In a trucking giant’s bankruptcy, workers and taxpayers get crushed, while a Trump-linked firm gets a government cushion.
As tens of thousands of workers are being laid off in the bankruptcy of one of America’s largest trucking companies, one player in the collapse is set to get at least some financial protection: Apollo Global Management, a politically-connected private equity firm that owns a huge chunk of the company’s debt.
The trucking company, Yellow, received a $700 million taxpayer-funded bailout from President Donald Trump in 2020, shortly before Apollo’s co-founder and his wife donated $1 million to Trump’s reelection campaign.
Though Trump constantly depicts himself as a pro-worker populist, his administration’s bailout of Yellow was structured to permit Apollo to get paid back in bankruptcy before the government. The result: Truckers now face mass layoffs and taxpayers could see hundreds of millions of dollars of losses — all while the Trump donors’ Wall Street firm benefits from a government-funded cushion.
This week, Yellow filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced it would be shutting down, three years after receiving a $700 million pandemic loan from the Trump administration. Yellow moved freight for major companies including Walmart and Home Depot as well as the Department of Defense and employed more than 30,000 workers, most of them members of the Teamsters union — which Yellow has scapegoated for its financial distress.
Because of how the government's loans to Yellow were structured, the federal government stands third in line to get paid back, behind Apollo and a group of banks — loan terms that a congressional oversight committee found were more generous than Yellow had sought, according to federalrecords reviewed by The Lever.
Apollo acquired a substantial stake in Yellow just before COVID hit, meaning the firm was a major beneficiary of the government’s bailout of the distressed company. Robert Rasmussen, a bankruptcy expert and professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, said that the Trump administration could have leveraged this fact to negotiate a better position on the creditor list, but apparently chose not to do so.
“If this had been a commercial loan, you would think the lender would have said, we will lend you money so that we come maybe second in line,” Rasmussen said. “And if you don’t let us come second in line, we won’t put money in. While Apollo would have had the right to say no, you would have expected a negotiation where they may have given up a little bit, because they had an interest in the company getting a $700 million infusion of cash.”
Apollo, a New York-based private equity firm with more than $600 billion assets under management, had significant ties to the Trump administration.
In 2017, Apollo loaned $184 million to Kushner Companies, the family real estate firm of Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, to refinance a mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper. That loan came after Apollo co-founder Joshua Harris started advising the White House on infrastructure policy.
The Trump Securities and Exchange Commission, chaired by finance industry lawyer Jay Clayton, dropped an investigation into Apollo weeks after the company extended the loan to Kushner. After Trump left office, Clayton became the lead independent director of Apollo.
When the pandemic hit, Apollo co-founder and now-CEO Marc Rowan contacted Trump administration senior officials, including Kushner, seeking relaxed restrictions on a separate COVID relief program that could benefit Apollo. In September 2020, Rowan and his wife donated $1 million to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee between Trump and the Republican National Committee supporting his 2020 reelection campaign.
Apollo’s third co-founder, Leon Black, was reportedly apersonal acquaintance of Kushner. Black was recently accused of raping a young girl at now-deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s New York townhouse.
Apollo and its subsidiaries spent $4.7 million lobbying the federal government in 2020, according to OpenSecrets.
Apollo partner John Bookout donated$85,000 to Trump Victory in the 2020 cycle. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who served on the Apollo board until 2021, donated $1 million from his Kraft Group LLC to the Trump inaugural committee in late 2016.
Former Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), one of four members of the COVID Congressional Oversight Commission set up to oversee pandemic relief spending, joined Apollo’s Board in February after retiring from the Senate. The oversight commission’s final report on the Yellow loans was released in June.
