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 ultra-wealthy former supporters, including the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, have spurned Trump’s advances.
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.
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”.
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.
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”.
