Venezuela gave Trump $500,000. What did he do with it?

Venezuela gave Trump $500,000. What did he do with it?
The president accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from a government that he says is funded by the drug trade

By Charles R. Davis
News Editor
Published September 10, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) Before he was ordering the extrajudicial killing of South American civilians and before he was offering up $50 million in U.S. taxpayer funds for the head of his authoritarian counterpart in Venezuela, Donald Trump wasn’t so sour on Nicolás Maduro and his fossil fuel-rich country. They were never close spa buddies, like he and the convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but the U.S. president and three-term strongman did share a love language.

In 2016, a month before Trump was first inaugurated, Maduro and his government donated some $500,000 — just under $670,000 in today’s money — so that the man who would be king, who would go on to imprison, abuse and even kill Venezuelan nationals without trial, could throw one hell of a party. According to the Federal Election Commission, Venezuela, via its state-owned oil company, PdVSA, and its U.S. subsidiary, CITGO, was indeed one of the single largest donors to Trump’s first inaugural committee; so much money was raised that nearly $26 million was left over to pay an event planning company founded about 30 days prior by an aide to his wife, Melania.

That’s pretty neat. With the 79-year-old president also lashing out at his former benefactor, moving F-35 stealth fighter jets to the region (“It looks to me like the US military is going to war,” observed a Fox News correspondent) after just unilaterally accusing, convicting and then slaughtering 11 purported drug traffickers off the coast of Venezuela, it’s also pretty relevant.

The charge is not that Mr. Maduro bought himself anything meaningful and lasting with that half-million-dollar donation. The contribution was a reflection of the times, when pundits and some foreign ministers confused Trump’s opportunistic criticism of his predecessors and “America First” rhetoric with a less militaristic approach to foreign affairs, as well as the general incompetence of the political leadership in Caracas, which in the run-up to the 2016 election used its English-language state media to promote Trump as the candidate “less likely to engage (America) in needless wars.” ....................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/09/10/venezuela-gave-trump-500000-what-did-he-do-with-it/