How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again
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.
