#Charles #Koch, perhaps the most legendary Republican financier of recent decades,
has never backed Trump, either.

The political network affiliated with him and his late brother #David remained officially neutral in the Presidential races of 2016 and 2020,
and spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in this year’s Republican primaries,
-- much of it supporting Haley.

When she dropped out, the Koch network concentrated on down-ballot races.

But Kochworld, like the Republican Party more broadly, remains divided.

“There are a lot of donors in that network lobbying Charles from the perspective of,
I know you don’t like him,
but he’s better than the alternative,”
Marc Short, who worked for a Koch-affiliated group
and later served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said.

Nevertheless, neither Koch nor Pence is supporting Trump this fall
—a remarkable rift, given the role that each of them has played in Republican politics.

At the same time, Trump has cultivated a new group of what might be called #maga #megadonors.

A study conducted for The New Yorker by the campaign-finance expert Robert Maguire,
of the nonprofit good-government group #crew,
found that, as of this summer,
more than forty of the G.O.P.’s biggest super-pac donors during Romney’s 2012 campaign had never given to a pro-Trump super pac,
including Oracle’s co-founder #Larry #Ellison,
the Dallas real-estate tycoon #Harlan #Crow,
and the hotel magnate J. W. #Marriott, Jr.

Meanwhile, nearly sixty pro-Trump donors in the study,
including #Lutnick, #Mellon, #Perlmutter, and the Wisconsin shipping magnates #Richard and #Elizabeth #Uihlein, had given nothing to the pro-Romney super pac.

Others have significantly increased their giving.

The #Adelsons, for example, donated $53 million to the pro-Romney super pac in 2012 and $90 million to support Trump in 2020,
when they were the largest individual donors of the cycle.

By the end of September, Miriam Adelson had given $100 million to back Trump in 2024.

With such sums at stake, Trump has pursued what the former Bush Pioneer called a “high touch” approach to the Republican billionaire class.

The ex-President has all but invited donors to view their contributions as business investments,
telling oil-and-gas executives who went to see him in April at Mar-a-Lago, for example, that,
because he would allow unrestricted drilling,
they should raise $1 billion for his campaign
—a statement redolent of Sondland’s “quid pro quo” that soon leaked to the Washington Post.

The campaign’s strategy, another longtime fund-raiser told me,
was essentially to let Trump be Trump:

“He talks the same book to everybody.”

Oliver, the former Bush finance director, observed that the difference between the model of the Bush campaigns and Trump’s is the difference between having a large pool of “institutional investors” which had been built up in the course of years, and a series of ad-hoc “transactional” dealings with a relatively small group of the ultra-rich.

Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University, offered another key distinction. Trump’s billionaires—many of whom have made their fortunes as hedge-fund managers, activist investors, and corporate raiders—tend to be highly motivated ideologues and individual operators. “It’s transactional, but their end of the bargain is a lot different than just having access to the President of the United States,” Wilentz told me. “They see Trump as their instrument. This is an investment for them to take power.” Wilentz noted that, unlike the “traditional corporate conservative élite” dating back to the Gilded Age, this new “class of the super-rich” appears both more numerous and less civic-minded. “The other guys might have been robber barons,” Wilentz said. “These guys are oligarchs.”

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.