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Donald Trump campaigns in North Charleston, South Carolina, on 14 February.
Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images
View image in fullscreen
Donald Trump campaigns in North Charleston, South Carolina, on 14 February.
Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Donald Trump



RIGHTWING MEGA-DONORS DRIFT BACK TO TRUMP AS ELECTION REMATCH LOOMS

Former president is enjoying some success in courting sceptical funders but
some, such as Peter Thiel, have spurned his advances



Chris McGreal in New York
Sun 18 Feb 2024 06.00 ESTLast modified on Sun 18 Feb 2024 06.02 EST
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Donald Trump’s efforts to court and cajole rightwing billionaires into financing
his presidential campaign are bearing fruit as even sceptical conservative
mega-donors face up to the prospect he will again be the Republican candidate.

Trump is winning back some donors who supported him four years ago but then gave
their money to the former US president’s primary rivals this year, fearing he
will again lose to Joe Biden in November or the chaos that will ensue if he
wins. But some other former ultra-wealthy supporters, including the tech
billionaire Peter Thiel, have spurned Trump’s advances.


Revealed: rightwinger Leonard Leo linked to efforts to keep Trump on ballot
Read more

Trump’s campaign is pushing the inevitability of his victory over the former
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, the last remaining challenger in the
Republican primaries, in order to shift the focus to the general election as he
pursues Wall Street and Silicon Valley money.



Trump successfully wooed the biggest donor to the Florida governor Ron
DeSantis’s failed presidential campaign during a visit to Las Vegas last month,
the billionaire developer Robert Bigelow. After meeting Trump and then joining
his motorcade through Las Vegas to a political rally, Bigelow pledged $20m to
the former president’s campaign – the same amount he gave to DeSantis – along
with another $1m toward the mounting costs of his myriad legal problems.

Trump also won commitments from other well-heeled donors on the Las Vegas trip
while the billionaire investor John Paulson held a dinner for the former
president and major Republican party contributors earlier this month, according
to Politico.

Two years ago, some mega-donors were backing away from Trump after the
Republicans fell short of expectations in the midterm congressional elections
and candidates backed by the former president did badly. The hedge fund magnate
Kenneth Griffin publicly threw his support behind DeSantis, calling Trump a
“three-time loser”.

In October, Trump’s representatives were pointedly excluded from a meeting of
the American Opportunity Alliance, a conservative donor network founded by
Griffin and another Wall Street billionaire, Paul Singer, while aides from rival
Republican primary campaigns were present. In 2016, Singer was the biggest donor
to a super political action committee (Super Pac) focused on stopping Trump
winning the Republican nomination.

View image in fullscreen
Paul Singer opposed Trump winning the Republican nomination in 2016 but the
donor network he co-founded may be softening its stance. Photograph: Mike
Blake/Reuters

But, in a sign that at least some donors have shifted their focus to November,
Trump’s aides were invited to an AOA meeting in Florida last month. The New York
Times reported that a majority of those donors still backed Haley, including
Griffin after he lost confidence in DeSantis’s inept campaign. But the presence
of the former president’s representatives was taken as evidence that they were
going to have to support him if they wanted to lever Biden out of the
presidency.

Donor concerns about the chaos Trump brings will not have been allayed by recent
comments that appeared to abandon some members of Nato to the Russians and the
writer E Jean Carroll’s $88m award for defamation by the former president.
Neither will donors have been encouraged by Trump’s threat on his social media
platform, Truth Social, to blacklist those who give money to Haley’s campaign.

But, for some donors at least, whatever dangers Trump poses to democracy are
subordinate to their opposition to taxes funding welfare, laws to protect the
environment, worker rights and anti-monopoly laws.

The Wall Street financier Omeed Malik, who previously backed DeSantis and the
independent candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, told told NBC news on Wednesday that
he plans to raise millions of dollars for Trump because of what he regarded as
government overreach during the Covid pandemic that prompted him to move to
Florida.

“It’s starting to become prime time here between Biden and Trump, and this is
when I can be much more effective,” he said.

Brendan Glavin, deputy research director of the transparency group Open Secrets,
which tracks the influence of money on politics, said that while Trump is highly
effective at raising money online from grassroots supporters to keep campaign
offices and other parts of the election machine running, as well as pay his
mounting legal bills, he is in need of the billionaire donors to cover a huge
surge in spending on advertising blitzes as the general election nears.

“When you’re dealing with these mega-donors, they can come in and drop tens of
millions of dollars. Then that money can be allocated very quickly to wherever
they need to spend it, where they want to spend on ads,” he said.



“In 2020, Sheldon Adelson and his wife Miriam gave $90m to the Super Pac
Preserve America to support Trump. They didn’t do that until the last three
months of the election but it paid for ads supporting Trump at the last minute
when it had an impact.”

Glavin said that the news that a Biden-supporting group was planning to spend
$250m in what the New York Times described as “the largest single purchase of
political advertising by a Super Pac in the nation’s history” will have added to
“pressure on Trump to ramp up his mega-donors”.

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View image in fullscreen
Donald Trump awards the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson at the
White House in 2018. Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

The Adelsons were Trump’s single largest donor at the last election and the
former president has held regular meetings with Miriam Adelson to ensure that
continued support since her casino magnate husband, Sheldon, died three three
years ago. It’s highly likely that Miriam, who is estimated to be worth more
than $30bn, will support Trump again principally because of his position on
Israel.

Miriam, who is Israel’s richest woman, has praised Trump for his policies as
president such as recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US
embassy there from Tel Aviv as well as cancelling the Iran nuclear deal which
had been strongly opposed by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In
2018, Trump awarded Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom.



Trump will also be looking to the billionaire industrialists Richard and
Elizabeth Uihlein. The couple have been among the most enthusiastic financial
backers of political groups and elected officials pushing conspiracy theories
that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. They were the largest
conservative donors in the 2022 midterm elections, giving about $90m according
to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Once he has formally secured the Republican nomination, Trump is unlikely to
want for financial supporters. Forbes found that 133 billionaires or their
supporters donated to his 2020 campaign.

View image in fullscreen
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, made Trump ‘very sad’ by
refusing to repeat his campaign funding from 2016. Photograph: Rebecca
Blackwell/AP

But some mega-donors appear to have turned away from the former president for
good.

The chief executive of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, who was one of Wall
Street’s biggest donors to Trump’s previous campaigns, declared he would not
back him again, saying that the Republican party needed a new generation of
leaders.

The tech billionaire Peter Thiel gave $1.25m to support Trump in 2016. But the
co-founder of PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir told the Atlantic in
November that he turned down an appeal from the former president for $10m
because Trump’s first term was so chaotic.

“It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They
couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work,” he said.

Thiel said that Trump told him “he was very sad, very sad” at the refusal to
contribute, and that he later heard the former president had called him a
“fucking scumbag”.

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