THE UGLY TRUTH
Donald Trump and the US Chamber of Commerce Are Dance Partners While 170 Million American Workers Cannot Afford the Cover Charge
Part III of the Clean Slate 2028 Series
By Randell Hynes, Founder & President, US Workers Alliance
In Part I of this series, we gave credit where credit was due. We examined the Trump cabinet’s three-pillar challenge to globalism — Rubio’s civilizational confidence, Bessent’s economic sovereignty doctrine, Warsh’s monetary reset — and acknowledged that it represents the most coherent strategic framework any administration has offered in fifty years. We asked: Are they building something for American workers, or for themselves?
In Part II, we told the story of how we got here. We traced the fifty-four-year arc from Lewis Powell’s confidential 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce through the Supreme Court decisions that gave corporations the rights of citizens and money the power of speech, through the Chamber’s lobbying machine funded by foreign corporations and companies convicted of visa fraud, to the systematic destruction of the American worker’s voice in their own democracy.
Now comes the ugly truth. The part that neither party wants you to see. The part that explains why the diagnosis in Part I never becomes the cure, and why the history in Part II keeps repeating.
Donald Trump and the US Chamber of Commerce are not enemies. They are dance partners performing the most expensive piece of political theater in American history — a choreographed conflict designed to make you believe that someone in Washington is fighting for you while every institution that was supposed to protect you is systematically dismantled behind the curtain.
The disagreements are loud. The agreements are worth trillions. And the American worker pays for both.
I. The Stage
On February 1, 2025 — eleven days into what the White House called the Golden Age of America — the United States Chamber of Commerce issued a public rebuke of the new president. “Tariffs are not the answer,” declared John Murphy, the Chamber’s Senior Vice President for International Affairs, responding to Trump’s announcement of sweeping tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. The statement was sharp. It was quotable. Cable news ran it on a loop. And across the country, millions of Americans who had voted for Donald Trump because he promised to take on the corporate establishment nodded along and thought: good. He is fighting them. He is fighting for us.
He is not fighting for you. And they are not fighting him.
What you are watching is a performance. A carefully staged production in which the president who promised to drain the swamp and the lobbying machine that is the swamp play their assigned roles with the discipline of Broadway veterans while the real business of America gets conducted behind the curtain. The tariff fight is the magician’s left hand — the one waving in the air, drawing your eye, making you believe something extraordinary is happening. The right hand — the one picking your pocket — is a $3.3 trillion bill that cuts your healthcare to pay for corporate tax cuts, a gutted labor board that destroyed your right to organize, a neutered consumer protection bureau that let the banks off the leash, and a lobbying industry that just posted its first $5 billion year in American history.
In January 2026, OpenSecrets — the nonpartisan organization that tracks money in American politics — reported that lobbying activity in the United States surpassed $5 billion for the first time in 2025. Five point zero eight billion dollars. A fourteen percent increase over the previous year. The largest jump since quarterly disclosures began in 2008. Five billion dollars spent in a single year by corporations, trade associations, and interest groups to influence the people who are supposed to represent you. That is not democracy. That is a marketplace where your government is the product and you are not the customer.
And who was the single largest spender in that marketplace? The United States Chamber of Commerce. Seventy-two point one million dollars in lobbying expenditures in 2025 alone. The Chamber overtook the National Association of Realtors to reclaim its throne as the most powerful lobbying operation in Washington — the same throne it has occupied, on and off, since Lewis Powell told it to take over the political arena in 1971.
To understand the theater, you have to watch what the Chamber does — not what it says.
II. The Handshake
While the cameras were pointed at the tariff drama — while cable news devoted hour after hour to the question of whether Trump and the Chamber were allies or enemies — the two sides were conducting the largest transfer of wealth from working Americans to corporations in modern history. And they were doing it together. In the open. On letterhead.
The vehicle was called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to every member of Congress urging them to pass it. They had dozens of businesses sign it. They called the bill essential for “long-term investments that drive growth, accelerate productivity, and increase prosperity across all segments of the economy.” They made it their number one legislative priority for 2025.
Trump signed it into law on July 4, 2025. Independence Day. The irony would be poetic if it were not so cruel.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the most-lobbied piece of legislation in 2025. Two thousand three hundred and fifty-four organizations reported lobbying activity on the bill — more than three times as many as the next most-lobbied measure. The health care sector alone invested a record $868 million in lobbying in 2025, much of it centered on this single bill. Blue Cross Blue Shield cited it sixty-four times in its lobbying disclosures. The American Hospital Association cited it forty-eight times. Berkshire Hathaway lobbied on it. General Motors lobbied on it. Comcast, FedEx, and Altria Group lobbied on it. And the Chamber of Commerce — the single largest lobbying spender in Washington at $72.1 million — made it the centerpiece of its entire 2025 agenda.
Here is what the corporations got: the permanent extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which slashed the corporate tax rate from thirty-five percent to twenty-one percent. A proposed further reduction to fifteen percent for domestic manufacturers. Continued access to the H-1B visa program. No new regulations. No new accountability.
Here is what American workers got.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 16.9 million people will lose health coverage as a result of the bill and related policy changes. Eleven point eight million from the bill’s direct provisions — Medicaid cuts, work requirements, eligibility restrictions, the stripping of coverage from refugees and asylees. Another 5.1 million from marketplace rule changes and the expiration of expanded premium tax credits that the bill chose not to extend. Work requirements were imposed on able-bodied adults — eighty hours a month of qualifying activity, verified by a bureaucratic apparatus designed to create paperwork barriers that kick eligible people off their coverage. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was restructured with new work requirements, reduced federal reimbursement for state administrative costs from fifty percent to twenty-five percent, and a state cost-sharing requirement that penalizes states with higher error rates. Federal matching for Medicaid expansion was frozen. Provider tax thresholds were ratcheted down. Retroactive coverage was limited. And the bill added $3.3 trillion to the national debt that your children and grandchildren will spend their lives paying off.
The Chamber lobbied for this bill. Trump signed it. And nobody called it a fight, because it was not one. It was a handshake. The corporations got permanent tax cuts. The workers got their healthcare and food assistance cut to pay for them. And the bill was signed on the Fourth of July, the day we celebrate independence from the tyranny of concentrated power.
III. The Toll Booth
No single issue reveals the theater more clearly than the H-1B visa program. It is the issue where the performance is most visible, where the gap between what the audience sees and what actually happens is widest, and where the human cost is most concrete.
In December 2024, weeks before taking office, Trump’s inner circle fractured publicly over H-1B visas. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — the men Trump had appointed to lead the Department of Government Efficiency — publicly defended the visa program, arguing that American companies need access to global talent. Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s 2016 “America First” platform, called it a betrayal. The MAGA base erupted. It was the first real ideological crisis of the incoming administration.
Trump settled it on December 28, 2024, telling the New York Post: “I’ve always liked the visas. I have always been a believer in H-1B.”
Read that sentence again. The man who won the presidency by promising to protect American workers from foreign labor competition told the country, on the record, that he has always been a believer in the program that replaces American workers with cheaper foreign labor. And then the news cycle moved on.
Nine months later, Trump imposed a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa petitions. His base cheered. Finally, they thought, he is cracking down. The fee was framed as a populist strike against the body shops — the Indian outsourcing companies like Infosys, Cognizant, and Tata that file tens of thousands of H-1B applications every year and pay their workers $48,000 less than American companies pay for the same work.
One month after that, the Chamber of Commerce filed a federal lawsuit to block the fee. The headlines wrote themselves: Trump versus the Chamber, Round Two. The base cheered again.
But look closer. The $100,000 fee does not reduce the number of H-1B visas. It does not close the loopholes that allow body shops to game the lottery system. It does not punish the companies that have already been caught committing fraud. Infosys paid a $34 million federal settlement for systemic visa fraud in 2013 — they created a “Do’s and Don’ts” memo teaching their workers how to lie to United States border agents. Its Chief Legal Officer still sits on the Chamber’s U.S.-India Business Council Board. Cognizant’s president was federally indicted. Its CEO, Ravi Kumar, still sits on the Chamber’s Board of Directors. Tata Consultancy Services is under a $100 million federal investigation for gaming the H-1B visa lottery. Its representative still sits on the Chamber’s Board.
Trump has not directed the Department of Justice to investigate these companies. He has not signed an executive order targeting visa fraud. He has not proposed legislation to reform the H-1B program. He imposed a fee. A fee that large corporations can absorb and small American companies cannot. A fee that consolidates H-1B usage among the very outsourcing giants that sit on the Chamber’s Board. A fee that collects revenue from the fraud without stopping it.
The $100,000 H-1B fee is not a wall. It is a toll booth. And the Chamber’s lawsuit against it is not a war. It is a scene in the play — the scene where the audience is supposed to believe that the two sides are enemies.
Meanwhile, the Chamber’s own statement announcing the lawsuit praised Trump’s tax cuts, energy policy, and deregulation agenda. “The Chamber and our members have actively backed these proposals,” Neil Bradley wrote. He sued the president and thanked him in the same press release.
That is not opposition. That is choreography.
IV. The Wrecking Crew
While the tariff fight and the H-1B fee consumed the public’s attention, the Trump administration systematically dismantled every institution that was built to protect American workers. And the Chamber of Commerce, which claims to be Trump’s adversary, praised every demolition.
The National Labor Relations Board — the agency that protects your right to organize, to bargain collectively, to have a voice in your own workplace — was gutted. Trump fired board members. The Supreme Court, in May 2025, allowed the removals. Union elections fell sharply throughout 2025. In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order stripping federal workers of collective bargaining rights. The AFL-CIO called it “an attack on working people.” The Chamber said nothing, because the Chamber has been trying to destroy the NLRB since Lewis Powell told them to in 1971. This was not a policy disagreement between Trump and the Chamber. This was a delivery.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the agency created after the 2008 financial crisis to prevent banks from defrauding American families — was effectively neutered. Congress passed resolutions overturning CFPB rules on overdraft fees and digital payment oversight. The Chamber, which had sued the CFPB multiple times over the years, praised every rollback. The agency that was supposed to stand between you and the banks that crashed the economy was dismantled by a president who told you he was fighting the establishment, while the establishment applauded from the gallery.
The Securities and Exchange Commission repealed its climate disclosure rules — rules the Chamber had sued to block. It repealed guidance on shareholder proposals that allowed investors to raise concerns about corporate governance. It repealed restrictions on cryptocurrency activities by banks. The Chamber praised every rollback.
On April 16, 2025, the Chamber published an article on its own website with a headline that should have been front-page news: “The Trump Administration Is Rightsizing Financial Regulations.” The article, written by the Chamber’s Senior Vice President for Capital Markets, praised the administration’s rollback of consumer protections, financial oversight, and corporate accountability rules with the enthusiasm of a theater critic reviewing a five-star performance. The White House boasted of the “best deregulation year in history.” The Chamber called it “a model for deregulation done right.”
If Trump and the Chamber are enemies, why does the Chamber keep praising him?
The answer is that they are not enemies. On tariffs — one issue, one fight, one piece of the performance — they disagree. On everything else that matters to the Chamber’s bottom line — taxes, deregulation, labor, consumer protection, the social safety net — Trump and the Chamber are in perfect alignment. The tariff fight is the scene the audience is meant to remember. The deregulation, the tax cuts, the gutted labor board, the neutered consumer bureau, the 16.9 million people losing health coverage — that is the show the audience is not supposed to see.
V. The Foreign Money Pipeline
Trump’s Golden Age is branded as “America First.” The slogan is on the hats, on the podiums, on the executive orders. But follow the money, and “America First” starts to look like “Foreign Capital Welcome.”
Within his first hundred hours in office, Trump announced that Saudi Arabia “wants to invest $600 billion in the United States over the next four years.” He secured a $500 billion AI infrastructure deal with SoftBank — a Japanese conglomerate — alongside Oracle and OpenAI. Stellantis, a Dutch-Italian automaker, restarted an assembly plant in Illinois after its chairman met with Trump before the inauguration. These are foreign corporations and foreign governments pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the American economy — not out of charity, but because Trump’s deregulation agenda, tax cuts, and energy policies make the United States the most profitable place on earth for foreign capital.
And the Chamber of Commerce is the bridge between that foreign capital and American policy.
The Chamber maintains over one hundred American Chambers of Commerce — AmChams — in countries around the world, from Albania to Zambia. It operates Business Councils that directly solicit dues from foreign corporations, including foreign state-owned enterprises. The U.S.-India Business Council counts among its members Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, and Wipro — the same Indian outsourcing companies convicted of or under investigation for visa fraud. The U.S.-Bahrain Business Council includes Bahrain Petroleum Company and Gulf Air — companies owned by a foreign government. These foreign corporations pay dues into the Chamber’s treasury. And the Chamber uses that treasury to spend $72.1 million a year lobbying Congress and influencing American elections.
They will tell you the foreign money is kept separate. They will tell you they have an accounting system. But when the American people asked to see the books — when journalists and members of Congress demanded proof — the Chamber refused. They have never disclosed their donors. They have never demonstrated how foreign money is separated from domestic money. They have never proven that foreign dollars do not support the largest lobbying operation in the history of the United States.
And here is the critical point — the point that transforms this from a political argument into a legal one. The Chamber’s primary business is political influence. Every dollar that enters the Chamber — whether from Bahrain Petroleum or a small business in Topeka — supports an organization whose entire purpose is to influence American politics. When foreign corporations pay dues that cover the Chamber’s rent, its utilities, its staff salaries, its technology infrastructure, they are not funding a neutral trade association. They are funding a political enterprise. And that funding — even if it never touches a political ad directly — liberates domestic money for political spending. It is an indirect contribution to American elections by foreign nationals. And under 52 U.S.C. § 30121, that is illegal.
Trump’s “America First” and the Chamber’s foreign money pipeline are not contradictions. They are two sides of the same coin. The president welcomes foreign capital with one hand and guts the regulations that might hold it accountable with the other. The Chamber collects foreign dues with one hand and spends $72.1 million influencing the government with the other. The branding is different. The beneficiaries are the same.
VI. The Powell Memo’s Final Act
In August 1971, Lewis Powell — a corporate tobacco attorney and friend of Chamber Education Committee Chairman Eugene Sydnor Jr. — wrote a confidential memo to the Chamber of Commerce outlining a blueprint for the corporate takeover of American democracy. He told the Chamber to take over the universities, the media, the political arena, and — most critically — the courts. Two months later, Nixon put him on the Supreme Court, where Powell himself wrote the decision that gave corporations First Amendment political rights.
Fifty-four years later, every single directive in that memo has been fulfilled. And the Trump administration — the administration that promised to fight the corporate establishment — delivered the final pieces.
Powell said take over the courts. Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices in his first term. That Court overturned Chevron deference, weakening every regulatory agency in the federal government. That same Court allowed Trump to fire NLRB board members, effectively destroying the agency that protects workers’ right to organize.
Powell said weaken labor. Trump gutted the NLRB, stripped federal workers of collective bargaining rights, and presided over a sharp decline in union elections. The Chamber said nothing. The Chamber did not need to say anything. The delivery spoke for itself.
Powell said reduce regulation. Trump delivered what the Chamber called “the best deregulation year in history.” The CFPB was neutered. The SEC was rolled back. Consumer protections were eliminated across every sector.
Powell said protect corporate profits. Trump made the corporate tax cuts permanent, proposed cutting the rate further to fifteen percent, and signed a $3.3 trillion bill — the Chamber’s number one legislative priority — that cut healthcare and food assistance to pay for it.
Powell said mobilize corporate political power. In the 2024 election, outside spending reached $4.5 billion. Dark money hit $1.9 billion. One man spent $280 million on a single election cycle. The Chamber spent $72.1 million lobbying Congress. And the lobbying industry as a whole crossed $5 billion for the first time in American history.
The Golden Age of America is the final act of the Powell Memo. It is the culmination of a fifty-four-year project to transfer power from the American people to the corporations that pay the Chamber’s dues. And it is being executed by a president who convinced 74 million Americans that he was the corporations’ enemy.
That is the theater. That is the show. And the American worker bought a ticket to a performance in which they were never the audience. They were the price of admission.
VII. The Reviews Are In
The Chamber of Commerce knows exactly what it has in Donald Trump. It has a president who delivers its entire legislative agenda — tax cuts, deregulation, labor suppression, safety net cuts — while publicly feuding with it over tariffs. The feud gives Trump populist credibility. It gives the Chamber plausible deniability. And it gives the American worker the illusion of representation while every institution that was supposed to protect them is systematically dismantled.
Consider the scorecard.
Corporate tax cuts made permanent. Delivered. The Chamber’s number one priority.
Best deregulation year in history. Delivered. The Chamber called it “a model for deregulation done right.”
NLRB gutted, union elections collapsed, collective bargaining stripped from federal workers. Delivered. The Chamber has been trying to destroy the NLRB since 1971.
CFPB neutered, SEC rolled back, consumer protections eliminated. Delivered. The Chamber had sued both agencies multiple times.
Sixteen point nine million people projected to lose health coverage. Delivered. The Chamber lobbied for the bill that did it.
H-1B system preserved, visa fraud unenforced, body-shop companies untouched. Delivered. The Chamber’s Board members at Cognizant, Wipro, and the U.S.-India Business Council remain in place.
Lobbying crosses $5 billion for the first time in history. Delivered. The Chamber sits at the top of the pile at $72.1 million.
Now consider the tariff fight — the one issue where Trump and the Chamber publicly disagree. The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs in February 2026. The Chamber’s Executive Vice President Neil Bradley called the ruling “welcome news” and urged the administration to “reset overall tariff policy.” The free-trade regime that shipped American factories to Guadalajara and American jobs to Shenzhen survived the Trump presidency without a scratch.
Even when Trump and the Chamber fight, the Chamber wins.
They are not enemies. They are dance partners. And the music they are dancing to was written by Lewis Powell in 1971.
VIII. What Comes Next
There is only one way to end the show. You cannot vote out the Chamber of Commerce. You cannot impeach a lobbying operation. You cannot recall a 501(c)(6) that refuses to disclose its donors. You cannot drain a swamp that just posted a $5 billion year.
But you can replace every member of Congress who dances to its music.
That is what Clean Slate 2028 is. Not a protest. Not a petition. Not a hashtag. A plan. A plan to replace every single member of Congress — Republican or Democrat, it does not matter what letter is next to their name — who took the Chamber’s money, who voted the Chamber’s way, who put foreign corporate interests ahead of American workers. Every single one.
We are running candidates in every congressional district in America who have signed the American Worker Pledge: no corporate PAC money, no Chamber endorsements, no K Street masters. Citizens who serve citizens. Patriots who serve the people. Candidates who answer to the 170 million American workers who have no seat at the table in Washington — not to the 2,354 organizations that spent billions lobbying for a bill that cut your healthcare to pay for corporate tax cuts.
And we are taking the Chamber to federal court. We are going to force open its books. We are going to prove that foreign money — from Bahrain Petroleum Company, from the State Bank of India, from Infosys and Tata and Wipro and a hundred AmChams around the world — flows into the largest lobbying operation in American history and is used, directly or indirectly, to influence American elections and destroy American jobs. We are going to challenge the legal fiction that an organization funded by foreign governments and foreign corporations is an “association of American citizens” entitled to First Amendment protection. We are going to use the very courts that Powell weaponized against us to hold the Chamber accountable for the first time in its history.
The theater ends when the audience walks out.
Part I of this series showed you what the Trump administration is building. Part II showed you who built the system they are operating within. This — Part III — showed you the ugly truth: that the builder and the system are the same machine, wearing different masks, performing for an audience of 170 million workers who were never meant to see behind the curtain.
Now you have seen it. And you cannot unsee it.
The question is what you do next.
Clean Slate 2028. Replace every member of Congress.
Join the Stand at cleanslate2028.com.
© 2026 Buildup Cooperative 501(c)(4) dba U.S. Workers Alliance. All rights reserved. cleanslate2028.com | usworkeractions.com | @USWorkerActions
Sources
Primary Sources
- OpenSecrets: “Lobbying firms took in a record $5 billion in 2025” (January 29, 2026)
- Congressional Budget Office: Information Concerning the Budgetary Effects of H.R. 1, as Passed by the Senate on July 1, 2025
- ASTHO: One Big Beautiful Bill Law Summary (July 9, 2025)
- US Chamber of Commerce: Letter to Congress supporting the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (2025)
- US Chamber of Commerce: “The Trump Administration Is Rightsizing Financial Regulations” (April 16, 2025)
- US Chamber of Commerce: Statement on H-1B fee lawsuit (October 2025)
- Trump, Donald J.: Interview with the New York Post, December 28, 2024
Secondary Sources
- OpenSecrets: Chamber of Commerce lobbying data, 2024-2025 ($72.1M in 2025)
- OpenSecrets: Outside spending data, 2008-2024 ($4.5B in 2024 cycle)
- Supreme Court of the United States: Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump (February 20, 2026) — IEEPA tariffs struck down
- AFL-CIO: Statement on executive order stripping federal workers of collective bargaining rights (March 2025)
- CBPP: Analysis of Medicaid and SNAP cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act
- KFF: Health Provisions in the 2025 Federal Budget Reconciliation Bill
Legal Authority
- 52 U.S.C. § 30121(a)(1)(A): Prohibition on foreign nationals making contributions “directly or indirectly” in connection with federal, state, or local elections
- Bluman v. FEC (2012): Supreme Court summarily affirmed that foreign citizens have no First Amendment rights in U.S. elections
