A new investigative report shines a light on the corporate beneficiaries of the “Make America Great Again” movement — and asks who is really being made great.
When Donald Trump rallied millions of Americans under the banner of “Make America Great Again,” the promise was straightforward: a government that works for the forgotten working class. But a sweeping new investigative report from CorpWatch, the Berkeley-based corporate accountability organization, raises a pointed question — great for whom, exactly?
Released in June 2026, MAGA Inc. is a deep-dive into the companies that have most aggressively bankrolled the MAGA movement and, in return, reaped extraordinary rewards in the form of federal contracts, deregulation, and political access. The report, authored by Pratap Chatterjee, Aya Dardari, and Oriane Burke, organizes its targets into three distinct categories: the Crypto Czars, the Tech Titans, and the Prison Profiteers.
The Crypto Czars: Digital Gold Rush
At the intersection of politics and digital finance sit what CorpWatch dubs the “Crypto Czars” — a cluster of cryptocurrency firms that have cultivated deep ties to Trump and his inner circle.
Leading the charge are World Liberty Financial and Tether, two digital currency entities the report credits with helping to substantially grow Trump’s personal fortune since his return to the White House. The crypto industry, long seeking regulatory leniency in Washington, found in Trump an enthusiastic ally — and the relationship has been mutually lucrative.
Critics argue this entanglement between presidential politics and speculative digital assets creates a profound conflict of interest, with policy potentially being shaped to benefit the very investors who funded Trump’s political machine.
The Tech Titans: A New Data Center Gold Rush
The second pillar of MAGA Inc. focuses on Silicon Valley’s biggest players, who the report portrays as eager participants in a federally-enabled technology land grab.
Oracle, OpenAI, and Palantir each receive dedicated scrutiny. Together, they represent a wave of tech companies that have embraced — and materially benefited from — Trump’s aggressive push to build data centers across the country. This expansion is being bankrolled by Wall Street giants like Cantor Fitzgerald and fueled by the natural gas infrastructure of Energy Transfer, one of Trump’s most prominent corporate supporters.
The data center boom has enormous environmental consequences. CorpWatch researcher Oriane Burke argues that Energy Transfer’s aggressive pipeline expansion and the gutting of environmental regulations to power these facilities runs directly counter to the interests of local communities — sacrificing clean air, water, and land in the name of profit.
The Palantir chapter is particularly striking. The data analytics giant, already deeply embedded in U.S. immigration and national security infrastructure, has reportedly provided tools used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in sweeping surveillance and deportation operations — including, allegedly, the tracking of activist protesters.
The OpenAI section, meanwhile, opens with a jarring anecdote: a young man in Texas who took his own life in July 2025 following a prolonged conversation with ChatGPT about his mental health struggles — raising profound questions about AI accountability and the rapid, largely unregulated deployment of powerful AI systems.
The Prison Profiteers: Detention for Dollars
Perhaps the most viscerally troubling section of MAGA Inc. concerns the private prison and deportation industry. Under the Trump administration, immigration enforcement has exploded in scale, and a handful of for-profit companies have been positioned to capture the windfall.
CoreCivic and GEO Group, the two largest private detention contractors in the United States, are running massive immigration detention facilities — including the Delaney Hall center in New Jersey — under lucrative federal agreements. CSI Aviation, meanwhile, has emerged as a primary contractor for mass deportation flights.
CorpWatch researcher Aya Dardari does not mince words: these companies, she writes, are “making a windfall off of ICE’s reign of terror on migrants,” subjecting the most economically vulnerable workers — people she describes as “the backbone of America” — to harsh and inhumane conditions purely to pad their bottom lines.
The human cost is difficult to overstate. Families separated. Communities destabilized. Workers who built industries and neighborhoods removed on a mass scale. And at every step, a private corporation billing the federal government for the service.
Resistance on the Ground
Embedded within MAGA Inc. is documentation of the communities and activists who are quietly, persistently pushing back.
From neighbors opposing new gas pipelines, to immigration rights advocates outside detention centers, to AI ethicists demanding accountability from Silicon Valley — the report frames a growing, if outgunned, opposition. As Dardari puts it, communities are responding “with a message of their own: humanity is not up for sale.”
A Pattern Decades in the Making
CorpWatch is no stranger to this kind of corporate reckoning. The organization spent the 2000s and 2010s exposing the war profiteers of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts — companies like Halliburton and a constellation of private military contractors that turned foreign policy tragedy into financial opportunity.
MAGA Inc. is, in many ways, the domestic sequel to that work. The names have changed. The industry sectors are different. But the fundamental dynamic — political power translating into private profit, often at tremendous public cost — remains hauntingly familiar.
The Bottom Line
The core argument of MAGA Inc. is not merely partisan. It is structural: that the Trump movement, whatever its populist rhetoric, has functioned in practice as an accelerant for a specific class of corporate interests — those nimble enough, or well-connected enough, to position themselves at the intersection of political power and federal spending.
Whether in the form of crypto deregulation, data center subsidies, surveillance contracts, or detention facility expansions, the pattern that CorpWatch documents is consistent. A political promise was made to working-class Americans. The checks, however, were written to someone else.
This article is based on the CorpWatch report “MAGA Inc.: A Guide to Trump’s World of Crypto Czars, Tech Titans and Prison Profiteers,” published June 16, 2026, and authored by Pratap Chatterjee, Aya Dardari, and Oriane Burke.
