Trump Is Banking on Billionaires to Put Him Back in the White House
As Vice President Kamala Harris rakes in record-breaking donation hauls, Donald Trump’s campaign is falling behind — and increasingly relying on billionaires to bankroll Super PACs to remain competitive. It’s happening as the former president promises favors to donors: lucrative new policies, regulatory rollbacks, administration roles. You name it, it’s on offer.
To be clear, Trump is still raising real money. His campaign and committees brought in $139 million in July, and $130 million in August. But Harris raised $310 million in July after taking over the Democratic ticket, and her campaign says she raised another $361 million in August.
There’s one area where Trump is still beating Harris: spending by outside groups. Pro-Trump Super PACs have made $194 million in independent expenditures boosting his campaign since President Joe Biden left the race and Harris took over the ticket, compared with $145 million for Harris.
The pro-Trump Super PACs are being bankrolled or directed by some of the wealthiest people on the planet. Timothy Mellon, an heir to Andrew Mellon’s Gilded Age fortune, has donated $125 million to Trump’s primary outside group, Make America Great Again. The group has poured $97 million into the race since Biden withdrew.
Preserve America PAC — tied to Miriam Adelson, the billionaire widow of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson — has spent $53 million aiding Trump. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is spearheading a group called America PAC. Musk repeatedly denied a report that would give $45 million per month to the Super PAC, but the group has already spent $25 million to help Trump.
The massive outside spending comes as Trump promises the world to wealthy donors. In April, Trump reportedly asked oil and gas executives to donate $1 billion to help his campaign as he promised to roll back Biden’s environmental regulations and speed up corporate mergers. Despite previously calling bitcoin “a scam,” Trump has courted cryptocurrency investors with promises to enact regulations that “benefit” the industry and hire friendly regulators.
Then there’s taxes: Trump has pledged to renew his 2017 tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy, and slash the corporate tax even further. The Trump tax law was a boon for the Adelson family’s casino company, Las Vegas Sands, providing a $1.2 billion benefit. Mellon’s rail company praised the Trump tax law in 2018, saying it provides “substantial incentives for investment in America’s growth.”
Harris, meanwhile, is pledging to raise the corporate tax rate and proposed a wealth tax on households worth more than $100 million, a measure designed to target people like Musk.
Though he is worth a reported $245 billion, as his wealth has grown, Musk reportedly managed to avoid paying any federal income taxes in 2018. The Tesla CEO, not surprisingly, is not a fan of Harris’ economic agenda — he’s said it would lead to “bread lines and ugly shoes.”
There’s been talk of even more explicit favors. An adviser to Miriam Adelson denied a report that her support for Trump was contingent on him allowing Israel to annex the West Bank, amid its brutal war in Gaza, which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians. Adelson is ready “to do whatever it takes for [Trump] to win,” her adviser recently said, and her Super PAC is planning to spend upward of $100 million on the presidential race.
Trump has openly floated giving Musk a role in his administration — though he subsequently said Musk might be too busy to serve.
While Trump is now praising Musk on the campaign trail — and bragging about the $45 million a month Musk may or may not be giving to America PAC — sources close to Trump tell Rolling Stone that as recently as July, the former president and 2024 nominee was still trash-talking Musk, calling him “boring,” off-putting, and prone to mood swings.
Billionaire and former Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter has funded a fourth pro-Trump Super PAC, called Right for America. The group, which has raised $38 million, started spending on the presidential race in earnest this week.
Perlmutter, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, offers a stark example of what major donors wrought during Trump’s term as president. Perlmutter and his cronies helped set policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs despite never serving in the military or government. That meant pushing health care privatization, attempting to sell VA patient data, and awkwardly promoting Marvel characters at a Veterans Day event.
Outside the campaign trail, Trump is once again openly selling access and influence at his Florida club. In the middle of his 2024 presidential campaign, he hiked new-member fees at Mar-a-Lago by hundreds of thousands of dollars — all the way to $1 million. The price increase was widely viewed within the upper ranks of Trumpworld as a blatant open-for-business sign.
In the past few months, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter and another person briefed on the topic, when Trump has privately discussed the fee hike with advisers or close allies, he has said that if anything the price tag should be more than $1 million. After all, Trump has said: “They’re paying to see the president.”
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