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.