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.

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.

Backed by a cabal of wealthy conservative patrons like industrialist #David #Koch,
banker #Richard #Mellon #Scaife,
and the devout Catholic entrepreneur #Frank #Hanna,
the Federalist Society under Leo became a breeding ground for conservative judges who were recruited at law school,
groomed through the society’s program of events and talks,
and then bound together through their careers.

“The key was to figure out how to develop what I call a ‘pipeline’
— basically, where you recruit students in law school,
you get them through law school,
they come out of law school,
and then you find ways of continuing to involve them in legal policy,” Leo later explained.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for #John #Roberts
— a former member
— to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court,
the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate.

A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court
— #Harriet #Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society
— and pressured him to nominate #Samuel #Alito, one of its members, in her place.

Leo worked closely with the "Judicial Confirmation Network",
a new nonprofit organization set up using funds from #Robin #Arkley, a California businessman known as the
“foreclosure king,” who had made billions buying up mortgages of people in financial difficulties.

The idea for #JCN had been hatched at a dinner in Washington attended by Leo and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shortly after Bush’s reelection in late 2004.

JCN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on radio and online advertisement to shape public opinion.

It was run by #Neil and #Ann #Corkery, a couple who had been members of #Opus #Dei since at least the eighties.

Neil had been a critical figure in getting a new residence for male, celibate members of the Catholic movement built in Reston, Virginia.

“Opus Dei members preach their faith through their work as well as the friendships they develop,” Ann explained.

She and her husband would later preach their faith by becoming central figures in a series of nonprofits that would channel dark money for Leo’s efforts.