NEW YORK — Wall Street executives spent three years doing everything they could to distance themselves from former President Donald Trump. Now they’re busy coming up with reasons to vote for the guy.
Many high-dollar donors at banks, hedge funds and other financial firms had turned their backs on Trump as he spun unfounded claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and savaged the judicial system with attacks. Today, they’re setting aside those concerns, looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.
“I don’t know that anyone really believed he was a threat to democracy,” said Point Bridge Capital founder Hal Lambert, an investor and Republican donor. Lambert had backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 primary but is now supporting Trump.
Republican business titans from hedge fund executive Nelson Peltz to hotel mogul Robert Bigelow have come out in favor of the presumptive GOP nominee. Even those who loudly denounced Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are backing his bid to return to the White House.
Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman — who once labeled the U.S. Capitol insurrection that followed a Trump speech on Jan. 6, 2021, “an affront to the democratic values” of the country — is once again one of the former president’s most important allies on Wall Street. Top financiers like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who called on the then-president to resign over the riot, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin, who dubbed Trump a “three-time loser” in elections, are considering offering their support.
The new embrace of Trump threatens to further blunt the fundraising edge that President Joe Biden maintained through the opening innings of the 2024 campaign. But beyond that, it suggests that a key Biden argument — that Trump’s actions since his 2020 defeat have made him unfit to lead the country again — is falling flat with a pivotal constituency that has an especially large stake in the rule of law.
The former president “is a much better choice than what we have now. Just check out the four years that Trump was in office versus the three years that President Biden was in office,” said John Catsimatidis, the billionaire New York radio station owner and real estate investor. Gas and food prices were lower. It was easier to conduct business, he said, and it was a lot cheaper to secure financing for second homes.
“I remember I got a mortgage on one of my homes I bought in the suburbs for 2.75 percent,” said Catsimatidis, who is estimated by Forbes to be worth $4.3 billion. “It’s horrible what’s going on.”
Though he’s a longtime Trump ally, Catsimatidis is no longer an outlier among the Republican Party’s top donors. Trump will have a major opportunity to persuade even more corporate leaders to support him when he speaks to the nation’s top CEOs at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting on June 13. Biden will be traveling to Italy for the G7 meetings, so White House chief of staff Jeff Zients will address the Roundtable in his stead.
“Donald Trump is a self-obsessed convicted felon who would do anything to regain power — and if he does, has made clear he intends to rule as a dictator on day one,” Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said. “But for some billionaires none of that matters. They’ll prop up a convicted white-collar crook so long as Trump slashes their taxes.”
“But for some billionaires none of that matters. They’ll prop up a convicted white-collar crook so long as Trump slashes their taxes.”
Ammar Moussa, Biden campaign spokesperson
Corporate America’s dismay at Trump’s behavior around Jan. 6 has faded — even after his recent criminal conviction for falsifying business records about payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels. What’s more, Wall Street firms and Silicon Valley venture capitalists have grown increasingly antagonistic toward Biden as appointees like Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler move to tighten rules around markets and mergers.
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Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit organization that represents the city’s top business leaders, said Republicans have told her that “the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.”
Democrats hoped that Republican donors in the financial services world would remain on the sidelines in 2024, fatigued by Trump’s conspiracy theories and bellicose public persona. Many of the high-profile contributors now lining up behind him had flocked to candidates like DeSantis or former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who they believed would offer the benefits of Trump’s business-friendly agenda without the baggage.
As Trump cleared the field, GOP donors grew increasingly skeptical about Democratic claims that a second term for the former president would spell doom for democracy.
“It seems you’re at the end of the anti-Trump arguments if that’s the argument you have to make,” said Key Square Group founder and major Trump donor Scott Bessent, a former chief investment officer at Soros Fund Management.
Lambert said that for a lot of Republican donors, Jan. 6 and its aftermath was a lot like the leaked Access Hollywood tape that many thought would doom Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“They assumed this was the end of his political support in this country. Which has happened time, and time, and time again,” he said.
Biden and his allies still consider Trump vulnerable on his legal challenges, 2020 conspiracy theorizing and relentless attacks on the justice system. The president recently told donors at a fundraiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, that Trump’s claims of a rigged justice system were “reckless and dangerous.”
A recent ABC/Ipsos poll found that a majority of Americans view Trump’s guilty verdict in New York as “correct,” though its overall impact on the presidential race is marginal. The latest New York Times/Siena poll found that his lead over Biden shrank following the conviction.
Still, many Republican donors have rejected Biden’s warnings about the dangers of a second Trump term. Instead, they claim Trump’s conviction in New York, along with the cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith and Georgia prosecutors, were politically motivated and damaged the rule of law.
Eric Levine, a longtime GOP fundraiser and former Treasury official who had said he would never vote for Trump after the Jan. 6 riot, told POLITICO that the criminal cases brought against the former president were a factor in why he changed his mind.
Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital and former Hillary Clinton supporter, pledged $300,000 to pro-Trump efforts minutes after the verdict. His examination of the charges Trump faced had been a “radicalizing experience,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The Trump campaign says it hauled in $141 million last month, with nearly 38 percent arriving after the May 30 verdict.
“Donors big and small are coming to the table to support President Trump because they realize Joe Biden is weak and dishonest, and America cannot afford four more years of his failed policies,” Trump campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Spokespeople for Schwarzman, Ackman and Griffin declined comment. Peltz and Bigelow did not respond to requests for comment.
hannity trying to give trump an excuse to skip the debate
