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Jay Shackford
(Editor’s Note: Below is a long, long article by Susan Glasser of The New Yorker on the power of billionaire donors on the upcoming election. What’s happened since the landmark “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision in 2010 that outlawed any limits on individual campaign donations as an attack on “free speech” and therefore any limits were unconstitutional. Read Jane Mayer’s book, “Dark Money,” which really outlines the consequences of the Citizens United deciision in great detail more than a decade ago. Also, if you get a chance, listen to the New Yorker’s weekly podcast “The Political Scene” for a super weekly summary of what’s really happening behind the scenes on the campaign trail. Line of the week: When confronted by a heckler in Wisconsin, Kamala Harris responsed with a big smile on her face: “Oh you guys have the wrong rally. No, I think you meant to go to the smaller one down the street.”)
Purchasing Power
By Susan Glasser/The New Yorker
October 19, 2024
In February, the billionaire investor Nelson Peltz convened two dozen of the country’s wealthiest Republicans for a dinner at Montsorrel, his $300-million oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, just down the road from Mar-a-Lago. During the 2020 campaign, Peltz had hosted a lavish fund-raiser for Donald Trump at the mansion, which took in $10 million. But, in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Peltz, like many Republicans of all income levels, had publicly denounced the President. In an interview with CNBC on January 7th, he apologized for his vote and said that Trump would always be remembered for that day’s “disgrace.” “As an American,” he added, “I’m embarrassed.”
During this year’s Republican primaries, Peltz gave $100,000 to a super pac supporting Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, but Scott dropped out before a single G.O.P. vote was cast. By the time of Peltz’s dinner, it was clear that Trump would secure the Republican nomination for an unprecedented third consecutive election. Peltz, who was no longer on speaking terms with the ex-President, opened the discussion with a blunt assessment of the race. “I don’t like Donald Trump,” an attendee recalled Peltz saying. “He’s a terrible human being, but our country’s in a bad place, and we can’t afford Joe Biden.” So, Peltz concluded, however much they might dislike it, “we’ve all got to throw our support behind him.”
Some of Peltz’s guests remained skeptical, holding to the view, as the attendee put it, that “Trump’s a terrible person—I’m going to focus on the Senate.” Most of the donors, however, adopted a more pragmatic approach to the ex-President. Many of them had been granted significant access to the White House during his four years in office. Some were expected to be considered for senior roles in a second term: Trump has personally floated the name of the hedge-fund tycoon John Paulson, for instance, as a potential Secretary of the Treasury, touting him as “a money machine.” “They know how transactional he is,” the attendee told me. “They’re hoping to have some influence over the course of appointments and therefore the direction of his Administration.”
A few of Peltz’s guests were all in. Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas gambling titan, has known Trump for decades; his wife, Andrea Hissom, is close to the former First Lady, Melania, and the two couples have spent time together in Palm Beach. And then there was Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who had reportedly got to know Peltz through Peltz’s son Diesel, a tech entrepreneur. At the time, Musk had said that he would not back a candidate in the Presidential race. By the fall, he would enthusiastically endorse Trump, spending $75 million to support him through a new super pac, and spreading pro-Trump lies and conspiracy theories on his social-media platform, X.
Trump, the richest man ever to serve in the White House, is himself a billionaire, though the extent of his wealth has long been in question. (As of mid-October, with stock in Trump’s social-media venture, Truth Social, experiencing a pre-election bounce, Forbes estimated his net worth at about $5.5 billion.) In 2016, Trump hardly bothered to court big donors. He was shunned by much of the G.O.P. élite and largely self-funded his Republican primary campaign. He lambasted Jeb Bush, the brother and son of Presidents, as a tool of the moneyed class. “Super pacs are a disaster,” Trump said in a 2016 debate. “They’re a scam. They cause dishonesty. And you’d better get rid of them, because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people.”
But in 2020, as an incumbent President, Trump embraced super pacs and their funders. The two main super pacs supporting his campaign raised $255 million on his behalf that year; his total fund-raising came to more than $1 billion. However, Biden, like Hillary Clinton four years earlier, raised even more than Trump, bringing over-all spending in the 2020 Presidential race to a record $5.7 billion.
As 2024 began, Trump’s money problems were mounting: Biden started the election year with almost $120 million in the bank—nearly three times as much as Trump. The ex-President, with four criminal indictments and multiple civil lawsuits pending, was also paying tens of millions of dollars in legal bills through his political operation. The main super pac of his Republican rival Nikki Haley, meanwhile, outraised his own by nearly $5 million in the second half of 2023. In January, Trump posted a threat on social media to the donors defecting to Haley, whom he had taken to calling Birdbrain: “Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”
On February 16th, the same day as Peltz’s dinner in Palm Beach, Trump’s business was hit with a $355-million judgment, plus interest, in a New York civil fraud case. At a fund-raiser in Dallas, in March, Biden taunted his rival about his dire financial state, joking, “Just the other day, a defeated-looking guy came to me and said, ‘Mr. President, I need your help. I’m being crushed with debt. I’m completely wiped out.’ I had to say, ‘Donald, I can’t help you.’ ”
But Trump’s cash crisis was misleading. By mid-March, after Haley dropped out and the ex-President clinched the nomination, his fund-raising comeback was already under way. Many rich Republicans might have preferred to move on from him, but they were still, above all, right-wing partisans. They had flip-flopped on Trump before; they could do it again. Later that month, Peltz hosted Musk, Wynn, and a few others for a Sunday-morning breakfast. This time, Trump was not the subject of agonized debate among the billionaires. He was the guest of honor.
Trump’s effort to win back wealthy donors received its biggest boost on the evening of May 30th, when he was convicted in Manhattan on thirty-four criminal counts related to his efforts to conceal hush-money payments to the former adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. After the verdict, Trump walked out to the cameras in the courthouse and denounced the case brought against him as “rigged” and a “disgrace.” Then he departed in a motorcade of black Suburbans. He was headed uptown for an exclusive fund-raising dinner, at the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Florida sugar magnate José (Pepe) Fanjul.
The ex-President arrived with his son Eric, stopping to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with each of the approximately two dozen guests, a “AAA list” of the G.O.P.’s top funders, as John Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket owner, put it. Such events, another attendee told me, often feel like a birthday dinner for the host, except that “there’s a lot of money being given to someone who isn’t the host—making Donald Trump the birthday boy, so to speak.”
Trump was seated at the head table, between Fanjul—a major Republican donor going back to the early nineties—and Stephen Schwarzman, the C.E.O. of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity fund, who had endorsed Trump the previous Friday. Securing the support of Schwarzman was a coup for the Trump campaign. In 2022, he had said that he would not back the former President again, because it was time for “a new generation of leaders,” and, during the primaries, he had given $2 million in support of Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor, who had repeatedly called Trump “unfit to be President.” In a statement explaining the reversal, Schwarzman said that Biden’s “economic, immigration and foreign policies” were “taking the country in the wrong direction.”
At the dinner, Trump reprised his public rant about the “biased” legal proceedings brought against him, but an attendee who spoke with me was struck by how “calm and confident” Trump seemed for someone facing prison time. “He has this very strong internal capability to push those things aside and still feel good about things,” the attendee said. At the end of the evening, Trump went around the room and solicited opinions on whom he should pick for his running mate. Haley, Scott, and Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and a wealthy businessman, were mentioned; a couple of the attendees expressed a preference for J. D. Vance, the young populist senator from Ohio, whom Trump would ultimately choose. The donors appeared to relish the chance to help select a Vice-Presidential candidate. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” the attendee marvelled. Trump raised about $50 million at the event.
Trump was fund-raising off his conviction with small-dollar donors as well; his campaign, which portrayed him as the victim of a politicized justice system, brought in nearly $53 million in the twenty-four hours after the verdict. Several megadonors who had held back from endorsing Trump announced that they were now supporting him, including Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson; the Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who said that the case against Trump was a sign of America turning into a “Banana Republic”; and the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire, who, less than an hour after the verdict, posted on X that he was donating $300,000 to Trump, calling the prosecution a “radicalizing experience.” A day later, Timothy Mellon, the banking-family scion, wrote a $50-million check to the Make America Great Again super pac.
Ed Rogers, a longtime G.O.P. lobbyist, had never publicly endorsed Trump or raised money for his campaigns. On May 31st, the day after Trump’s conviction, he sent his first contribution to the ex-President. “There was no case to make that that was not targeted prosecution,” he told me. He predicted that other Republicans who, like him, had been “allergic” to Trump would now get on board as well. “I tell people I am a Bill Barr, Chris Sununu, Nikki Haley Republican,” he said, listing the names of Republican officials who had criticized Trump in blistering terms only to support him again in 2024; Haley, despite having called Trump “unhinged” and a threat to the Republic, had announced the week before his conviction that she would vote for him. “The choices are Biden or Trump, and I’m at peace with that,” Rogers said in June. “I wish it was a different equation, but it’s not.”
Many donors I spoke with at the time described Trump’s trial as an impetus, but they tended to cite a litany of other reasons, too, including questions about Biden’s age and fitness to serve another term, concerns about his economic policies, and gripes about some of his appointees, such as the head of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, who has launched high-profile antitrust investigations. Trump, despite his populist rhetoric, deficit spending, and support for market-distorting tariffs, has sold himself as a pro-business candidate. He has promised extensive deregulation, nearly unfettered drilling for oil and gas, and tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. “A lot of the donors have just come to the conclusion that, when you add it all up, the risks with Trump are behavioral—personal behavior and what he says—versus the policies,” the attendee at the Fifth Avenue fund-raiser told me. It was a “rationalization” adopted by “even those who were initially very put off, very alienated, by his behavior at the end of his Presidency.”
By late May, Trump’s campaign had more money in the bank than Biden’s. The incumbent President’s disastrous performance in a June 27th debate against Trump only accelerated the trend. “After the debate, Biden looks like a loser, so these people who were never going to give to Biden, they’re now even more attracted to the idea of giving to former President Trump,” the attendee at Fanjul’s dinner said. “Because he looks like a winner.”
The following month, as Democratic donors and elected officials frantically pressured Biden to drop out of the race, Trump and the Republicans again outraised the Democrats. “The Zeitgeist in the business world is that Trump is going to be President again,” a billionaire C.E.O. who is not a Trump supporter told me at the time. “Therefore, why fall on your sword on principle?” He added, “Businesspeople—their main focus in life is to make money, and you make money by backing winners. . . . They’ve concluded, O.K., he’s going to be President, let’s hold our nose and do what we have to do.”
The modern era of campaign finance began with George W. Bush’s 2000 Presidential campaign, which professionalized the idea of the campaign “bundler” and created, in effect, a national club for wealthy Republicans who backed the G.O.P.’s Presidential effort. Individual contributions to federal candidates were limited to a few thousand dollars in so-called hard money, but wealthy supporters could tap their networks to bring in hundreds of thousands more. The Bush campaign formalized this approach, calling its top fund-raisers, those who raised more than $100,000, Pioneers; in 2004, a new category, Rangers, was added for those who collected more than $200,000. “We made it fun,” Jack Oliver, Bush’s national finance director, recalled. “We built a community.”
During the 2008 campaign, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, harnessed his hope-and-change platform to the power of the Internet, raising an unprecedented number of gifts online from small-dollar donors. The increase in donations—in addition to both parties actively recruiting big-dollar bundlers—made it the first Presidential election in history in which the campaigns spent more than $1 billion. Two years later, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision ruled that federal law could not prevent corporations from spending unlimited sums to elect candidates, a decision that effectively ended restrictions on campaign fund-raising.
The arms race of political spending that ensued has not only increased the influence of money in politics—it’s changed the nature of national elections. “What’s happened is that money has moved from the political parties—which were a centering force in American politics for two hundred years, because they had to stay competitive—out to super pacs on the right and the left,” Tom Davis, a former Republican House member from Virginia, who once ran the Party’s congressional-campaign committee, told me. “That has only further polarized our politics.”
Earlier in this election cycle, the Federal Election Commission, already a largely toothless agency, undid some of the few remaining restrictions on coördination between candidates and super pacs. Many large contributions are no longer disclosed at all, with huge sums flowing through so-called dark-money funds that support candidates or causes without revealing their donors; the Web site OpenSecrets found about $660 million in such spending in 2020. Far more dark money is expected in this year’s election. One veteran political operative told me that, even as the billion-dollar campaign remains a recent phenomenon, the country could soon see its first billion-dollar contribution. “The amount of money sloshing around Washington now is beyond any sense of reality,” Fred Wertheimer, a public-interest lawyer who spent his career advocating for enhanced campaign-finance laws, said. “It’s like a sandbox for billionaires, and they treat it like a sandbox, and they go in and play.”
Gordon Sondland, a wealthy hotelier from Seattle who parlayed a million-dollar donation to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration into an appointment as the Ambassador to the European Union, began bundling donations for Republicans in the early two-thousands. “Look, I bundled for George W. Bush. I bundled for McCain, Romney, Jeb Bush, and then, ultimately, for Trump,” he said. “And if you bundled a few million dollars through a fund-raiser or through a lot of cold-calling, leaning on friends, colleagues, acquaintances—that was considered a significant achievement.” At the start of the Trump era, Sondland added, “you used to get a really good seat at the table at an event for fifty grand. . . . Now you add another zero to that. It’s five hundred to get to the roundtable, and that’s just a ten- or fifteen-minute discussion in someone’s dining room with the candidate.”
It’s not only the sums that have changed; donors now expect more for their money. “It’s a whole different class,” Sondland said. “They’re less concerned about the photo op and a visit to the state dinner at the White House.” Instead, he added, “they want to essentially get their issues in the White House. . . . They want someone to take their calls.”
During the 2019 impeachment inquiry of Trump, Sondland acknowledged under oath that there had been a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s attempt to pressure the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, into investigating Trump’s political opponents. Trump fired Sondland two days after the impeachment trial ended in a Senate acquittal. Nonetheless, Sondland told me that he planned to vote for Trump again. “It’s a binary choice,” he said. “And I want the Trump policies.”
The bundling of hard-money individual contributions—currently capped at $3,300 each for the primary and the general election—which Sondland calls “business as usual” fund-raising, is still happening. But, whereas Bush’s Rangers needed to bring in $200,000, a bundler now has to collect $2.5 million to join the top-tier “Trump Victory Trust,” according to documents obtained by CNBC. “Bundlers of hard money still have a role, because that is the principal way in which Republicans fund campaigns at the federal level,” a Trump supporter who was one of the original Bush Pioneers told me.
The reason is structural: Democrats have retained an advantage in small online donations, while Republicans rely on a higher percentage of large contributions. As of late September, sixty-eight per cent of contributions to the Trump political network had come from big donors, compared with fifty-nine per cent for the Democrats. Trump, in other words, needs his billionaires more than the other side does. Raising more money from fewer donors is the Party’s strategy.
Trump’s time in the White House provided ample evidence that some billionaires could have extraordinary sway in a second Trump Administration. “They think they have a greater chance to have influence over Trump than they have had the last four years over Biden,” a prominent Republican fund-raiser told me. Key positions in Trump’s first Administration went to alumni of Goldman Sachs, the C.E.O. of the nation’s largest oil company, and scions of wealthy families, such as Betsy DeVos. When criticized for appointing so many ultra-rich Cabinet members, Trump responded, “I want people that made a fortune!” His signature legislative accomplishment slashed the top corporate tax rate from thirty-five per cent to twenty-one per cent and reduced the top individual-income-tax rate. “You all just got a lot richer,” Trump was reportedly overheard saying, at his Mar-a-Lago club, hours after signing the bill.
In office, Trump gave some of his donors highly unusual roles in government. Schwarzman, the Blackstone C.E.O., for example, had not supported Trump in the 2016 primaries, but he gave $250,000 to his Inauguration; soon after the Senate passed the tax-cut bill, he hosted a private lunch with Trump at his New York triplex—the former home of John D. Rockefeller—where the cost of entry was $50,000 a plate. Schwarzman revealed in his 2019 memoir that Trump had asked him to help renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. Schwarzman reportedly spoke with Trump as often as several times a week during the talks. “Donald listens to me because I’m richer than Donald,” Schwarzman joked at one point to Gerald Butts, then the top adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister.
Schwarzman also wrote that he had served as Trump’s intermediary with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, personally extending the invitation that led to Xi’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, in early 2017. In 2018, Schwarzman made eight trips to China “on behalf of the administration,” personally reporting back to Trump about his efforts “to assure senior Chinese officials that the President was not looking for a trade war.” His pivotal role was not disclosed at the time, despite the potential conflicts inherent in having the person in charge of Blackstone’s broad investment portfolio also represent the U.S. government. In 2020, Schwarzman gave $3 million to a pro-Trump super pac.
Peltz, the billionaire who hosted fellow Republican donors in Palm Beach, also had direct access to the White House. A few months after Trump’s Inauguration, he met privately with the President in the Oval Office, presenting him with a written dossier that made the case that Amazon and its owner, Jeff Bezos, were responsible for the economic woes of the U.S. Postal Service. Trump, who had long attacked Bezos as the proprietor of the Washington Post, summoned a senior official to hear Peltz’s complaint. According to the official, Peltz told Trump that “the reason why the Post Office is in the red is almost entirely because of Amazon,” claiming, falsely, that it received preferential rates, benefitted from “unfair competition,” and ought to be considered an antitrust violator.
Trump’s staff tried to figure out what Peltz’s interest was in the matter. It turned out that Trian Fund Management, Peltz’s asset-management firm, had recently taken a $3.5-billion stake in Procter & Gamble, the consumer-products giant. Peltz, an activist investor who buys his way into corporate-leadership roles, often by prompting proxy fights, considered Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods a threat to his business. On December 29, 2017, Trump tweeted, “Why is the United States Post Office, which is losing many billions of dollars a year, while charging Amazon and others so little to deliver their packages, making Amazon richer and the Post Office dumber and poorer? Should be charging MUCH MORE!”
Isaac Perlmutter, the former head of Marvel Entertainment, which he sold to Disney, in 2009, for $4 billion, was also at Peltz’s breakfast for Trump in Palm Beach. (Trump personally introduced the pair at Mar-a-Lago, where Perlmutter has a regular table next to the ex-President’s; last year, Peltz and Perlmutter joined forces when Peltz launched an unsuccessful bid to win a seat on Disney’s board.) Perlmutter donated $5 million to Trump’s 2016 campaign; his wife, Laura, was a member of Trump’s Inauguration committee. Soon after Trump became President, he installed Perlmutter and two of Perlmutter’s friends from Florida as de-facto overseers of the Department of Veterans Affairs, an agency with an annual budget of some $200 billion. “On any veterans issue the first person the President calls is Ike,” a former Administration official told ProPublica, which revealed the arrangement.
David Shulkin, whom Trump had appointed to head the V.A., made multiple visits to Palm Beach to consult with the troika that officials came to call “the Mar-a-Lago crowd.” “There probably weren’t too many times I met with the President when he didn’t say, ‘What’s happening with Ike?’ ” Shulkin once said. When Perlmutter visited Washington, Shulkin told me, “I would get a call—‘Could you come over to the White House? Mr. Perlmutter’s here with the President.’ ”
Shulkin was fired by Trump, in March of 2018, amid a controversy over an expensive trip to Europe that Shulkin had taken at taxpayers’ expense. Within hours, he went public with accusations that the story had been hyped by Trump political appointees who were intent on privatizing many of the V.A.’s services. Shulkin told me that he never fully understood why Perlmutter, who had not served in the U.S. military or even visited a V.A. hospital until Shulkin took him to one, had been given such power over the agency. He described Perlmutter as “a private-sector guy” whom Trump admired as a self-made man, someone who “had started with very little and built empires.” The problem, as Shulkin saw it, was that Perlmutter had little idea of what he was doing. “Because he never worked in government, he didn’t understand government,” Shulkin told me. “Part of my role was always trying to translate—‘That isn’t the way we could do things in this organization.’ ”
Perlmutter, however, has remained close to Trump. He and his wife gave $21 million to a super pac supporting Trump’s bid in 2020, and, in 2024, they bankrolled a new pro-Trump super pac, Right for America, donating another $25 million. By September, Right for America had raised some $70 million, which it has spent on an advertising blitz this fall. The venture drew support from other longtime members of Mar-a-Lago, including the Newsmax founder Christopher Ruddy, who gave $100,000, and Anthony Lomangino, a South Florida waste-management mogul, who donated $7.85 million. Scott Bessent, another hedge-fund executive often mentioned as a possible Trump Treasury Secretary, also contributed $100,000.
Perlmutter’s highly unusual role in the first Trump Administration appears to have become something of a template for outside influence in a second term. In March, when Elon Musk met with Trump at Peltz’s house for breakfast, they discussed a broad advisory gig for the tech billionaire on such matters as immigration and the economy—“in the mold of the role” that Perlmutter had played at the V.A., according to the Wall Street Journal. By August, after publicly endorsing Trump, Musk had fleshed out the idea. During a lengthy live-streamed conversation with Trump, Musk suggested that a commission was needed to investigate how to rein in government spending. Such a panel, Musk posted on X, “would unlock tremendous prosperity for America.”
Weeks later, during a speech at the Economic Club of New York, Trump formally announced his support for a “government-efficiency commission” that would “conduct a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” He proposed that Musk, despite having received billions of dollars in government contracts and subsidies for his ventures SpaceX and Tesla, should chair the effort. Soon, Trump was calling Musk his future “Secretary of Cost Cutting.” It sounded like a more ambitious version of a project that Trump had launched early in his Presidency, when he named the billionaire investor Carl Icahn as a special adviser in charge of overhauling federal regulations. Icahn left the role less than a year later, when an article in this magazine raised questions about potential conflicts of interest.
Trump has long made a practice of telling potential supporters what they want to hear. This year, he has also changed previous policy positions in ways that would benefit some of his party’s largest donors. In March, for example, he publicly reversed course on forcing the sale of the Chinese-owned social-media app TikTok, despite having signed an executive order, in August, 2020, stating his intention to ban the app if it was not sold to a U.S.-based buyer within forty-five days. Back then, Trump warned that a Chinese company owning so much of Americans’ personal data was a national-security threat. But this winter, when the Biden Administration endorsed a bipartisan bill to force TikTok’s sale, Trump came out against the measure. On Truth Social, he wrote, “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck”—his derogatory name for Facebook’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg—“will double their business.” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, posted another explanation for the about-face: “Simple: Yass Coin.”
Days earlier, at an event in Florida for the conservative group Club for Growth, Trump had met with Jeff Yass, a major investor in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance. Yass, a libertarian-leaning Wall Street billionaire who started out as a professional poker player, has not officially endorsed Trump or donated directly to him. Instead, he has given more than $25 million to the Club for Growth pac, which is supporting the ex-President’s reëlection. (According to OpenSecrets, Yass and his wife have contributed more than $70 million to conservative candidates and causes this election cycle.) Yass also appears to have had a hand in Trump’s personal enrichment. This spring, the company behind Truth Social merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp., a company in which Yass’s trading firm, Susquehanna, was the single largest institutional investor. Truth Social went public in March, and Trump’s majority stake in the company is now worth an estimated $3 billion.
Perhaps the most striking example of the former President’s donor-friendly flexibility in 2024 has been his shift on the cryptocurrency industry. In recent years, he was unambiguously critical of bitcoin, the most widely traded digital currency, saying it “seems like a scam” and “potentially a disaster waiting to happen.” But, in 2024, he became an unapologetic promoter of it, attracting contributions from major players in the field, such as the twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, each of whom donated $1 million in bitcoin to help Trump. The former rowing stars who famously sued Zuckerberg, their classmate at Harvard, for allegedly stealing the idea for Facebook, went on to found the cryptocurrency exchange Gemini. (In a speech this summer, Trump called them “male models with a big, beautiful brain.”) This year’s Republican Party platform offers few details on many policy issues affecting Americans, but it is unusually specific on crypto, promising to “defend the right to mine Bitcoin” and opposing the creation of a “Central Bank digital currency,” which could threaten the crypto industry’s biggest investors.
In July, Trump flew to Nashville for the Bitcoin 2024 conference, where he spoke shortly after one of his top fund-raisers, Howard Lutnick. Lutnick, the C.E.O. of the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, has become a leading public proponent of the crypto industry; at the conference, he announced a plan to lend $2 billion to crypto investors, allowing them to use bitcoin as collateral. Onstage, Trump said that his Administration would permit the creation of so-called stablecoins, which, he promised, would “extend the dominance of the U.S. dollar to new frontiers around the world.” Trump also promised to fire Gary Gensler, Biden’s chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose pro-regulatory positions on crypto have outraged bitcoiners. The United States, Trump vowed, “will be the crypto capital of the planet.”
Lutnick, who has known Trump for thirty years and who once made a guest appearance on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” supported Trump’s previous campaigns. But he has significantly increased his giving in 2024. According to Bloomberg, Lutnick and his wife donated $30,200 to Republicans in 2016 (though he also gave $1 million to Trump’s 2017 Inauguration committee), $1.3 million in 2020, and $12.1 million so far this year. In May, during the former President’s trial in Manhattan, Lutnick hosted a fund-raiser for him at Lutnick’s apartment in the Pierre hotel. In early August, he held another event at his forty-acre estate in Bridgehampton, which brought in $15 million; seats for a roundtable with Trump in Lutnick’s dining room went for $250,000. The following Monday, maga Inc., a pro-Trump super pac, recorded a $5-million donation from Lutnick, the largest individual political gift he’d ever made.
After the Bitcoin event in Nashville, Trump brought Lutnick on board his plane, Trump Force One, to a campaign stop in Minnesota, where Lutnick introduced Vance. Lutnick later told an interviewer that travelling to a rally with the former President was like “going to a rock concert with Mick Jagger.” During the trip, Lutnick said, Trump offered him a formal role as co-chair of his Presidential transition team. The decision was announced a few weeks later, after the fund-raiser at Lutnick’s Bridgehampton home. Another co-chair is Linda McMahon, the former head of the Small Business Administration in the Trump Administration. She, too, is a wealthy donor who, according to federal records, has given more than $10 million to support Trump in 2024.
That same month, Trump announced that he and his sons Don, Jr., and Eric were getting into the crypto business themselves. Steve Witkoff, a New York real-estate mogul and a major Trump donor, who testified on Trump’s behalf during his civil fraud trial this year, helped set up the venture, called World Liberty Financial. One of the entrepreneurs brought in as a partner, Chase Herro, was later revealed to have referred to himself as “the dirtbag of the Internet.” Trump, during a rambling two-hour live-stream rollout on X, struggled to describe how exactly the new business would work, or even when it would launch. “Crypto is one of those things we have to do,” he said. “Whether we like it or not.”
By then, Lutnick’s sphere of influence had moved well beyond bitcoin. In October, he told the Financial Times that appointees in a second Trump Administration would be subject to a strict “loyalty” test to avoid the kinds of senior aides who sought to constrain Trump during his first term. “Those people were not pure to his vision,” Lutnick said. “We’re going to give people the role based on their capacity—and their fidelity and loyalty to the policy, as well as to the man.”
For all Trump’s success in winning back reluctant conservative billionaires, many of them have seen firsthand the ways in which his erratic behavior and anti-market ideas could disrupt their businesses and the wider economy. After Trump became President, he asked Schwarzman to enlist high-profile business executives to serve on an advisory council. The participants included Musk; Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase; Mary Barra, of General Motors; Bob Iger, of Disney; Larry Fink, of BlackRock; and Jack Welch, the former C.E.O. of General Electric. It was a perfect Trump setup: the biggest brand names in American business would come to the White House, kiss his ring, and offer free advice. But, as one of the panel’s members recalled, the first session quickly devolved into an argument between Trump and several participants over his false allegation that China was manipulating its currency. In the summer of 2017, following Trump’s comments about there being “very fine people on both sides” of the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the group convened an emergency call and decided to disband. After Schwarzman conveyed the news to the White House, Trump preëmptively tweeted that he had decided to shut the group down.
Early this summer, Trump’s campaign surprised the Business Roundtable, a members-only organization of corporate C.E.O.s, with a last-minute acceptance for the ex-President to appear at the group’s quarterly meeting in Washington. Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times’ financial columnist and a host of “Squawk Box,” on CNBC, reported that even C.E.O.s at the meeting who were sympathetic to Trump had found the former President uninformed and “remarkably meandering.” A source in the room told me that Trump’s digressions included complaints about his court cases and “crazy rants about Venezuelan immigrants.”
Soon after the event, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor at Yale University who tracks the political preferences of America’s corporate leaders, wrote in an op-ed for the Times that not a single Fortune 100 C.E.O. had donated to Trump by June of this year, something he called a “telling data point.” In fact, Sonnenfeld argued, the lack of giving to Trump from traditional Republican donors in the business community was the real fund-raising story, “a major break from overwhelming business and executive support for Republican Presidential candidates dating back over a century.” Sonnenfeld told me that such giving “fell off a cliff” when Trump became the Party’s nominee—going from more than a quarter of Fortune 100 C.E.O.s in 2012, when Mitt Romney was the G.O.P. candidate, to zero in 2016. In 2020, he noted, only two Fortune 100 C.E.O.s had given to Trump—someone in the energy sector who is no longer running his company and Safra Catz, the C.E.O. of the Oracle software corporation. One lobbyist who speaks with many corporate C.E.O.s told me, “Unanimously, they hate the Biden Administration’s policies. But I think almost unanimously they would much rather deal with that than the risk of catastrophic disaster from a Trump Administration.” By fall, the only Business Roundtable member publicly backing Trump was Schwarzman.
Charles Koch, perhaps the most legendary Republican financier of recent decades, has never backed Trump, either. The political network affiliated with him and his late brother David remained officially neutral in the Presidential races of 2016 and 2020, and spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in this year’s Republican primaries, much of it supporting Haley. When she dropped out, the Koch network concentrated on down-ballot races. But Kochworld, like the Republican Party more broadly, remains divided. “There are a lot of donors in that network lobbying Charles from the perspective of, I know you don’t like him, but he’s better than the alternative,” Marc Short, who worked for a Koch-affiliated group and later served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said. Nevertheless, neither Koch nor Pence is supporting Trump this fall—a remarkable rift, given the role that each of them has played in Republican politics.
At the same time, Trump has cultivated a new group of what might be called maga megadonors. A study conducted for The New Yorker by the campaign-finance expert Robert Maguire, of the nonprofit good-government group crew, found that, as of this summer, more than forty of the G.O.P.’s biggest super-pac donors during Romney’s 2012 campaign had never given to a pro-Trump super pac, including Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison, the Dallas real-estate tycoon Harlan Crow, and the hotel magnate J. W. Marriott, Jr. Meanwhile, nearly sixty pro-Trump donors in the study, including Lutnick, Mellon, Perlmutter, and the Wisconsin shipping magnates Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, had given nothing to the pro-Romney super pac. Others have significantly increased their giving. The Adelsons, for example, donated $53 million to the pro-Romney super pac in 2012 and $90 million to support Trump in 2020, when they were the largest individual donors of the cycle. By the end of September, Miriam Adelson had given $100 million to back Trump in 2024.
With such sums at stake, Trump has pursued what the former Bush Pioneer called a “high touch” approach to the Republican billionaire class. The ex-President has all but invited donors to view their contributions as business investments, telling oil-and-gas executives who went to see him in April at Mar-a-Lago, for example, that, because he would allow unrestricted drilling, they should raise $1 billion for his campaign—a statement redolent of Sondland’s “quid pro quo” that soon leaked to the Washington Post. The campaign’s strategy, another longtime fund-raiser told me, was essentially to let Trump be Trump: “He talks the same book to everybody.”
Oliver, the former Bush finance director, observed that the difference between the model of the Bush campaigns and Trump’s is the difference between having a large pool of “institutional investors” which had been built up in the course of years, and a series of ad-hoc “transactional” dealings with a relatively small group of the ultra-rich.
Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University, offered another key distinction. Trump’s billionaires—many of whom have made their fortunes as hedge-fund managers, activist investors, and corporate raiders—tend to be highly motivated ideologues and individual operators. “It’s transactional, but their end of the bargain is a lot different than just having access to the President of the United States,” Wilentz told me. “They see Trump as their instrument. This is an investment for them to take power.” Wilentz noted that, unlike the “traditional corporate conservative élite” dating back to the Gilded Age, this new “class of the super-rich” appears both more numerous and less civic-minded. “The other guys might have been robber barons,” Wilentz said. “These guys are oligarchs.”
In July, after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, another wave of giving came in to the Trump campaign. Musk officially endorsed him on X within an hour of the shooting. But the following week, Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Kamala Harris as his successor. Democrats, especially those who had been reluctant to support the eighty-one-year-old incumbent, began dumping record sums into the race: Harris brought in $200 million in her opening week as the Party’s official candidate. In August, her first full month atop the ticket, Harris’s network raised $361 million to Trump’s $130 million. Her operation, the Times reported, was bigger than Trump’s “in nearly every discernible category.”
But, even as Trump’s momentum faded, most of the billionaires who had returned to his side were sticking with their choice. “Do they have buyer’s remorse? No,” one veteran Republican fund-raiser told me in August. He allowed that “there’s concern about Trump being able to turn to a disciplined message,” but, for this group, at least, Harris was never a conceivable option. “They view her as even further left than Biden from a policy perspective,” the veteran fund-raiser said. “There wasn’t an alternative to not be for Trump—the alternative would be for no one.”
Another possibility was for major Republican donors to switch their emphasis to the Party’s efforts to hold on to the House and win back the Senate. One Republican fund-raiser, a former Haley supporter, spoke to me from the sidelines of a summer retreat that House Speaker Mike Johnson held for big givers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he found a number of donors more skeptical about the White House race. “They’re just saying they’re going to sit out the Presidential for the time being and focus on the down ballot,” he said. “The races where, even if Harris wins, if we unleash gargantuan resources in that particular race, we can still win.”
Among the donors who have reluctantly swung to Trump was the billionaire Thomas Peterffy, a Wall Street mogul and a six-figure donor to Trump in 2020, who had vowed to do “whatever I can” to make sure the G.O.P. had a different nominee in 2024. Federal campaign-finance records show that, through the summer, Peterffy donated some $7 million to G.O.P. politicians and Party organizations, but he had given nothing publicly to Trump. In August, he donated $844,660 to the Trump 47 joint fund-raising committee, which helps support the ex-President’s campaign.
Trump was still trying this summer to personally persuade a few remaining billionaire holdouts to get back on board. Two of his biggest targets were Kenneth Griffin, the C.E.O. of the hedge fund Citadel, and Paul Singer, the founder of the activist investment group Elliott Management—both former Haley backers who had yet to endorse him. In recent years, Griffin has been among the Republican Party’s top benefactors; as of August, he had donated nearly $75 million to G.O.P. candidates and super pacs. But he had publicly disavowed Trump after his Presidency; according to a friend of Griffin’s, he has privately called the former President a “three-time loser” and an “idiot.” Earlier this year, he said that he would consider giving to Trump, depending on whom he chose as his running mate; according to the veteran fund-raiser, he was “not a fan” of Vance. Singer had similarly given tens of millions to Republican causes this year without formally backing Trump.
In July, Trump met with Griffin and, separately, with Singer. His lobbying effort was partially successful. On August 15th, Singer sent $5 million to maga Inc. Griffin, however, eventually announced that he would not be giving any money to the ex-President. “I have not supported Donald Trump,” he said this fall. “I’m so torn on this one.” He added, “I know who I’m going to vote for, but it’s not with a smile on my face.” (Griffin told me that “Americans enjoyed greater economic opportunity, and the world was a safer place, under President Trump’s leadership,” and that “Senator Vance has matured quickly on the campaign trail.”)
Trump’s courting of billionaires has been an explicit part of the Democrats’ campaign against him. At the Democratic National Convention, in August, Harris said that the ex-President’s populist rhetoric did not match the reality of a man who “fights for himself and his billionaire friends.” But the talking points miss an uncomfortable fact for both parties: during the Trump era, it’s the Democrats who have enjoyed a clear advantage with the nation’s wealthiest political donors. According to OpenSecrets, big donors—those who gave $100,000 or more to just one party—contributed $5.2 billion to Democratic causes and candidates in the last election cycle, and $3.3 billion to Republican ones. Despite Trump’s cultivation of the crypto bros and Wall Street money, his online chats with Musk and his Mar-a-Lago fund-raisers with Big Oil executives, that trend is on track to continue this year. A recent Bloomberg survey of billionaires showed Harris receiving support from twenty-one of the country’s richest people, compared with fourteen who were backing Trump. The difference, though, is that Trump had taken in millions more from these supporters. His campaign is far more dependent on its shrinking segment of the ultra-rich.
In September, the day after the debate between Harris and Trump, I spoke again with the lobbyist Ed Rogers. “You know, I’m a Trump voter, a Trump donor,” he said, “but I think Harris is going to win.” Another Republican told me that, after Trump’s poor debate performance, he had seen similar hand-wringing from other major donors: “Can I stomach giving money to this guy and he keeps blowing it?”
In at least one notable case, Harris managed to regain a major donor who had defected to Trump, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz. Horowitz and his business partner, Marc Andreessen, who are both longtime Democratic givers, had stunned the tech world in July by endorsing the ex-President, citing, in part, Trump’s newfound support for the crypto industry. But, in October, Horowitz announced that he and his wife planned to make a “significant donation” to Harris, saying that, though the Biden Administration had been “exceptionally destructive on tech policy,” he had spoken personally with Harris, a friend from California, and was “hopeful” that she would take a different approach. “There was no real engagement by the Biden world with the business community,” a Democratic donor who has spoken with the Vice-President told me. “Harris has been very intentional about engaging. She’s saying all the right things.”
Harris’s success with the moneyed class infuriated Trump. “All rich, job creating people, that support Comrade Kamala Harris,” he wrote in a social-media post in September, “you are STUPID.” A couple of weeks later, he posted the false claim that Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan C.E.O., whom Trump had also mused about as a candidate for Treasury Secretary, had endorsed him. Not only was this untrue, as JPMorgan swiftly announced; it turned out that Dimon’s wife had donated more than $200,000 to the Democratic ticket and attended a dinner this summer with Harris.
As if to rebut the doubters, Trump appeared in early October at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the scene of the first assassination attempt against him, alongside his wealthiest benefactor, Musk. Trump had outsourced much of his campaign’s turnout operation—the traditional preserve of the political parties and the candidates—to Musk’s America pac. Musk, whom the Times called “obsessive, almost manic” in his backing of the ex-President, had all but relocated to Pennsylvania to oversee an effort to swing the crucial battleground state. In Butler, he leaped around the stage in a black maga hat, as the former President grinned with delight. If Trump does not win, Musk told the crowd, “this will be the last election.”
A few days later, Harris’s campaign made a stunning announcement: she had raised $1 billion in a matter of weeks, the largest sum ever collected for an American politician in such a short amount of time. Harris more than doubled Trump’s contributions in September alone. Will it matter? During the past two decades, the winner of the Presidential election has always been the better funded of the two candidates—with the notable exception of Hillary Clinton, in 2016. ♦︎
Susan B. Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker, has a weekly column on life in Washington and is a host of the Political Scene podcast. She is also a co-author of “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021.”
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