How Much Is Our Freedom Worth? Ending Corporate Support for Fascism

Americans are guaranteed the right to have a say in who represents us in making decisions about our healthcare system, the quality of air we breathe, and how immigrants are treated. Yet the Trump regime has been laying the groundwork to interfere with our right to vote for months, and that effort will likely continue long after tomorrow’s elections. Trump and his allies are pushing an unsubstantiated narrative of voter fraud meant to create mass chaos and confusion about the validity of election results. To protect our freedom and defeat Trump’s attempts to sabotage our elections, we must fight back on all fronts.

As we pour our efforts into fighting voter suppression and gerrymandering, we must not forget about the power that corporations provide as a critical pillar of support for the far right by funding their campaigns, lobbying for their policies, and publicly endorsing or staying silent on authoritarian overreach. Trump cannot continue terrorizing our communities and denying our freedoms without the support of corporate America. ICE and MAGA do not act alone in their ruthless attacks on our neighbors, our pastors, and our friends. They are fueled, propped up, and funded by billionaires and corporations who seek unfettered profit and control by keeping wages low, prices high, and using racism to keep the working class fighting amongst ourselves.

Thus, as we fight to maintain our right to vote, we must take our demands directly to this billionaire and corporate power structure to force them to take a stand against this administration’s election interference. 

Currently, corporations are simultaneously courting the Trump administration and distancing themselves from responsibility or association with its authoritarian overreach. The fight against authoritarianism requires us to not only expose the ways corporations are supporting the fascist state, but also to create defections by disrupting capital that is aligned with or unwilling to stand up to the state. 

Business for Democracy Pledge 

The “Business for Democracy” national pledge is a tool organizers across the country are using to call on corporations to clearly state their interest in protecting free and fair elections. It calls on businesses to inform employees about their voting rights and publicly oppose efforts that obstruct free and democratic elections, including efforts to impede vote counting or the seating of duly elected candidates. 

The pledge is simple and shouldn’t be controversial, but it is powerful because it highlights the fact that authoritarianism cannot thrive on its own. While many focus on legal efforts to fight back against election sabotage, we cannot lose sight of the economic front. And we know that while many small businesses will stand in solidarity with our communities and sign the pledge, the only way we will get a significant number of megacorporations to sign is by showing that complicity with fascism is bad for business.

Beyond the pledge, this moment calls for mass action to bring our demands directly to our local corporate power brokers. For some of the larger corporations, it might even require boycotts, getting pension funds and large institutional investors to divest, or promoting legislation that disincentivizes collaboration with the fascist regime. In short, corporate actors that support authoritarianism should be held accountable. 

What would happen if the largest corporations in this country stood up to Trump? We’ve already seen glimpses of their power when they push back. Following the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, JPMorgan Chase closed Trump’s bank accounts due to the political and legal aftermath. Despite his praise of Trump, Chase CEO Jamie Dimon raised the alarm against Trump’s tariffs in April 2025, and the administration paused their implementation and shortly after walked them back. In October 2025, Trump cited a call from Nvidia and Salesforce CEOs as the reason for holding off on a National Guard surge in the Bay Area. Earlier this year, over 700 Minnesota businesses closed for the Day of Truth & Freedom protesting ICE’s violent Operation Metro Surge with no work, no shopping, and no school. In response to a sustained week of actions against corporations enabling the ICE surge, 60 Minnesota corporations signed a letter calling on Trump to de-escalate. Corporations can take a stand against authoritarianism, and we need to create the conditions and pressure for enough of them to do so. 

Every city and state has a unique list of corporations and billionaires that prop up Trump’s regime. Local organizers must identify those corporate players and bring the fight directly to their doorstep. 

A clear example is the Coalition to Stop Avelo. Local organizers in Connecticut learned that Avelo — a newer airline carrier based in the state — had signed an estimated $150 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security and was flying deportation flights for ICE. A coalition formed almost immediately including local organizations like the New Haven Immigrants Coalition, large national organizations like Indivisible and Siembra NC, faith based groups and the union of flight attendants who credibly documented the lack of safety and humanity on board the flights. Avelo was attempting to sell airline tickets to the public while participating in the deeply unpopular deportation machine. The broad coalition made that impossible. After just a few months of public pressure, Avelo CEO ended the airline’s DHS contract saying it was hurting the company’s bottom line. 

Large national corporations have outsized influence and ties to the administration, and their defection will be monumental in the fight against authoritarianism. These corporations — like Amazon, Palantir, Target, Salesforce, and JP Morgan Chase — represent some of the nation’s largest private-sector employers and Trump’s biggest donors, funding his 2025 inauguration and ballroom. Defending our rights will require large-scale economic disruption and publicly exposing how corporations are not only funding the administration, but, in our view, supplying it with infrastructure that undermines our democracy. 

Over the next few months, we must ask corporate America, “How much is our freedom worth?” Attacks on our communities and our rights are not carried out by government actors alone. Billionaires and corporations sustain the violence by using their wealth and power to shape government, extract from our communities, and shield themselves from accountability. The instability and chaos being created by the Trump regime is not only bad for our democratic process, but is also worsening economic hardships for regular people. Our task leading up to the midterm elections and beyond is to build enough collective power to get the corporations that underpin this regime to take a stand against election sabotage, hold those who do not act accountable, and protect our neighbors being persecuted for their dissent.