Sunday, October 20, 2024. Annette’s News Roundup.
Happy Birthday, Kamala.
Do something to help Kamala or another Blue candidate.
Call a friend. Post on social media. Vote. Help someone else to vote. Donate. Volunteer. Phone Bank. Knock on doors.
Do something!
Harris makes another play for disenchanted, swing-state Republicans.
Harris and Cheney will appear with conservative radio host Charlie Sykes and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell.
Kamala Harris is making another run at disaffected Republicans in the swing states.
The vice president will be joined by anti-Donald Trump Republicans, including former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), as she makes campaign stops Monday in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Harris and Cheney will appear with conservative radio host Charlie Sykes and Republican strategist Sarah Longwell, according to a senior campaign official granted anonymity to preview the schedule.
The events will be held in a trio of suburban counties where Nikki Haley performed strongly during the GOP primary: Chester County, Pennsylvania; Oakland County, Michigan; and Waukesha County, Wisconsin.
It’s the second major appeal to GOP-leaning and independent voters just in the last week, as Harris appeared on stage in Pennsylvania with more than 100 Republican former elected officials, aides and national security leaders who endorsed her bid over Trump.
These events come as Trump’s campaign is working to coordinate an event with Haley, his rival in the Republican primary. (Politico)
Obamas to hit the campaign trail in first joint appearances with Harris
The Harris campaign hopes the Obamas' appearances mobilize voters in the final stretch of the campaign.
Vice President Kamala Harris will hit the trail for the first time alongside the Obamas, who the campaign hopes will galvanize supporters in early voting areas in the waning days ahead of the election.
Harris is appearing alongside the political juggernauts at a crucial time when polling indicates that she and former President Donald Trump are virtually tied in the final all-out push to Nov. 5.
Harris will hold a campaign event with former President Barack Obama in Georgia next Thursday, the first time the pair has campaigned side by side, a senior campaign official said.
A week from Saturday, Harris will campaign alongside former first lady Michelle Obama in Michigan, the first time she has appeared on the campaign trail this cycle. The appearances are billed as get-out-the-vote events, according to the campaign official.
The campaign official said Harris advisers believe they can boost voter enthusiasm through the joint events, pointing to people who have signed up for nearly a thousand volunteer shifts during former President Obama's rally for Harris in Pennsylvania last week.
In a major push, Democratic stars are hitting the trail for Harris in the final weeks of the campaign.
In addition to his plans to campaign alongside Harris in Georgia, Barack Obama is set to hold events in Arizona and Nevada on Friday and Saturday. Next week, he is expected to head to Michigan and Wisconsin. Harris' running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will join him at the Wisconsin rally.
Former President Bill Clinton has stumped for Harris in Georgia, a state Democrats flipped blue in 2020. On Thursday, he campaigned alongside Walz in North Carolina. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made multiple media appearances in support of Harris.
Last week, Barack Obama held a rally in Pittsburgh, his first time campaigning for Harris in a battleground state. In September, he also held a fundraiser for her campaign in Los Angeles.
NBC News has reported that Michelle Obama has worked to boost voter turnout behind the scenes. She has also expressed concerns about security after assassination attempts against Trump.
Michelle Obama electrified supporters at the Democratic National Convention this summer, urging them to "do something" to support Harris.
"If we see a bad poll, and we will, we’ve got to put down that phone and do something," she said in her speech in August. "If we start feeling tired, if we start feeling that dread creeping back in, we’ve got to pick ourselves up, throw water on our faces and what?"
"Do something!" the crowd responded.
Georgia’s early voting period has already started. Michiganders can start heading to the polls for early voting in most of the state on Oct. 26 — the day of Harris’ rally with Michelle Obama. (NBC News)
MoneyMatters - in the Trump world.
How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again
The former President has been fighting to win back his wealthiest donors, while actively courting new ones—what do they expect to get in return?
“There wasn’t an alternative to not be for Trump,” a Republican fund-raiser said. “The alternative would be for no one.”Illustration by Ricardo Tomás.
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 Glasser, New Yorker).
How Tech Billionaires Became the G.O.P.’s New Donor Class
Elon Musk and a group of Silicon Valley allies have built a shadow campaign to put Donald Trump back in office.
Last February, the billionaire financier Nelson Peltz summoned a group of about 20 wealthy, predominantly Republican donors and a handful of G.O.P. strategists to dinner at his $334 million waterfront estate in Palm Beach, Fla. There were plenty of people in the room who had publicly disavowed former President Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol — Peltz among them — but it was pretty clear now that he was going to be the candidate, and it was time to get onboard and figure out how to help him win. There were a lot of problems. An especially uncomfortable one was that a lot of donor money was going to paying Trump’s mounting legal bills rather than building a serious political campaign.
Peltz, who was 81 at the time and made his fortune via junk bonds and leveraged buyouts, had gathered some traditional high rollers, including the hedge-fund manager John Paulson and the Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn, as well as Ronna McDaniel, then the chair of the Republican National Committee. He had also invited Elon Musk.
For much of his career, Musk gave modestly to candidates of both parties. He was drawn to President Barack Obama, making several visits to meet with him in the Oval Office and inviting him to Cape Canaveral to see SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. But he didn’t really like spending time with politicians, and never aspired to be a political power broker, at least in the traditional sense. His business empire spanned the globe, and administrations everywhere came and went. He seemed to view himself as being bigger than any party.
In the years since the 2020 election, though, Musk had been following a number of his friends in the tech industry — some dating back to his earliest days in the business, when he helped found the company that became PayPal — on a journey to some of the more baroque regions of the far right. He was becoming increasingly outspoken about his views but had less to say about the daily scrum of partisan politics. He had quietly given more than $50 million to fund advertising campaigns attacking Democrats in the 2022 midterms, The Wall Street Journal has reported, and in 2023 he donated $10 million to an outside group that helped fund the presidential bid of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. Now he seemed open to doing a lot more.
Peltz gave Musk the honor of speaking first. He told the group that he had always been a Democrat, but no longer. And, despite being new to political campaigns, he had some ideas to share. What worked with his electric car company, Tesla, he said, was not paid advertising but word of mouth. If everyone in the room told two friends to vote for Trump — and told them to tell two friends — he would win. Then Musk underscored what he saw as the real stakes of the presidential race.
Musk was born in South Africa, became a Canadian citizen and once admitted that his immigration status was in a “gray area” when he founded his first company in the United States. But in recent months, he became obsessed with a conspiracy theory that Trump and his followers were promoting: that Democrats were allowing immigrants to pour into the country to create more Democratic voters, in effect stealing the election. In the months leading up to the gathering at Peltz’s home, Musk helped spread the idea — a central plank of MAGA’s election denialism — across his own social media platform, X. (Musk did not respond to a detailed request for comment.)
Now, over a dinner of shrimp and lobster tails, he put the matter in stark, existential terms: Were Biden to win in November, the Democrats would use the ongoing flood of immigrants to create a permanent majority. If they failed to get Trump into office, Musk said, this would be America’s last free election.
Musk has always seen himself as the protagonist of his own science-fiction novel, on a hero’s quest to save humanity. It’s the legacy of a childhood as a geeky bookworm but also of his years in Silicon Valley during the great tech boom of the early 2000s. He and his fellow tech leaders were not just businessmen; as they saw it, they were visionary founders reinventing the world. They knew what to do and how to do it. The hundreds of billions of dollars that they accumulated along the way only confirmed the importance of their mission and validated their unique ability to carry it out.
Over the course of this election cycle, a group of these men have coalesced around a new mission: putting Donald Trump back in the White House. They are the Republican Party’s ascendant donor class, and they operate on a plane very different from that of the donors who preceded them. They have not only a seemingly limitless amount of money to help make this particular vision a reality but also their own media profiles and platforms to use toward that end. They are the opposite of private, dark-money donors, making a public show of their support for Trump and even sometimes announcing their donations on social media. It’s an ambitious and highly motivated group, powered by self-interest and self-regard and unencumbered by self-doubt.
Peltz and the rest of the anxious, old-money Republicans had gathered in Palm Beach to strategize about how to elect Trump. The answer was quite possibly Elon Musk and the new breed of high-tech billionaires.
For many years, Silicon Valley’s reactionary right orbited around one man: the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Thiel was a right-wing libertarian before he was a billionaire. As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1980s, he brought the “PC wars” to the West Coast, helping to found The Stanford Review, a student-run conservative newspaper whose many acts of editorial provocation included defending the conduct of a senior who pleaded no contest to the statutory rape of a first-year student. (Thiel declined to comment for this article.)
The author of that story was one of Thiel’s protégés at Stanford, David Sacks, a fellow ideologue on the make. In 1995, the two men jointly wrote a book attacking multiculturalism, “The Diversity Myth.” Several years later, they reunited at a company called Confinity, which became PayPal after merging with a competitor founded by a young Musk. Their revolutionary, techno-utopian vision was baked into the business plan: PayPal was designed to render the dollar obsolete. The road to utopia was rocky; Sacks led a coup to oust Musk and replace him with Thiel. But they soon sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2004, making them all fantastically rich and sending a diaspora of entrepreneurs and investors across Silicon Valley — the “PayPal Mafia” — to build more revolutionary, billion-dollar companies like YouTube and Yelp.
David Sacks beating Peter Thiel when Thiel played his colleagues in 10 simultaneous games of chess on the day of the PayPal I.P.O. in 2002. It was the only game Thiel lost. The story, and this photo, have been featured on Sacks’s podcast and have become part of tech-world lore.
As the internet blossomed, Thiel began to encourage a new set of even more provocative thinkers. At their center was an ex-programmer named Curtis Yarvin, who blogged under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug, sketching out the framework for a nascent reactionary movement — later called the new right — aimed at deposing the cabal of liberal elites running the country. Yarvin saw democracy as a “destructive” form of government, instead proposing a techno-monarchy run by a national chief executive. Americans, he said, had to “get over their dictator phobia.” He and Thiel grew close; Yarvin stayed in Thiel’s homes, and they watched the 2016 election returns together.
As Thiel became wealthier and more powerful, he continued to help like-minded men accumulate their own wealth and power. They included a lot of Stanford Review alumni, like Josh Hawley, now the 44-year-old senator from Missouri, but also others who came to him via different routes — most prominently JD Vance, who has cited Yarvin as an influence himself. Vance reached out to Thiel after hearing him deliver a talk at Yale Law School, and following his graduation, Thiel helped set him up in Silicon Valley, first recommending him for a job at a biotech firm whose founder he was close with and later helping him raise $120 million for his own venture firm, Narya Capital. When Vance ran for Senate in 2022, Thiel was by far the biggest donor to his super PAC, giving $15 million.
Thiel embraced Trump in 2016, speaking at the Republican National Convention, donating $1.25 million to support the campaign and even working alongside Steve Bannon on Trump’s transition team. Two of his associates came along: Trae Stephens, who worked at his venture firm, Founders Fund, and Blake Masters, the chief operations officer of Thiel Capital, who would later run for the U.S. Senate. Another PayPal and Stanford Review alum, Ken Howery, served as Trump’s ambassador to Sweden.
These men became the nucleus of the tech industry’s MAGA mafia, and in recent months, quite a few more have joined them. They don’t represent a majority in Silicon Valley, but they are a high-profile minority. Some, like Joe Lonsdale, are members of Thiel’s extended network and have long been committed to the cause. Lonsdale, who was editor of The Stanford Review and interned at PayPal, has used some of the fortune he built as a founder of Palantir to create a conservative think tank called the Cicero Institute, which is lobbying states to criminalize homelessness, and the University of Austin, which he has described as an antidote to universities that have been overtaken by “radical, far-left ideologues.”
Others, like the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, were Democrats troubled by the changing climate for tech investors. Not only has the Biden administration vigorously enforced antitrust laws, putting a damper on deal-making, but it has also sought to aggressively regulate the cryptocurrency sector. At the same time, the arrest and conviction of the crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, the government bailout of Silicon Valley Bank and the rising, uncertain specter of artificial intelligence were all feeding a broader skepticism toward the tech industry in general. Personal fortunes were being threatened — Andreessen and Horowitz presided over a huge crypto fund — and so was the larger techno-utopian project. Late last year, Andreessen grew frustrated enough to pour out a 5,000-word “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” denouncing progress-impeding forces like “social responsibility” and “tech ethics.” For him, Biden’s proposed so-called billionaire’s tax, which would require that people whose wealth exceeds $100 million pay taxes on unrealized capital gains, was the ultimate threat. He called it “the final straw” tipping him to Trump; Horowitz said it smacked of Leninism.
As these new donors started gravitating toward Trump, he began making new promises on the campaign trail. He would make America “the crypto capital of the planet”; he would fire Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler; he would steer more military contracts to the booming private defense-tech sector; he would repeal an executive order intended to provide some checks on the development of A.I. “In the matrix of people supporting Trump — a 2-by-2 matrix of ‘Are they purchasable?’ and ‘Can I purchase them?’ — Biden and Harris are not purchasable, and Trump is the most purchasable president in our lifetime,” says Reid Hoffman, one of PayPal’s early employees and a prominent Democratic donor.
Sacks is one of the group’s most outspoken members, unremittingly championing Trump these days on his podcast, “All-In.” After his time at PayPal, he did a stint as a Hollywood producer before returning to tech as an entrepreneur, executive and venture capitalist. In recent years, he has also leveraged his wealth to become a modern media personality with “All-In,” which he started during the early days of the Covid lockdown with three of his rich V.C. friends. They have since turned the voice of the tech bro — with its unbounded expertise on everything from Texas hold ’em to the war in Ukraine — into a media brand. The Besties, as he and his co-hosts call themselves, now run their own conference and sell a $1,200 Besties tequila. (Sacks declined requests for an interview.)
Musk was one of the last to take a fully reactionary turn. Since his PayPal days, he has moved into realms that transcend “technology” in the Silicon Valley sense, becoming a modern industrialist in the spirit of Henry Ford. But his ties to the tech industry and its pro-Trump moguls remain strong. He had been on his own journey over the last few years, pushed to the right by a confluence of forces. It started with what he described as California’s “fascist” Covid lockdowns, which forced him to temporarily close his Tesla plants, and continued with his outrage over Biden’s decision to exclude him from an electric vehicle meeting at the White House. In 2021, he moved from California to Texas, surrounding himself with a more conservative social circle. His reactionary anger was fueled, too, by the decision of one of his children to transition; he later said that he had been “tricked” into authorizing gender-affirming care for her.
Musk had left the dinner at Peltz’s house dissatisfied, according to two people familiar with his reaction in the subsequent weeks. He had started talking privately to Lonsdale, who was a member of his new friend group in Texas, and a few others about how he might take matters into his own hands. He didn’t want to publicly endorse Trump; the furthest he would go, he told friends, was an “anti-Biden endorsement.” Musk was doing things his own way. He started secretly building his own super PAC.
By the beginning of the summer, the Republican Party’s new donor class was moving toward Trump, and they had a new item on their wish list: They wanted him to put one of their own on the ticket.
JD Vance left his venture capital firm when he was elected to the Senate in 2022, but he brought the V.C. agenda with him into office. He went to bat for the crypto industry, argued against A.I. regulation and championed the breakup of Google — the holy grail for some venture capitalists who believe that it has become a monopoly and is crushing the start-up market. Thanks largely to Thiel, Vance had already risen remarkably swiftly, jumping straight to the Senate in his mid-30s, and now he was on Trump’s short list for vice president. But there was a problem: Trump had finished the Republican primary being badly outspent by Joe Biden, and his legal expenses were still a drain on resources. He needed a running mate who could help him raise money. Being so new to politics, Vance didn’t seem to offer much help on that front. The party’s new donor class was ready to prove otherwise.
Sacks, who once threw a “Let Them Eat Cake”-themed 40th birthday party for himself, complete with 18th-century-style powdered wigs, took the lead, planning a Trump fund-raiser in his 21,888-square-foot home in San Francisco, with Vance in attendance. Sacks had initially been a DeSantis man, squiring the Florida governor around Silicon Valley in search of donors. He had also thrown fund-raisers for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy. But in March, he made the pivot to Trump and seemed poised to become more than just another donor. Vance had served as the intermediary. After Sacks introduced him at an awards dinner in Washington, Vance took him to a private dining room at the Conrad Hotel to meet Donald Trump Jr. and personally communicate his support.
Sacks, one of the most outspoken of the Silicon Valley Trump boosters, with JD Vance at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July.Credit...Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Silicon Valley had not historically provided natural fund-raising terrain for Donald Trump. The last time he held a fund-raiser in the area, in 2019, the host withheld his name and address until hours before the event to avoid protests. This one, on June 6, was far more conspicuous: Sacks — whose house was in the heart of the Pacific Heights neighborhood, on a street sometimes known as Billionaire’s Row — boasted about it on his podcast, predicting that it would break the ice for more tech leaders to endorse Trump. One week earlier, Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to suppress a sex scandal. The day the verdict came down, Shaun Maguire, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist from Sequoia Capital, announced on X that he was giving $300,000 to Trump. But the real money was about to flow. The cheapest ticket to the fund-raiser was $50,000, and it was $300,000 to attend a smaller dinner with Trump after the opening reception. The money would go directly to the campaign via Trump’s main joint fund-raising committee with the R.N.C.
The guest list leaned heavily toward the crypto industry, and the event was carefully choreographed. Another person on the short list for vice-presidential candidate, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, was also in attendance, but it was Vance who introduced Trump before his remarks. Sacks seated himself next to Trump at the dinner that followed, taking the opportunity to make his pitch for Vance. One moment was unplanned: About two-thirds of the way through the meal, Trump asked the group whom he should choose as his running mate. Even though Burgum was sitting right there at the table, the response was unanimous: Vance.
A little more than five weeks later, Trump narrowly escaped an assassination attempt. The near miss brought an outpouring of support from his new allies in the tech world. In an instant, Musk was inspired to reconsider his reluctance to publicly support Trump. “I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” he posted on X less than an hour after the incident, with a video of Trump getting back on his feet, his ear bloodied, pumping his fist to the crowd. Sacks went a good deal further. “I KNOW A HERO WHEN I SEE ONE,” he wrote. “He has risked everything for this country.”
The Republican National Convention was now only days away, and tech’s MAGA cohort was ramping up its campaign for Vance. Musk called Trump on Vance’s behalf, telling him on the night before Vance was chosen that he would be a good “insurance policy” in case the next attempt on his life was successful. Thiel also made a personal call, and it was a tough conversation. He had been disappointed by Trump’s presidency, which he found insufficiently revolutionary, and he told friends that he was pained by the excommunication he suffered socially. In 2023, Trump asked him for a big donation; Thiel refused, and the two men hadn’t spoken since then. Now he encouraged Trump to not hold his anger at him against Vance. He also offered a form of penance, casually dropping into the conversation that he had in fact made a donation in the millions to a pro-Trump legal group.
On the opening afternoon of the convention, Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, that he was going with Vance. His supporters in Silicon Valley could hardly contain their excitement: “WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY,” Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, wrote on X. With Vance on the ticket, Andreessen, who invested in Vance’s venture capital fund, and his partner Horowitz formally endorsed the ticket and immediately donated $2.5 million each to a Trump super PAC. “Sorry, Mom,” Horowitz said on their podcast, “The Ben & Marc Show.” “I know you’re going to be mad at me for this. But, like, we have to do it.” Sacks — who joined Vance, Don Jr. and Tucker Carlson in Trump’s red-and-white box before speaking during prime time — posted a list of 17 tech V.C.s and entrepreneurs who were supporting Trump on X, writing, “Come on in, the water’s warm.”
As was his self-lionizing, hands-on style, Musk was steaming ahead with his PAC, which he called America PAC. He was planning to provide the bulk of the funding himself — at least $140 million, he told vendors — in four tranches. But he also told friends throughout the year that when it came to supporting Trump, secrecy was very important to him. He wanted to wait until after July 1 to make his donations so that they wouldn’t become public until closer to the election. And so Lonsdale and his team, including his top adviser, Blake Brickman, set out in mid-April to start rounding up anchor investors to cover the initial costs. Lonsdale kicked in himself. Other initial recruits included Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who are being sued by the state of New York for their alleged role in defrauding 230,000 investors of more than $1 billion through their crypto exchange. And this was not going to be a traditional super PAC, steering the money it bundles toward paid media. It was going to play a vital, active role in securing the votes Trump needed to win.
Trump’s team had decided to do things very differently in 2024. It was doubling down on election denialism, using its campaign volunteers not to try to persuade voters but to lay a foundation for future legal challenges in districts won by Democrats. They would be trained to become poll watchers — standing outside voting precincts, tabulation centers and drop boxes. The work of getting out the vote would end up being largely done by paid canvassers, hired and run by Trump’s super PACs.
It was a novel strategy made possible by a recent opinion from the Federal Election Commission. Like most F.E.C. opinions, this one was not exactly front-page news, but its electoral implications were huge: For the first time, campaigns could share voter data with super PACs, and vice versa, enabling PACs to run their own field teams. Historically, this was the work that won — or lost — elections: Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was driven primarily by a sprawling network of local volunteers recruited by the campaign and the D.N.C. to engage voters in their own communities. Now independent groups could take the lead, relying on itinerant paid canvassers known as carnies, after traveling carnival workers. Trump’s super PACs would be a big part of the campaign’s ground game, using the money they raised — a theoretically limitless sum, thanks to Citizens United — to run their own field teams. And America PAC would be the biggest of the bunch.
Musk envisioned an army of 5,500 canvassers turning out 800,000 to 1 million Trump voters across all the battleground states — quite possibly enough to swing the election. The emphasis would be on those who were either unregistered or had a spotty record of getting to the polls. The canvassing business is notoriously vulnerable to waste and overbilling; at one point, Musk reached out to Tucker Carlson for advice on how to ensure that his PAC didn’t become a gravy train for consultants.
Musk started pulling it together in April, initially turning to a fellow Texan, Dick Weekley, for guidance. Weekley had little in common with Musk. He was a 78-year-old Houston homebuilder and fixture of Texas’ G.O.P. establishment. But he had some experience with super PACs. In 2019, he ran one called Engage Texas, which had a goal of registering one million new G.O.P. voters in the state before the 2020 election. The PAC shut down prematurely, having spent $7.2 million to register just 100,000 voters — an unsustainable rate of $72 per voter. To help with the new project, Weekley brought aboard Denis Calabrese, a local Republican consultant and frequent collaborator with a checkered past. Calabrese had only recently emerged from prison for tax evasion; he had since settled a lawsuit brought by his longtime employer, the Arnold Foundation, for taking millions of dollars in kickbacks from the foundation’s contractors. (Neither Weekley nor Calabrese responded to requests for comment.)
Weekley and Calabrese started building out their team of canvassers. Musk cleared his calendar every Friday morning for 30 to 60 minutes to meet with them and the leaders of the team they assembled, whether in person from a home in Austin or via video call from one of his private jets, asking about the website, the super PAC logo and everything else. How many doors had been hit? How many voters registered? Could he hear a recording of the script the canvassers were using? Why not use more humor? When confronted about the labor-intensive scale of the task before him, Musk would wax romantic about state fairs as venues where ordinary Americans with clipboards could organize their neighbors.
As is often the case in a start-up, management hit some rough patches. A few weeks after he requested memos from all the PAC’s vendors, Musk began to grow frustrated with the pace of the progress, a friend said, and Musk decided to make some changes. In July, he brought aboard two Republican operatives who had been cultivating him since the days of the DeSantis campaign, Generra Peck and Phil Cox. They led a sprawling communication and public affairs firm and had been intimately involved in DeSantis’s much-criticized decision to largely outsource his field operation to a super PAC, Never Back Down; it was an arrangement similar to what Musk was executing for Trump.
Peck and Cox quickly took control, firing the company running America PAC’s field operation, which had already been paid about $20 million, and stranding hundreds of carnies across the country. It was effectively dormant for several weeks in July and early August, as Peck and Cox worked to bring in canvassers mostly from their own affiliated firm, Blitz Canvassing. Musk’s defenders and friends say that he was doing what very few megadonors are willing to do and what Musk is famous for doing: fire people who he believes are failing. All that mattered was better positioning the PAC to help Trump win in November, and Musk was making that happen.
Musk was beginning to realize that he might need some additional help with his foray into politics. In late August, he hired an experienced G.O.P. field operative, Chris Young, to help him oversee the PAC. In September, after Young visited Nevada, America PAC shook things up again, cutting ties with the subcontractor it had hired to canvass both there and in Arizona because it believed the group wasn’t hitting enough doors. In October, it effectively acquired the Wisconsin assets of another Trump-aligned super PAC, Turning Point USA, taking on about 200 new canvassers in the state.
America PAC was becoming increasingly central to Trump’s ground game, which worried some people around the campaign. Some senior Trump advisers were privately sharing concerns with one another about America PAC playing such an outsize role in turning out voters. Even Musk was acknowledging that there were problems with his field operation. When one canvasser posted on X about a pay dispute, he replied: “Sorry, so many dumb things happening. Working on fixing.”
Of course, Republican operatives and strategists expressed almost identical anxieties eight years ago. The Trump campaign had virtually no field operation in the 2016 election. It relied instead on free media and in particular on social media, where Trump could reach many millions of voters directly multiple times a day. Twitter and other social media companies had also embedded some of their employees in the Trump campaign, free of charge, to help it more effectively target voters using their platforms. (Twitter offered to do the same for the Clinton campaign, but it declined.) “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing,” Trump’s digital media director, Brad Parscale, said after the 2016 election.
A very different Republican narrative surrounded 2020. In the intervening years, amid a growing backlash against the deluge of false information and propaganda on social media platforms, Twitter had recalibrated. It banned political advertising and stepped up its efforts at content moderation, seeking to find a balance between free expression and disinformation, misinformation and hate speech. For several days in the run-up to the election, the platform blocked users from linking to a questionably sourced story in The New York Post that featured emails extracted from Hunter Biden’s laptop purporting to show that he had arranged an undisclosed meeting between his father and a Ukrainian executive with whom he worked. (The company at the time wrongly believed that the emails had been obtained by a foreign hacking operation, and it later acknowledged that it was a mistake to block the link.) A right-wing organization, the Media Research Center, subsequently issued a poll claiming to show that the decision cost Trump the 2020 election. Republicans eagerly embraced its findings, turning them into another plank of MAGA’s election denialism. Vance often cites it on the campaign trail when asked if he believes Biden’s election was legitimate.
But now Musk controlled the dial. His Silicon Valley friends were ecstatic when he bought Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion. Andreessen kicked in $400 million, and Sacks temporarily joined Musk’s leadership team, overseeing the release of the Twitter Files, the internal communications leaked to a handpicked group of sympathetic journalists in late 2022 and early 2023. Among the goals was to prove that the decision to block The Post’s Hunter Biden story was part of a larger collaboration between Twitter and the Biden administration to suppress potentially damaging content to his campaign. In the months that followed, Musk radically remade the platform, which he renamed X, significantly shrinking the large team of trust and safety employees whose job was to prevent disinformation and hate speech from spreading across the platform; restoring the accounts of users who had been barred for violating the platform’s rules; and bringing back political advertising.
Signs of X's new pro-Trump bias became increasingly apparent over the summer. Following the July assassination attempt, a custom-designed mini emoji of Trump raising his fist began appearing next to the hashtag #MAGA; after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, X’s artificial intelligence bot, Grok, wrongly informed users that the ballot deadline had already passed in nine states, including Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Some of the pro-Trump influencers whose accounts Musk had restored shared baseless rumors that the assassination attempt on Trump was orchestrated by Democrats and spread false stories of voter fraud.
Musk, of course, was the platform’s most powerful driver of pro-Trump content. Trump, at his peak, had about 88 million followers. Musk has more than 200 million. And as the owner of X, he has free rein on the platform. On July 26, he reposted a deepfake video of Harris — in an apparent violation of X’s manipulated-media policy — in which a phony voice-over says, “I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire.”
With no meaningful guardrails to stop him, Musk freely championed MAGA’s election-denial crusade, falsely accusing the Democrats of flying illegal voters into swing states and claiming that Arizona was refusing to remove migrants from its voter rolls. In mid-August, he gave Trump two-plus hours of free, friendly media in the form of a livestreamed conversation during which Trump made numerous unchecked false claims. Trump also used the forum to propose that Musk join his administration to lead a “government efficiency commission.” The suggestion excited Musk, whose companies are currently under at least 20 federal investigations and inquiries by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the S.E.C. and other agencies, according to an analysis by The Times. The Trump campaign and X cross-promoted the event, with the campaign running banner ads on the platform’s main page for trending topics and X sending a notification to users featuring Trump’s picture, encouraging them to subscribe to the platform’s streaming service. Even as Musk was operationalizing his company to serve his political agenda, it did not appear to be serving his financial interests. According to an internal corporate document, U.S. advertising revenue, which had already dropped precipitously since his takeover, was $173 million for the three months ending Sept. 30, down 31 percent from the same period last year.
Musk and his fellow techno-utopianists may be dreamers, but they are also pragmatists. When an independent journalist, Ken Klippenstein, published a hacked dossier that the Trump campaign compiled while vetting Vance and then tried to promote his story on X, the campaign reached out to the platform — which did exactly what the Republicans accused Twitter of doing in 2020, suppressing the potentially damaging information by blocking the link and suspending Klippenstein. (Musk later reinstated Klippenstein’s account, saying he wanted to “stay true to free speech principles,” according to messages seen by The Times.) Earlier this month, Musk used his account to solicit signatures, cellphone numbers and addresses for a petition on the PAC’s website, offering $47 to anyone who referred a signatory in a swing state.
Elon Musk, Donald Trump and JD Vance on Oct. 5, the day Trump held a rally in Butler, Pa., where he was nearly assassinated at a previous rally in July.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Whatever was happening, or not happening, on the ground in the swing states, Musk had turned his social media platform into a 24-hour-a-day persuasion machine, pummeling voters with messages, images and videos on their electronic devices. There was no precedent for this. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United ushered in a new era in American politics, giving billionaires a previously unimaginable level of influence over candidates and elections. But this was the first time that one of those billionaires had used the largely unregulated modern communications platform he controlled to advance his political interests.
Musk was way ahead of America’s campaign finance laws, which have not been overhauled since the rise of social media. “If you look at the series of court cases that enabled all of this, one of the underlying assumptions was the reason to allow a corporation like X to spend unlimited amounts of money and say whatever it wants is because corporate America represents a giant sector of our society and our economy,” says Daniel Weiner, the director of the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute. “But it doesn’t take into account a billionaire using this incredibly important communications platform as a tool to advance his own personal agenda.”
The new donor class had made their bet, though in the end it was a pretty modest one, given their collective wealth. As of the end of September, Sacks and his wife had given a total of $550,000 to Trump’s election effort, less than the price of a couple of tickets to Sacks’s own fund-raiser back in June. Musk had given $75 million to America PAC, a huge sum for anyone else, but not so much for a man now worth roughly $250 billion. “The hilarious aspect is that they are feeding Trump crumbs,” says Michael Moritz, a veteran Silicon Valley V.C. and one of the earliest investors in the company that would become PayPal. “It’s a fantastic return on investment.”
In mid-October, one member of the group had second thoughts about Trump. Ben Horowitz, who has been friendly with Kamala Harris for years, put aside his concerns about the Marxist specter of an unrealized capital gains tax and announced that he would make a “significant” donation to the Harris campaign. Having already given $2.5 million to Trump, he and his wife, Felicia, now donated about $5 million to pro-Harris groups.
The rest were soldiering on. As the election approached, Musk was out front as usual, moving with his senior team to a war room in a hotel in Philadelphia and then to Pittsburgh to focus full time on the campaign. He now speaks to Trump multiple times a week, is doing a series of in-person town halls across the state and has recruited lieutenants from his companies to join him in Pennsylvania.
He and the Silicon Valley MAGA cohort were finished with Democrats, regulators, stability, all of it. They were opting instead for the freewheeling, fortune-generating chaos that they knew from the startup world. They had big dreams and had made the calculus that Trump would create a more hospitable environment in which to realize them. They were going to plant devices in people’s brains, replace national currencies with unregulated digital tokens, replace generals with artificial intelligence systems and much more. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential,” Andreessen wrote in his manifesto. “We are not victims, we are conquerors.”
(New York Times by Jonathan MahlerRyan Mac and Theodore Schleifer. Jonathan Mahler reported this article over two months from New York and San Francisco with Ryan Mac, who covers corporate accountability in the tech industry, and Theodore Schleifer, who covers billionaires’ influence on American politics.)
One More Thing.
👇 The New York Times Editorial Board warns business and the nation, including those folks noted above by Susan Glasser and the Silicon Valley moguls noted above by the Times reporters.
American Business Cannot Afford to Risk Another Trump Presidency.
Throughout American history, business leaders have been able to assume that an American president of either party would uphold the rule of law, defend property rights and respect the independence of the courts. Implicit in that assumption is a fundamental belief that the country’s ethos meant their enterprises and the U.S. economy could thrive, no matter who won. They could keep their distance from the rough-and-tumble of campaign politics. No matter who won, they could pursue long-term plans and investments with confidence in America’s political stability.
In this election, American business leaders cannot afford to stand passive and silent.
Donald Trump and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, have sketched out versions of their parties’ traditional positions on issues like taxation, trade and regulation that are well within the give-and-take of politics. In this election, however, stability itself is also at stake.
Mr. Trump denies the legitimacy of elections, defies constitutional limits on presidential power and boasts of plans to punish his enemies. And in these attacks on America’s democracy, he is also attacking the foundations of American prosperity. Voting on narrow policy concerns would reflect a catastrophically nearsighted view of the interests of American business.
Some prominent corporate leaders — including Elon Musk, a founder of Tesla; the investors David Sacks and Bill Ackman; and the financier Stephen Schwarzman — have been supportive of Mr. Trump’s candidacy. Beyond pure cynicism, it’s nearly impossible to understand why.
Business leaders, of course, may be skeptical of Ms. Harris’s policies, uneasy because they don’t feel they know enough about how she would govern or worried that she may not be open to hearing their concerns — a frequent criticism of the Biden administration. They may be reluctant to offend or alienate employees, customers or suppliers who have different political views. Most of all, they may be afraid of angering Mr. Trump, who has a long track record of using the levers of power to reward loyalty.
They should be more afraid of the consequences if he prevails.
This week Donald Trump provided a stark reminder that this election is different. In remarks that ought to alarm any American committed to the survival of our democratic experiment, the Republican nominee again refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. That comes on the heels of remarks in which he declared that he regards his political opponents as an “enemy from within” and that he would consider deploying the military against them merely for opposing his bid for the presidency. The implication is that participation in the democratic process is treason, and the threat is a fresh indication that if he is elected to a second term, Mr. Trump intends to deploy government power in new and dangerous ways.
Mr. Trump may seem like a novelty in American politics, but he is a familiar type in the broader sweep of world history. Right-wing populists often win elections by promising pro-business policies that will unleash economic growth. Once in office, however, they don’t just fiddle with the knobs; they break the machinery. They undermine economic stability by attacking and delegitimizing people and institutions, inside or outside the government, who might challenge or correct bad economic decisions. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for example, fired three central bankers in two years, all of whom failed to fall in line with his demand to lower interest rates. The country fell into a currency crisis and eventually had to raise interest rates significantly to drag itself out.
“It is this change to the nature of governing, more than individual policies, that is so dangerous to business over the long term,” as Roberto Foa and Rachel Kleinfeld argued recently in Harvard Business Review. “Populists undermine the operating environment capitalism depends on — most notably, free competition and a predictable rule of law.”
Mr. Trump’s attacks on the integrity of federal data and on government experts are examples of the ways in which he already pursues these strategies. In August, for example, he claimed that a routine revision in employment data issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was manipulated to favor his opponent. Michael Strain, a conservative economist at the American Enterprise Institute, called this attack on the integrity of the agency “grossly irresponsible and completely inaccurate.”
Business leaders often say they hate uncertainty about taxes and regulation even more than they hate taxes and regulation. Mr. Trump is the personification of uncertainty. During his four years as president, he demonstrated an alarming willingness to rewrite federal policies abruptly, out of spite, for favoritism or just on a whim. Planning to develop a property or make an acquisition that needs regulatory approval? Businesses might assume that a second Trump administration would be more supportive than Mr. Biden was or Ms. Harris would be. But a populist’s favor is capricious; there’s no way to predict who might end up on a Trump enemies list or why. Building a factory to make parts for electric vehicles? Counting on suppliers in other countries? Good luck.
Even by a traditional policy scorecard, Mr. Trump would do damage to American business. The candidate’s promises of tax cuts and regulatory leniency also must be weighed against other campaign proposals that are clearly not in the interests of American business. He has proposed large tariffs on imports, which would raise costs for companies that rely on foreign suppliers and could revive inflation. He has proposed large-scale deportations of immigrants, which would deprive businesses of needed workers and consumers. He has threatened to meddle in the Federal Reserve’s management of monetary policy. His proposed tax cuts would add trillions to the federal debt, which could drive up borrowing costs for the government and the private sector.
Executives who convince themselves that they can shape Mr. Trump’s decision making should consider the record of everyone who has tried to ride the tiger in the eight years since he emerged as the leader of the Republican Party. Those expecting his instincts to be tempered by advisers, as sometimes happened during his first term, will be disappointed. His inner circle has been purged of people who say no. In a second Trump term, the secretary of state would not come from Exxon, and the secretary of the Treasury would not come from Goldman Sachs. The smart — and courageous — people have left the room. What remains are loyalists and ideologues and a decision-making process that begins and ends with the question of what is most expedient for Mr. Trump.
As president, he treated the wide-ranging powers of the federal government as instruments to reward friends and to punish enemies. According to a 2019 report by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Mr. Trump repeatedly pressured the Justice Department to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner because he was mad at CNN, a Time Warner subsidiary at the time. Last month he threatened to prosecute Google because, he said, the company “has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump.”
And he is not the man for moments of crisis. His management of the government’s response to the Covid pandemic was disastrous. On China, his confrontational showmanship and his dismissive treatment of potential allies did nothing to improve America’s strategic position. Is there any reason for public confidence in the ability of a Trump White House to wrestle with the ever more thorny and high-stakes issues posed by artificial intelligence technology?
The questions run deeper, however: Is Mr. Trump honest? Is he willing to listen or learn? Does he demonstrate moderation or equanimity under pressure? Does he take the long view? Does he ever put the American public interest first?
Mr. Trump is not running as a champion of business. He is running as a tribune of populist grievance, committed to short-term gratification without regard for long-term consequences. For business leaders, as for other Americans, the responsible and necessary course is to defend American democracy by publicly opposing his candidacy. (Editorial, New York Times).
Swing State update.
Wisconsin.
Reminder, Marc Elias is the lawyer who, on behalf of the Biden campaign and the Democratic National Committee, oversaw the state-by-state response to lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign contesting the 2020 presidential election results. Of the 64 cases, he won all but one minor case, which was later overturned in his favor.
Elias was hired by the Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign to focus on potential recounts and post-election litigation. (Wikipedia).
Ballot drop boxes are back in Wisconsin because my legal team sued Wisconsin and won. Further evidence that when we fight, we win. https://t.co/Co62wYiG6V pic.twitter.com/Jjab3qOpsy
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) October 19, 2024
Michigan.
Touch to watch.👇
Vice President Harris arrives in Detroit wearing a “Detroit VS Everybody” shirt pic.twitter.com/lggc9ZhiMm
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 19, 2024
Kamala Harris appeared with Lizzo in the singer’s hometown of Detroit, marking the beginning of in-person voting and lavishing the city with praise after Republican nominee Donald Trump recently disparaged it. https://t.co/lysBcqz88w
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 19, 2024
BREAKING: CNN reports Trump is UNABLE to fill his Detroit rally.
— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) October 18, 2024
"It's actually pretty empty. They have not be able to fill this...I am told it is not a security issue." "pic.twitter.com/8zHTkmQRhz
Trump is always crazy.
Talking to the First Lady about the President of the United States. 👇
Trump: Jill, get your fat husband off the couch. Get that, get that fat pig off the couch. Get that guy the hell off our... Get him up Jill, slap him around, get him up, get them up, Jill. We want them off the couch
— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) October 19, 2024
(???) pic.twitter.com/uJhizMSQGk
Trump Tries to Rewrite History of Jan. 6 in Campaign’s Final Stretch.
Donald J. Trump amplified a conspiracy theory that the federal government had staged the Capitol attack and compared jailed rioters to people of Japanese descent in internment camps.
New York Times - Donald J. Trump on Friday tried to revise the history of the deadly attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, as new details in the federal prosecution against him were made public by the judge in the case.
His attempt to recast the events of Jan. 6, 2021, came on the same day that he compared his supporters who were arrested, convicted and imprisoned for their actions at the Capitol to the victims of the Japanese internment camps in the United States during World War II. And it followed a recent remark in which Mr. Trump declared Jan. 6 a day of “love.”
On Friday, on his website Truth Social, Mr. Trump amplified a conspiracy theory that the attack on the Capitol was staged by the federal government, and he promoted his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the 2020 election.
He reposted a meme that a user had originally posted on Thursday, which read: “January 6 will go down in history as the day the government staged a riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.” Those words appeared over two images of people swarming the outside of the Capitol building that day and waving American flags.
Earlier on Friday, on a podcast hosted by the conservative media figure Dan Bongino, Mr. Trump lamented how those arrested in connection with the attack have been treated.
“Why are they still being held?” Mr. Trump told Mr. Bongino. “Nobody’s ever been treated like this. Maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. They were held, too.”
At a Pennsylvania Rally, Trump Descends to New Levels of Vulgarity.
The G.O.P. nominee repeated crude insults, and his supporters relished each moment. But the display could alienate swing voters.
Former President Donald J. Trump on Saturday spewed crude and vulgar remarks at a rally in Pennsylvania that included an off-color remark about a famous golfer’s penis size and a coarse insult about Vice President Kamala Harris.
The performance, 17 days before the election in a critical battleground state, added to the impression of the Republican nominee as increasingly unfiltered and undisciplined. It comes as some of Mr. Trump’s allies and aides worry that Mr. Trump’s temperament and crass style are alienating undecided voters.
It was unclear if the outbursts and insults were an expression of his frustration as the campaign grinds on or of his reflexive desire to entertain his crowds. At her own events on Saturday, Ms. Harris called attention to Mr. Trump’s temperament and his tendency to “go off script and ramble.”
Mr. Trump opened his speech at the airport in Latrobe, Pa., with 12 minutes of reminiscing about the golfer Arnold Palmer, who grew up in the Western Pennsylvania town and for whom the airport was named.
His monologue culminated in lewd remarks about the size of Mr. Palmer’s penis. Moments later, Mr. Trump gave the crowd an opportunity to call out a profanity. He went on to use that four-letter word to describe Ms. Harris.
“Such a horrible four years,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Biden-Harris administration, as he surveyed the crowd of hundreds of people in front of him. “We had a horrible — think of the — everything they touch turns to —.”
Many in his audience — which was mostly made up of adults but included some children, infants and teenagers — eagerly filled in the blank, shouting, “Shit!”
Minutes later, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to vote, telling them that they had to send a crude message to Ms. Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president.”
Minutes later, Mr. Trump urged his supporters to vote, telling them that they had to send a crude message to Ms. Harris: “We can’t stand you, you’re a shit vice president.”
As the crowd reacted, Mr. Trump chuckled. Later, he said, “I had to tell you the shower part of it because it’s true. What can I tell you? We want to be honest.” (New York Times).
Your Daily Reminder.
Trump is a convicted felon.
On May 30th, he was found guilty on 34 felony counts by the unanimous vote of 12 ordinary citizens.
The Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump was scheduled to be sentenced on July 11th and September 18th. He will now be sentenced on November 26.
Trump now says that Democrats want to “ban cows and windows in buildings.” Honestly, is this 78yo senile, convicted felon anyone you think should EVER be trusted with America’s nuclear codes? The guy is a lunatic—his brain clearly is not firing on all cylinders. #harris pic.twitter.com/HQxZFFkMz3
— Carolyn Barber, MD (@cbarbermd) October 12, 2024
A Republic. If we can keep it.
We fight to preserve this document. We value it. Is it worth $43 million dollars or even $11 million or is it priceless?
Rare Copy of U.S. Constitution Sells for More Than $11 Million.
The document, which was sold to an anonymous bidder at an auction in North Carolina, was among the first copies of the Constitution ever printed, experts said.
A rare copy of the United States Constitution that was printed shortly after the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and played a role in the document’s adoption by the original 13 states sold for more than $11 million during a live auction on Thursday evening.
The high bid, from a buyer whose identity was not disclosed, was $9 million. That does not include the buyer’s premium of 23 percent or the taxes, which were not disclosed.
The sale was handled by Brunk Auctions, which is based in Asheville, N.C. Bidding began at $1.1 million but quickly jumped to $5 million. It took just over seven minutes before the bidding closed at $9 million, said Nancy Zander, director of external affairs for Brunk Auctions.
“It was a spectacular price,” Ms. Zander said in an interview Friday night. “It’s really important that important things get strong prices.”
The copy of the Constitution was found two years ago in a filing cabinet in the house at Hayes, a farm once owned by Samuel Johnston, who served as governor of North Carolina from December 1787 to December 1789. The document’s discovery garnered national attention for being an early copy of the document and for the role it played in the document’s ratification.
After the Constitutional Convention and after Congress added a ratification resolution, copies were sent to the governors of the original 13 states, who then gauged interest among their residents. Among those copies was the one sold on Thursday.
Another early version of the Constitution, one that was printed before Congress added the ratification resolution, was bought in 2021 by the billionaire Ken Griffin, a hedge fund founder, for more than $43 million, according to a statement.
But Seth Kaller, a historical document expert who collaborated with Brunk Auctions on the sale on Thursday and represented one of the bidders, said he was not surprised that this copy did not even get close to that figure because the 2021 price was inflated for several reasons. For example, he said, a crowdfunding effort from cryptocurrency traders drove up its price.
“Sure, we would have liked to have seen it go for 40, but nobody expected that,” Mr. Kaller said. “The particular lightning that brought that price didn’t make sense and we knew would not have been repeated.”
Thursday’s auction had been scheduled for Sept. 28. But Hurricane Helene, which caused immense destruction in Asheville, forced a postponement. The auction house and its employees were largely unharmed by the flooding, Ms. Zander said. But the gallery remained closed to the public on Thursday, and bidders called into the auction house.
“There would have been, I think, a huge crowd,” Mr. Kaller said. “But that would not have affected the bidding.”
Other items up for sale during the auction, such as a small painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware River and a copy of the Articles of Confederation, went for higher prices than was expected, Mr. Kaller said. The painting went for more than $307,000, while the Articles closed at over $1.2 million. He theorized that this was partly because of the added attention on the copy of the Constitution.
“It was not as celebratory as it would have been had we not had the terrible catastrophe around us,” Ms. Zander said. “But we were all together, appreciating the moment.” (New York Times).
I am taking today off - theatre and the Liberty v. the Lynx WNBA Final. 8 pm. ESPN.
Hope your day is full of joy.
See you on Tuesday!