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Guests scooped caviar, noshed on lamb lollipops and sipped top-shelf Champagne on a recent Friday at the grand opening of Executive Branch, a new club that President Trump’s son and close friends started in Washington that costs up to $500,000 to join.
Lobbyists Revel in Trump Bonanza but Ask How Long It Can Last
Consultants try to get rich in president’s second term, but without attracting scrutiny.
Published on: Jul 10, 2025, 17:54:42 IST
WSJ
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There was David Sacks, the administration’s unpaid cryptocurrency czar, who had been privately touting the club to associates. Some cabinet members came as guests, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. (Her aide Corey Lewandowski was there, too.) Donald Trump Jr. and senior administration officials mingled in the cavernous space near the Georgetown waterfront.
Many of the city’s top lobbyists said they were not interested in attending the party or joining the club, even though it might seem like a dream opportunity for hobnobbing with the nascent administration. The price was too high to join the club, they said privately, and they worried membership could attract scrutiny from critics and Democrats, who could be armed with subpoena powers after next year’s midterm elections.
Others said they were concerned about the appearance of directly giving money to the president’s family and relatives of White House officials. The children of special envoy Steve Witkoff are part owners of the club. An Executive Branch spokesman said the club has one lobbyist as a member and is an “anti-lobbyist club.” The spokesman said that while some consultants and lobbyists came to the opening party, most of the city’s top lobbyists were not invited. The Wall Street Journal spoke to several lobbyists who said they were approached about the club.
It is boom time in Washington for the influence industry, according to interviews with more than a dozen Republican lobbyists. The top 10 lobbying firms in Washington took in about $123 million in the first quarter of 2025, compared with about $80 million in the same time frame of both Joe Biden’s presidency and Trump’s first term.
Lobbyists with close ties to Trump are having a particularly lucrative year, covering their office walls with photos of the president and expanding their offices, with some firms even turning down clients because they already have too many.
Trump, who once vowed to “drain the swamp,” has relationships with many of the city’s top lobbyists, who raise money for him and sometimes bring him business opportunities.
Washington is even less concerned about the appearance of impropriety than usual, longtime consultants say, as Trump finds ways to boost his personal income from cryptocurrency and real estate deals. A White House official said Trump’s cryptocurrency policies weren’t about his own business interests.
“You don’t usually see the people in power marketing themselves as available and open to lobbyists the same way you see now,” said Kedric Payne, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan ethics watchdog group.
White House spokesman Harrison Fields said the president was “elected to serve Main Street, not K Street.” “Unlike many presidents before him, he is executing an agenda based on promises made on the campaign trail,” Fields said.
Beneath the bonanza, lobbyists know the clock is ticking. While the Trump administration has retreated from investigating the types of cases that have gotten lobbyists into trouble in the past, Democratic scrutiny could come as early as 2027 if the party retakes the House next year. When Democrats secured the House majority midway though Trump’s first term, they mounted investigations into Trump and his aides, including two impeachment inquiries.
That possibility leaves a narrow window to cash in on ties to the administration—but not so much that it attracts unwanted attention when the tides shift, some lobbyists said. Several described a sweet spot of making $3 million to $5 million a year, but staying off the radar.
Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita, summed up the strategy to friends: “Pigs get fat, and hogs get slaughtered.”
‘You can sleep when you’re dead’
How much is too much? LaCivita has signed up an array of clients, including from private equity and the cryptocurrency industry, given speeches and traveled the globe since Trump won.
He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars advising a presidential candidate in Albania who lost. He also has worked for artificial-intelligence firm OpenAI and helped U.S. Steel executives as they negotiated with the administration to close their deal with Japan’s Nippon Steel. He is working with former Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio on at least some of the clients.
But he has turned down lobbying for foreign countries. Lobbyists who do such work are required to register as foreign agents. He has declined to work as a lobbyist for any clients. Instead he has advised executives on how to interact with the administration, setting up meetings and telling companies what to say, without arguing on their behalf himself.
LaCivita declined to comment on his work.
Others do lobby for foreign clients.
Matt Mowers, a former State Department official in the first Trump administration, set up an office in the Willard Hotel downtown for his firm Valcour and has signed several foreign clients, including Serbia, Hungary and Iraq, and social Turkish startup Getir.
Mowers said the biggest uptick in his business has been Americans looking for Trump’s administration to help them abroad.
Another firm with longtime Trump allies, Tactic Global, opened an office just down the street from the Executive Branch club. The two aren’t affiliated. One of its partners, Barry Bennett, admitted last year to illegally failing to register an advocacy group he set up on Qatar’s behalf, and agreed in a deal with the Justice Department that he wouldn’t undertake foreign lobbying work until July 1. The Trump administration dismissed the case last week.
As that expiration date approached, Bennett said in an interview that he had flown 379,000 miles this year to Guyana, Suriname, Panama, Argentina, Paraguay, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Bosnia and other countries, looking for business. The firm already represents Vietnam and Argentina, and Bennett said he expected to ink other contracts soon, especially over Trump’s trade agenda, on which countries facing tariffs are seeking Washington advice.
“I have three and a half more years,” he said, referring to Trump’s term. “You can sleep when you’re dead.”
Some foreign government clients are now willing to spend $150,000 a month or more, he said, sums that he described as once unheard of. His red line: working for China or Russia.
“The world is a very big place filled with lots of big problems without having to do those,” he said.
Success fees
Another dividing line in Washington is whether to take clients seeking pardons from Trump.
Some lobbyists said they were particularly wary of the “success fee” payment structure in which they would receive large sums if their clients won a pardon. “I wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole,” said Peter Zeidenberg, a Washington attorney, of lobbying for pardons. Several others described a lucrative venture where those seeking pardons had offered contracts worth more than $1 million.
Ches McDowell, a friend of Donald Trump Jr.’s who commutes to Washington from his North Carolina home, has taken on one pardon-seeking client, according to a person familiar with the work: ex-Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. Zhao pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering requirements, and representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.
McDowell, who is a member of the Executive Branch club, has been spotted recently dining at the Palm Restaurant with Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn and wearing a Rolex watch. He has hired both LaCivita’s son and a nephew of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
His other clients include oil companies that operate in Venezuela. He said he turned down others, including one who wanted him to help trash Kennedy at the White House, and another who demanded near-immediate meetings with cabinet secretaries.
McDowell said he has his own limits on what he will do to win in Trump’s Washington: no cable news appearances. “All that does is increase your profile, and you’re bound to say something wrong,” McDowell said. “It’s not worth it.”
Some lobbyists and consultants haven’t steered clear of controversy in the early months of Trump’s second term.
Brian Ballard, a top lobbyist with longtime ties to Trump, has drawn the envy of other lobbyists for how many clients he has signed on and his access to the administration. Trump himself grew annoyed in March after a Ballard lobbyist pushed him to send a social-media post about a cryptocurrency company. Ballard and Trump have since made peace in a White House meeting.
Ballard, one of the president’s biggest 2024 fundraisers, has taken clients to see Trump at the White House and at his clubs, and was spotted on a recent evening with a trio of clients at the president’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J. In private, Ballard has told Trump aides that he might be among the highest earners next quarter, in an apparent effort to pre-empt attacks. His firm reported $14 million in lobbying revenues in the first quarter of the year, more than doubling its haul from the previous quarter.
He has also turned down clients seeking pardons and countries that Trump has sparred with, including Panama. But he has taken on another Trump foe, Harvard University, telling White House officials that he wants to help find a deal and that he took the university before they were in a war with Trump. He also represents Paramount Global, which recently settled with Trump for about $16 million after he sued over how “60 Minutes” edited an interview with Kamala Harris.
The rush to sign up new clients hasn’t always gone smoothly for some Trump-connected consultants.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo signed a $5 million lobbying contract in April with former Trump campaign aide Karen Giorno and right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, but suspended it days later, saying it wanted to work with “official and authorized channels” to the Trump administration.
Trump is “reshaping Washington’s lobbying scene with direct engagement and bold leadership,” Giorno said. The contract remains in effect, she added, and her firm is “fully prepared to resume work at the appropriate time.”
Write to Josh Dawsey at Joshua.Dawsey@WSJ.com, Rebecca Ballhaus at rebecca.ballhaus@wsj.com and Maggie Severns at maggie.severns@wsj.com
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