Monopoly utilities NextEra Energy, Sempra, Southern Company, and Washington Gas were among the donors to Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration.
The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, Inc., received large checks from a variety of corporations including those throughout the fossil fuel industry and several large investor-owned monopoly utilities, according to the committee’s recent filings with the Federal Election Commission.
NextEra is Florida Power & Light’s parent company. Sempra owns Southern California Gas and San Diego Gas & Electric, along with 80% interest in Oncor and 50% interest in Sharyland Utilities – utilities serving customers in Texas. Southern Company operates Alabama Power, Georgia Power, and Mississippi Power, along with Southern Company Gas – which consists of Nicor Gas, Atlanta Gas Light, Virginia Natural Gas, and Chattanooga Gas. Washington Gas is part of AltaGas, a Canadian corporation that owns another gas utility called SEMCO.
The amount raised by the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee was more than double the amount Trump raised for his previously record-setting inaugural committee in 2017. NextEra Energy, Southern Company, and Xcel Energy were utility industry donors to the Trump-Pence inauguration committee. NextEra donated $250,000, Southern Company donated $100,000, and Xcel Energy donated $25,000 in 2017.
The Edison Electric Institute, the trade association for electric utilities, celebrated the inauguration by hosting a joint watch party with the Republican Governors Association, according to an invitation obtained by the watchdog group Documented. Sponsorship opportunities for the EEI-RGA Trump watch party ranged from $7,500 for placing a logo on drink koozies to $50,000 for having a logo displayed at the main bar along with branded cocktail napkins.
While utilities largely avoided making contributions to presidential committees this past cycle, but WEC Energy Group’s We Energies Foundation donated $2 million to the host committee that funded last year’s Republican National Convention. WEC Energy is the parent company of several electric and gas utilities operating in the Midwest, including We Energies and Chicago-based Peoples Gas.
After the attack on the Capital on January 6, 2021 that Trump and many Republican officials incited with false claims about the 2020 presidential election, several utilities announced a pause on political contributions. Southern Company, whose political action committee was among the top contributors to the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, told EPI after the January 6 attack, “Our belief in government, respect for the democratic process and adherence to the rule of law always have been at the core of our engagement. We are constantly evaluating our efforts to ensure they are informed by those ideals and adhere to the uncompromising values we follow as a business – honesty, respect, fairness, integrity and the value of diversity. We will discontinue support for any official or organization that does not act in a manner consistent with these values.”
Trump has spent his first months back in the White House signing executive orders that judges have overturned as unconstitutional, and attacking judges and lawyers in ways that the president of the American Bar Association said puts the “bedrock principles of our democracy” and “rule of law” under “considerable duress.”