Meet the MAGA billionaire welfare barons.Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get The Daily Prospect Monday through Friday. [link removed]
[link removed]
**SEPTEMBER 8, 2025**
Click to read this email in your browser. [link removed]
I started down the rabbit hole of the Fanjul sugar dynasty of Palm Beach when Pam Bondi abruptly shut down the Jeffrey Epstein investigation and RFK Jr. announced he was bringing back cane sugar to Coca-Cola. Trump hatched the Coke plan in consultation with Pepe Fanjul, a longtime billionaire donor who was also close to Epstein. The Fanjuls’ deep state influence dates back to the McKinley administration, includes lots of run-ins with the Kennedys. They’e not household names outside Florida, but they certainly should be [link removed].
**–Maureen Tkacik, investigations editor**
[link removed]
TRAVELARIUM/iStock
Sugar Daddies [link removed]
Trump 2.0 is so relentlessly mobster that it can be difficult to reconcile with the historic and enduring lawlessness of the American capitalist class. Yet the Fanjul family history reminds us of this. For well over a century, this clan has wielded enormous influence in our corridors of power. The Fanjul sugar dynasty is the direct descendant and probably the wealthiest remaining heir to what a century ago was known as the “Sugar Trust.” Subsidizing the sugar industry might seem perverse today, but in the 19th century a deep reserve of emergency empty calories was viewed as a requirement of proper sovereignty.
In 1984, the family became the biggest landowner in the Dominican Republic for a mere $200 million when what was then Paramount Pictures’ parent company decided to offload a sugar plantation named Central Romana that had been a constant source of negative headlines. Three years earlier, a group of Maryknoll nuns had decided to raise a media shitstorm about the “subhuman” squalor in which the plantation housed its workforce. Most houses had no electricity or drinkable water or even mattresses for sleeping on, latrines were “appalling,” disease and child malnutrition were rampant, and laborers, they said, made on average around $2.50 a day. The Fanjuls were the perfect owners for such an enterprise.
In the four decades since they purchased the plantation, virtually nothing has changed, and that includes the pay. While the company **withholds funds for taxes and retirement** [link removed] from workers’ checks, virtually none of them have an immigration status that would enable them to collect such benefits; nearly all are migrants from Haiti who are forced to cut cane essentially until they die. (“Since the acquisition, Central Romana has significantly improved working conditions, benefits, and living conditions of its workers,” a Fanjul family spokesman said in an emailed statement.)
Today, the Fanjuls make much, much more money selling sugar than what the global market will bear, thanks to the resiliency of those late-19th-century sugar subsidies, along with a powerful cocktail of market dominance and old-fashioned price-fixing. It is unclear and possibly unquantifiable how much the Fanjuls make directly from these subsidies, but estimates generally suggest the program costs consumers between $2.5 billion and $4 billion per year, and the Fanjul empire supplies roughly 30 percent of the sugar consumed in America annually.
The Fanjuls have become big donors to President Donald Trump and the Republican Party in recent years, and that investment has seen a return. After **exposés** [link removed] and investigations, then-President Joe Biden’s Labor Department formally issued a “withhold release order” blocking Central Romana’s sugar products from entering the country. Within weeks of his inauguration, Trump repealed the ban on Central Romana sugar without explanation. Then, in July, Trump cajoled Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into bestowing the official MAHA seal of approval on a plan to **use cane sugar in Coca-Cola’s flagship beverage** [link removed] in lieu of high-fructose corn syrup. Naturally, the Fanjuls were behind the plan, having been patched in six months earlier to an awkward meeting between Trump and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey. The family has cultivated a political terrain as hospitable to their dreams and desires as Cuba under Fulgencio Batista.
Continue reading this story [link removed]
**ON OUR SITE**
In exchange for avoiding a government shutdown, Democrats are demanding an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies. What happens when Republicans say no? [link removed]
With Trump hostile to democracy at home and indifferent to it abroad, it’s not clear that the West still exists [link removed].
[link removed]
Read more about the [link removed]
IDEAS, POLITICS, and POWER [link removed]
that shape the world around us at [link removed]
prospect.org [link removed]
[link removed]
**Support**
**The American Prospect**
We're a small, non-profit newsroom. Our independent reporting is supported by readers like you.
YOUR TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM prospect.org/donate
Copyright (c) 2025 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.**The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States**
You are receiving this newsletter because you have signed up for our service.
To opt out of American Prospect membership, donation or advertising messaging, click here [link removed].
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here [link removed].
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters, click here [link removed].
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
[link removed]
Sent to:
[email protected]
Unsubscribe [link removed]
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
