Trump Uses Taxpayer Money to Fund the Torture of Billions of Animals

A report published today by Vox describes how the poultry giant Mountaire Corporation has effectively bribed right-wing politicians to fund its engine of animal cruelty. In today’s newsletter, I go deeper into that story — including the secretive religious organization, The Family, that ties factory farming to right-wing politics. We are simultaneously releasing a version of this newsletter on my YouTube show. Check it out!

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Little known to most Americans, even as Elon Musk makes massive cuts to federal programs across the nation, the Trump administration is planning one of the largest rollouts of welfare in American history. But the billions of dollars of handouts at issue are not for Americans, or to human beings at all. They’re being given to farm corporations who have made a killing, even as they roast tens of millions alive.

Behind it all is an influence operation unparalleled in American history. On both the right and the left, Big Ag has a stranglehold on our political system. Even anti-corporate diehards, such as Elizabeth Warren, have sponsored unconstitutional legislation that protects farm corporations from even the mildest challenge, e.g., using the word “milk” to describe “soy milk.”

And at the center of it all is a company called Mountaire.

Mountaire Corporation, the fourth largest chicken producer in the nation, is one of the top contributors to Trump and the MAGA movement. In 2016, when Trump launched his political career, Mountaire was a top 5 donor. That has continued with tens of millions in contributions to MAGA in the last decade.

It has all been done with incredible secrecy, and it has bought incredible influence.

Chicken producers like Mountaire have become the dominant food companies on the planet. 70 billion chickens are slaughtered every year, and archaeologists say future generations will dig up their skeletons and see the modern era as the age, not of homo sapiens, but of gallus domesticus, the chicken.

This growth is partly because the chicken industry is among the largest beneficiaries of corporate welfare, with billions of taxpayer dollars handed out to companies like Mountaire, even as the company sells chickens with antibiotic resistant disease.

Chicken has even affected our spiritual life. Mountaire executives have held key positions at the National Prayer Breakfast, the religious event that every President since Eisenhower has attended. That influence is part of the reason that the US dollar says the words “In God We Trust.”

And it all comes back to… this.

This is the story of the animal cruelty funding the MAGA movement.

How Chicken Little Became Big Bird

At the height of the Great Depression, as banks failed and millions of people lost their life savings overnight, starvation became a reality for the first time in the nation’s history. The government’s solution was “a chicken for every pot.” And that promise was delivered.

In 100 years, chicken went from being an insignificant part of the American diet to the dominant source of protein for humans on this planet, with 202 million chickens killed every day. In terms of the numbers killed, it’s as if we dropped 1000 atomic bombs on chickens every 24 hours.

US meat consumption: Efficient poultry wins market share. Absolute amounts compared with 1970. Source: USDA.

But this shift didn’t happen naturally. It was largely driven by two choices by the American government.

The first choice was to launch government handouts for farmers. In 1933, as farm companies across the nation were going bankrupt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed the first Farm Bill – the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 – to address a “national economic emergency.” The law designated nearly 10% of the entire federal budget, $250 million, to provide handouts to farms.

But what was supposed to be an emergency program became a permanent part of our political system. Even as farming became big business, the amount of money handed out in the Farm Bill skyrocketed. The most recent Farm Bill in 2018 cost $867 billion, which is a 100x increase in real terms since 1933 and $200+ billion more than the US spent on the military in that same year. The Farm Bill has been described as the largest corporate welfare program in history.

The second choice was allowing the use of drugs in animal feed. Before the 1950s, it was impossible to raise chickens in large flocks because disease would kill them all off when crowded. Antibiotics and other so-called “growth promoting drugs” changed that, and allowed for farmers to cram tens of thousands of animals into a single shed. We now use 4 times as many antibiotic drugs on factory farm animals as on human beings. And chickens grow to 5x the size of chickens raised in 1958.

There are a lot of companies that have benefited from corporate welfare and drugs. But among the most prominent is Mountaire.

The Birth of a Poultry Giant

The chicken industry was not always a giant.

Mountaire was founded in 1914 as a feed business, back before chicken was big business in America. But as corporate welfare and drugs made the poultry business more profitable, Mountaire jumped from feeding chickens to killing them in 1959.

The business has grown immensely since then, with acquisitions of slaughterhouses, hatcheries, and distribution centers across the nation. Mountaire is now one of the largest poultry companies in the nation and does billions in sales every year.

But what has made Mountaire distinct from even its corporate competitors is its investment in politics. Beginning in 1980, Mountaire’s owner Ronald Cameron began to make contributions to Republican politicians. It started small, with $2500 to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Federal law at the time prohibited corporations from contributing large amounts to elections.

But after the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to corporate donations with the Citizens United case in 2010, Cameron made his first big move into politics: a $600,000 contribution in 2016 to a political action committee in Arkansas called Arkansas Horizon. That PAC, which was financed primarily by Cameron, used a huge surge in last minute spending to help knock out the incumbent Democrat in Arkansas, Sen. Mark Pryor, and replace him with a conservative firebrand named Tom Cotton.

Immediately after that Mountaire donation, Cotton argued that the government should cut food stamps from the Farm Bill – but was notably quiet about corporate welfare.

All In For Trump

In 2016, Mountaire Farms went all-in for Trump.

Even as other major Republican donors withheld their donations, Mountaire’s owner Ron Cameron opened the financial spigot. On June 30, 2016, days after Trump secured the nomination, Ron Cameron and his wife Nina each gave $446,000 to a PAC called Trump Victory. In August 2016, Cameron gave another $2 million to a PAC called Rebuilding America Now, run by Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, who ended up in prison a few years later in a money laundering scandal. Mountaire was one of the 5 largest donors to Trump that year.

But Cameron barely received any attention. By donating to so-called Super PACS – political campaign committees that are technically independent of the candidate and can therefore take unlimited donations, Cameron and Mountaire made it hard to follow the money trail. Documents we’ve obtained from FEC records, however, show tens of millions in donations to right wing candidates over the last 8 years, including Lauren Boebert and Madison Cawthorn.

The biggest recipient of Cameron’s donations, however, has been Trump. After a brief interlude with Nikki Haley, Cameron gave another $1 million donation to MAGA, Inc. – a super PAC supporting Trump – shortly before the most recent election.

That has given Mountaire enormous influence. Even as the company has been implicated in environmental and labor scandals – polluting the water and endangering its employees with dangerously-fast line speeds – Trump has gone out of his way to protect Mountaire.

A Wise Political Investment

Mountaire and Big Meat made an investment in Trump – and it paid off hugely.

Trump’s ascendance in 2016 came with a massive surge in corporate welfare to factory farms. Direct payments to farms increased nearly 300% under the Trump administration, reaching record levels.

Source: USDA.

Trump also weakened regulations of Big Ag, including ending the so-called “animal welfare rule.” Under federal law, organic animals are required to have access to the outdoors; Trump allowed factory farmers to meet this requirement with a tiny porch, even if the birds never stepped outside.

But the biggest payoff for Big Ag occurred when COVID-19 hit. Slaughterhouses were crucial hot spots for the spread of COVID-19. One study found that 8% of COVID cases nationwide could be linked to slaughterhouses.

But Trump ordered them to stay open as “critical and strategic” for national security under the Defense Production Act. Bizarrely, he admitted later that the real reason he was doing this was not national security but to deal with the industry’s “liability problems.” Sick workers were suing slaughterhouses for forcing them to work in dangerous conditions, but Trump’s order immunized the companies from liability.

One of those companies was Mountaire. On April 3, 2020, Mountaire announced numerous employees at one of its meatpacking plants were sick with COVID-19, including at least one hospitalization. On April 28, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act and got rid of Mountaire’s “liability problems.” And Mountaire rewarded Trump and his party with a series of large donations immediately thereafter, including a six-figure donation to an obscure Republican legal organization.

Even with increasing scrutiny on COVID at meatpacking plants, however, Mountaire remained shrouded in secrecy.

Shortly after concealing COVID outbreaks at its farms, the company lobbied to reduce transparency in its supply chain, in a move that was described by Farm Action, a nonprofit that supports local farmers, as “slimy.” “What Is Mountaire Trying to Hide?” they asked.

But Mountaire is privately held and has no public disclosure requirements. So no one knew what Mountaire was trying to hide. Until now.

Inside Mountaire

In the summer of 2023, animal rights activists including former Baywatch star Alexandra Paul decided to take a look inside Mountaire’s factory farms. They took huge risks in doing so. Over the last few years, animal rights activists have faced dozens of felony charges for taking photographs of animal abuse in labs, slaughterhouses, and farms.

But Alexandra and other activists wanted to see what was funding the MAGA movement. And, in multiple visits to Mountaire locations over an 18 month period, this is what they found.

• Crowding. Tens of thousands of birds were so crowded that many were trampling one another to death.

• Disease. Animals suffered from antibiotic resistant infections, including Salmonella, a bacteria that sickens over 150,000 Americans every year.

• Starvation. In one of the cruelest ironies, numerous animals were collapsed and unable to reach food and water. Activists found sick animals who were unable to stand – and left to starve to death over multiple days.

This is a violation of the company’s own policies. This is a violation of animal cruelty laws. And this is what is funding the MAGA movement.

The Family

Every US Dollar says “In God We Trust.” But “In Chicken, we trust” would be more accurate. One of the primary reasons Mountaire has faced so little scrutiny is because of its ties to powerful religious groups.

A secretive organization called The Family organizes the National Prayer Breakfast, arguably the most important religious event in America. Every President since Eisenhower has attended the Prayer Breakfast, which is billed as a bipartisan celebration of American religious life. And it was the founders of the Breakfast who, in the 1950s, pushed the government successfully to print on every dollar the words, “In God We Trust.”

But today, it’s not God we trust, but chicken. The National Prayer Breakfast, for most of the last two decades, has been funded and run by Mountaire. Cameron joined the board of The Family in 2001 and began funneling millions of dollars to support its mission. His colleague at Mountaire, W. Dabbs Cavin, became The Family’s President in 2012. But while the Family claimed the moral high ground, it has been racked with sexual scandal, including two separate politicians like Sen. John Ensign using their dormitory to have illicit affairs. More disturbingly, the Family sent $20 million to Uganda to support laws which made homosexuality punishable by death.

Animal cruelty, in short, is just the tip of the iceberg.

And it’s all being supported by Americans buying chicken at the grocery store.

The Rescue

Chickens are everywhere - the dominant force on this planet - but they are also nowhere. Think about it: hundreds of billions of chicken skeletons are filling landfills across the globe, but when was the last time you saw a chicken… alive?

It’s not until someone like Alexandra walks into a factory farm that the public meets these animals face to face. Usually, they are cogs in the engine of our food system, and increasingly the engine of political power, too.

But something remarkable happens when we take them out of the engine. We see the chickens for who they truly are.

That starts with what you hear. We’ve all heard a dog or cat in pain. Animals cry, in the same way that a human child can cry. Scientists have found dozens of distinct vocalizations in the common chicken that express a range of emotions, from joy to fear. They have a sound for “tidbitting,” when they repeatedly pick up and drop morsels of food to encourage their babies to eat and a scream of terror when they see an aerial predator in the sky.

Yet at places like Mountaire, no one hears them scream.

But this bird at Mountaire was one in a billion because someone – Alexandra – heard her scream. And they responded by taking her out. She received emergency care, including a sling that was built to help her learn to stand again.

She saw the sunlight for the first time, and felt grass beneath her feet.

She had delicious new foods, with bright colors that she didn’t know food could have.

And maybe most important, she felt what it means to be safe. And when an animal feels safe – dog or cat, human or bird – they come back to life.

The same is true of the systems in which we live. Food. Politics. Religion. These systems will die unless we can make them safe. But the only way to do that is to turn away from companies like Mountaire, grounded in cruelty. If we can do that – and make a safer world for everyone – we’ll see our nation come back to life.