pledge by soliciting campaign contributions during his failed bid for re-election in 2020—but not by much, with the Journal writing that he “wasn’t notably aggressive about it” at the time. The major shift took place in 2024, when his wholesale embrace of fundraising saw him try to squeeze an astonishing $1 billion from oil industry bosses during a Mar-a-Lago gala in April of that year.

That effort has only intensified since he retook the White House the following January, with O’Rourke firmly at its helm. A veteran Florida fundraiser, she had worked in various capacities on Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and led the fundraising operation for the entirety of his 2024 run.

The Journal reports that O’Rourke even chose to drive the six hours between her home in the north of the state and the campaign’s HQ in Palm Beach, rather than taking an hour-long flight, so that she wouldn’t lose valuable donor-call time while in the air. She seems to have thought she’d be winding down those efforts after Trump won the race, but the president had other plans.

“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” she has told company executives during phone calls, according to the newspaper. At other times, she’s been even blunter. “The boss wants this money,” she’s understood to have said, in reference to Trump.

Sources with knowledge of what the Journal describes as a “staggering fundraising and influence operation” told the newspaper that Trump has at times told O’Rourke to ask for sums that made even her feel “uncomfortable.” Several executives said plainly that they believe “there is a link between their contributions and their access to the president.”

Weapons giant Lockheed Martin handed over upward of $10 million between late 2025 and the opening weeks of this year—money tied to Trump’s 250th anniversary events and construction work around the capital, people briefed on those transfers told the WSJ. The Pentagon then awarded the contractor a June deal worth as much as $35 billion for missiles to restock arsenals depleted by Trump’s war on Iran. The president announced a few weeks later that Lockheed was kicking in about $5 million for the helipad now taking shape on the White House South Lawn.

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Meta Platforms has paid up again and again. About $22 million reached the library once the company settled Trump’s suit over his banned accounts. It also handed $10 million to Securing American Greatness, a Trump-aligned committee under no obligation to name its donors, on top of cash for his inauguration, the ballroom, and two Easter functions. Executives were asked so often that they convened a run of internal calls to plot a response.

SoftBank went to the White House offering to help and was steered toward the library, where the Japanese conglomerate put up $50 million. Apple covered about $25 million of the ballroom bill, Microsoft roughly $10 million, Amazon some $5 million. Chevron faced a $50 million ask this year and paid only a slice of that.

Trump met tobacco executives in May at his golf club in Jupiter, Florida, and told them he would deliver most of what they wanted on vaping rules and the Food and Drug Administration, the Journal reports. Millions of dollars flowed to his political funds. O’Rourke sat in on the meeting. Soon afterward, the FDA dropped restrictions on a set of flavored vape products, and the agency’s top official was gone. Six Senate Democrats later wrote to the chief executive of cigarette giant Altria, telling him the millions his company had poured into the president’s political machine looked like “money well spent.”

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The Daily Beast has contacted White House for comment on this story.

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