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I opened the Herald online to find this headline:
“Donors to Trump’s ballroom project win billions of dollars in contracts, watchdog finds”
That certainly looks very much like exposure of corruption in high places and further confirmation that the man in the US White House isn’t fit to hold the office.
If you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, you need look no further. Your views are confirmed and you can join your millions of deranged colleagues around the world celebrating your derangement and spreading the good word, unhindered by the possibility that it’s all actually a big lie.
And it genuinely is – a great big misrepresentation of normal everyday business with scant regard for the facts.
To clarify: This is not a new discovery of damning facts that have been turned up by an investigative reporter from the Washington Post. It’s a rehash of a press release sent out in November 2025 by Public Citizen, described as an advocacy group.
Who and/or what exactly is “Public Citizen”? Who runs it? What’s their game?
Public Citizen is a left-wing advocacy organisation funded by George Soros, the Carnegie Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Their own website currently states they are “fighting, suing, and organizing against the Trump regime”, so no pretence of impartiality on their part. Institutional TDS maybe?
This story is a repeat, using the same information from their previous report from seven months ago when they published “Banquet of Greed”. The Washington Post has been running interference for this narrative since November and this more recent article is essentially a second bite at the same apple.
Thanks NZ Herald for running Washington Post propaganda unchecked and calling it journalism.
This is a great big lie dressed to make normal everyday business look like corruption. While it is entirely true that companies involved with the ballroom contributions have signed contracts for $50 billion over six months, 88 per cent of that figure is Lockheed Martin alone signing contracts at a rate below their normal annual run rate. Lockheed has been the US government’s single largest contractor since at least 2008, so absolutely nothing worthy of extra note here.
Another alleged conspirator, Booz Allen, derives 96 per cent of all its revenue from government contracts. The point being that these companies would have received this work regardless of any ballroom donation. It’s quite simply business as usual. Presenting routine procurement as donor rewards, without any baseline comparison, is a deliberate omission that inverts the entire meaning of the data and that is quite simply the fakest of fake news and, to be blunt, shameless shilling by the Washington Post.
The same manufactured logic applies to the article’s claim that enforcement actions against donor companies have been suspended as rewards for their generosity. The United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s pullback on crypto cases involving Coinbase and Ripple sounds damning, until you discover that the Trump administration dropped or paused nearly 60 per cent of all crypto-related cases across the entire industry. It was a broad policy shift, not targeted favours to ballroom donors. On the bigger antitrust cases involving Amazon, Apple, Meta and Google, the Trump administration has largely continued pursuing them, showing what has been described as “surprising continuity” with prior administrations by one legal analysis.
Public Citizen, not surprisingly, chose not to mention any of that. Sadly, neither did the Washington Post.
Public Citizen is not a neutral watchdog, yet the Washington Post ran this report as if it were, giving it undeserved credibility.
That is either negligent or complicit. What it isn’t, is competent or impartial journalism.
That the NZ Herald constantly runs this garbage from the Washington Post without fear or favour speaks volumes for its own editorial balance.
It does New Zealanders a gross disservice.
