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The reclusive plutocrat who became the biggest political donor of 2024 Judd Legum
The largest donor of the 2024 presidential campaign, by far, is Timothy Mellon, the reclusive billionaire and heir to the Mellon banking fortune. Mellon was already the largest donor after donating $25 million each to the Super PACs supporting the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump (MAGA Inc.) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (American Values 2024). Then, Mellon donated another $50 million to MAGA Inc. on May 31, the day after Trump was convicted of committing 34 felonies.
Mellon’s $75 million contribution to MAGA Inc. represents almost half of the group’s total fundraising. Mellon has also donated millions more to other conservative causes this cycle.
Despite his political spending, little is known about Mellon. The most detailed account of Mellon’s views comes from his self-published 2015 autobiography. “This book was not ghost-written: every single word is my own,” Mellon said in a press release announcing its publication. People who wanted to purchase the book were required to make a $9 donation to Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution that aggressively promotes right-wing ideology or another conservative group.
According to a 2020 article published in the Washington Post, Mellon writes that Black people have become “even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations” after social safety net programs were expanded in the 1960s and 1970s. Mellon writes that they are now “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.”
Mellon also derided programs intended to lift people out of poverty as “Slavery Redux.” Mellon claimed that in exchange for “delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on.” According to Mellon, who inherited his fortune, “[t]he largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.”
Mellon also blasted universities for offering college students the opportunity to learn about the history of Black people, women, and the LGBTQ community. “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, LGBT Studies, they have all cluttered Higher Education with a mishmash of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with the Dependency Syndrome,” Mellon wrote.
In response to scrutiny of the book, Mellon stood firm. “I said everything I wanted to say,” Mellon told Bloomberg. “I don’t have any regrets.”
But now, Mellon is trying to rewrite history. The website Mellon used to sell the book, timsstory.com, has been taken offline. The book doesn’t appear to be available to purchase anywhere. Instead, later this month, Mellon is publishing a new autobiography with the same title. This time, the cover includes a gushing blurb from Kennedy.
Mellon’s new book is being published by Skyhorse Publishing, which is run by Tony Lyons. He also serves as the co-chair of American Values 2024, Kennedy’s Super PAC. Skyhorse Publishing has published Kennedy’s books about vaccine conspiracy theories and the works of other conspiracy theorists, including Alex Jones. According to the promotional material, Mellon’s new book reveals “a life not merely lived on inherited wealth but on conviction, leadership, and the audacity to defy convention.”
Mellon’s connection to Project 2025
In addition to his donations to Super PACs supporting the campaigns of Trump and Kennedy, Mellon donated $4 million to Sentinel Action Fund, a Super PAC created by Heritage Action, a subsidiary of the Heritage Foundation. (Contributions directly to Heritage Action or the Heritage Foundation are not disclosed.)
The Heritage Foundation is the leading organization behind Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump administration.
Project 2025 is a 920-page document that lays out a radically different future for the United States. The document details a “Christian nationalist vision of the United States, one in which married heterosexuality is the only valid form of sexual expression and identity; all pregnancies would be carried to term, even if that requires coercion or death; and transgender and gender-nonconforming people do not exist.”
In addition to the detailed policy guide, the Heritage Foundation is vetting thousands of “conservative warriors” who can come to Washington, D.C., to implement the plan.
Why is Mellon supporting Kennedy?
Mellon’s $25 million donation to Kennedy’s Super PAC is keeping his cash-strapped campaign afloat. But why is Mellon supporting Kennedy?
In 2023, before Kennedy dropped out of the Democratic primary, Mellon expressed his support for Kennedy in a statement released by the super PAC. “The fact that Kennedy gets so much bipartisan support tells me two things: that he’s the one candidate who can unite the country and root out corruption and that he’s the one Democrat who can win in the general election.” Mellon “has also been a ‘supporter’” of Kennedy’s anti-vaccine non-profit Children’s Health Defense, Mark Gorton, co-founder of the American Values super PAC, told NOTUS.
Mellon, however, also has a history of supporting candidates that he thinks will damage the Democratic Party.
In 2018, for example, Mellon donated $2,700 to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). In an interview with Bloomberg, Mellon explained the donation was because “he thought that, if elected, her outspokenness would cause headaches for Democrats.” Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign tried to refund the donation, but Mellon said he would “neither cash nor deposit the check but rather, frame it.” The Wall Street Journal reported that Mellon also donated $5,800 to Senator Joe Manchin (I-WV) in 2021 and 2022 and $2,900 to Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) in 2022, two politicians who have a history of obstructing Democratic policy priorities.
Mellon’s other massive donation
In 2021, Mellon donated $53 million to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s (R) fundraising campaign to build a border wall. According to the Texas Tribune, Mellon’s donation “contributed nearly 98% of the fund’s total donations.”
In June 2021, Abbott announced a plan to build a state-funded wall on the Mexico border. Abbott “expected people to both donate their own money and volunteer their land for the barrier.” The plan is part of Abbott’s Operation Lone Star, which seeks to subvert federal immigration policy. In addition to the barriers, some of which are topped with razor wire, Texas has authorized “Texas National Guard soldiers and state troopers to arrest” undocumented migrants. This has created safety concerns and “essentially criminalizes seeking asylum,” which migrants have the right to pursue under federal law.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “people familiar with [Mellon’s] thinking” said that “[o]ne of the main issues driving Mellon’s giving is immigration.” In 2010, Mellon gave $1.5 million “to help the state of Arizona defend a controversial law that required police to determine the immigration status of people suspected of living in the U.S. illegally, which critics said could lead to racial profiling.”
When Nellie asked me to fill in while she is off birthing a persons, I said yes but only on slow news weeks. She assured me that no news ever drops the first week of July and I’d be able to paste in a few of my favorite Mormon mommy TikTokers, write a sentence or two about Seattle’s annual Independence Day Flag Burning Parade, and then go soak my feet in the pool. She lied. It’s been a hell of a week, and Nellie said no takes backs, so I guess you’re stuck with me. Let’s go.
→ Will he or won’t he? The New York Times reports that Biden told an ally that he is weighing whether to continue in the race. What they don’t say is that ally is actually the nice Bulgarian woman who helps him into the shower. Either way, last week’s disaster of a debate continues to roil the Democratic Party, which is now tasked with trying to figure out who is the least terrible candidate: a historically unpopular VP or the guy who starts sundowning around noon. Or maybe somebody else?
The Dems are in a tough position. Biden’s most trusted advisers (read: Hunter) want him to stay in the race, but everyone else is desperately trying to think of someone, anyone, who can win against Trump while also sparing the old man’s feelings.
So far, most of the freakout is happening behind closed doors. Publicly, most Democrats are standing by their man—for now. Just three Dems in Congress have called on Biden to step aside. And, barring that chat with the ally, the president himself seems to be in full “I’m not quitting” mode.
Not that he has done anything this week to demonstrate his fitness for office. While the president laid low, his press secretary said that it was really just a cold, plus maybe a bit of jet lag. White House aides told Axios that the president is “dependably engaged” from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. In a meeting with concerned Democratic governors who flew in to check on the old guy at the top of the ballot, he said all he needs is to work less, sleep more, and be able to clock out after 8 p.m. In that same meeting, the president is reported to have said: “It’s just my brain.” This is supposed to reassure us? What’s even more troubling is that longtime friends of the Bidens told New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi that they were “shocked to find that the president did not remember their names.” Incoming statement from the White House: “Guys, it’s just face blindness.”
I get it: Biden is a beloved elder statesman, and no one wants to hurt the old man’s feelings. So just do what they did at the retirement home when my grandpa had dementia: tell him whatever he wants to hear. Good news, Mr. President, you won the election! We’ll get Gorbachev on the line for you right after dinner. More ice cream? It’s chocolate chip. Seriously, this works.
→ Or maybe it’s just the media? Nothing to see here, folks! Just when we thought the spell had been broken and most of the media was finally willing to report on what’s been happening before our very eyes, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is now advising the Biden campaign, claimed on MSNBC that the media is rigging this whole thing. In this case, the former mayor was referring to her hometown paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which published an editorial calling for Biden to exit stage left.
“Let me just say I was very disappointed with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” Bottoms told Chris Jansing. “As we have talked about making sure we’re protecting elections and making sure there’s no undue influence, this was undue influence by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or an attempt to influence.”
As Jansing pointed out, it’s an editorial board. Attempting to influence elections is their literal job. Then again, Bottoms is a political operative. Spin is her literal job too.
→ Speaking of spin: The New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn sent a note out to staff, congratulating everyone on their coverage of Biden’s age: “What I’ve seen and what our readers have experienced from our team is steadfast, fact-based reporting. . . . We have stayed on that story with every turn, always with nuance and context, through today’s outstanding report.”
See, now that a critical mass sees that Biden is plainly too old, we’ve shifted straight into revisionism. We’ve been telling you the truth the whole time. Except, in March, the Gray Lady was likening Biden’s age to just a new, later in life style—like Scorsese with The Irishman (s/o Jon Levine for re-upping this). And those videos of his many senior moments before the debate? Misleading! Bad faith! You aren’t watching an old man be old, they said. Those are deepfakes and cheapfakes.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, the Associated Press offered up 2024’s answer to “mostly peaceful” riots:
→ KHive, assemble: Personally, I vote Al Franken as Biden’s replacement. He’s smart, funny, Midwestern, and he loves women. But Vegas has Kamala as the probable Democratic nominee. And I guess that makes sense, given that she’s the vice president and all. “It’s her party now,” read the banner headline on Drudge this past Wednesday.
Monday, July 1, was a busy day. That morning the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States that gives the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts. On the same day, Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon began a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress at a low-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Before he began serving his sentence, he swore he would “be more powerful in prison than I am now.”
“On July 2, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, went onto Bannon’s webcast War Room to hearten Bannon’s right-wing followers after Bannon’s incarceration. Former representative Dave Brat (R-VA) was sitting in for Bannon and conducted the interview.
“[W]e are going to win,” Roberts told them. “We’re in the process of taking this country back…. We ought to be really encouraged by what happened yesterday. And in spite of all of the injustice, which, of course, friends and audience of this show, of our friend Steve know, we are going to prevail.”
“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the radical left…has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Roberts took over the presidency of the Heritage Foundation in 2021, and he shifted it from a conservative think tank to an organization devoted to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” Central to that project for Roberts has been working to bring the policies of Hungary’s president Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, to the United States.
In 2023, Roberts brought the Heritage Foundation into a formal partnership with Hungary’s Danube Institute, a think tank overseen by a foundation that is directly funded by the Hungarian government; as journalist Casey Michel reported, it is, “for all intents and purposes, a state-funded front for pushing pro-Orbán rhetoric.” The Danube Institute has given grants to far-right figures in the U.S., and, Michel noted in March, “we have no idea how much funding may be flowing directly from Orbán’s regime to the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts has called modern Hungary “not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model.”
Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy and replace it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” in favor of “the Christian family model.” He is moving Hungary away from the stabilizing international systems supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
No matter what he calls it, Orbán’s model is not democracy at all. As soon as he retook office in 2010, he began to establish control over the media, cracking down on those critical of his far-right political party, Fidesz, and rewarding those who toed the party line. In 2012 his supporters rewrote the country’s constitution to strengthen his hand, and extreme gerrymandering gave his party more power while changes to election rules benefited his campaigns. Increasingly, he used the power of the state to concentrate wealth among his cronies, and he reworked the country’s judicial system and civil service system to stack it with his loyalists, who attacked immigrants, women, and the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals. While Hungary still holds elections, state control of the media and the apparatus of voting means that it is impossible for the people of Hungary to remove him from power.
Trump supporters have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to have elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.
The tight cooperation between Heritage and Orbán illuminates Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by Trump or a Trump-like figure. In January 2024, Roberts told Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times that Project 2025 was designed to jump-start a right-wing takeover of the government. “[T]he Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start,” Roberts said. “And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”
Project 2025 stands on four principles that it says the country must embrace: the U.S. must “[r]estore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children”; “[d]ismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”; “[d]efend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats”; and “[s]ecure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”
In almost 1,000 pages, the document explains what these policies mean for ordinary Americans. Restoring the family and protecting children means using “government power…to restore the American family.” That, the document says, means eliminating any words associated with sexual orientation or gender identity, gender, abortion, reproductive health, or reproductive rights from any government rule, regulation, or law. Any reference to transgenderism is “pornography” and must be banned.
The overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized the right to abortion must be gratefully celebrated, the document says, but the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision accomplishing that end “is just the beginning.”
Dismantling the administrative state starts from the premise that “people are policy.” Frustrated because nonpartisan civil employees thwarted much of Trump’s agenda in his first term, the authors of Project 2025 call for firing much of the current government workforce—about 2 million people work for the U.S. government—and replacing it with loyalists who will carry out a right-wing president’s demands.
The plan asserts “the existential need” for an authoritarian leader to dismantle the current government that regulates business, provides a social safety net, and protects civil rights. Instead of the government Americans have built since 1933, the plan says the national government must “decentralize and privatize as much as possible” and leave “the great majority of domestic activities to state, local, and private governance.”
It attacks “America’s largest corporations, its public institutions, and its popular culture,” for their embrace of international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union and for their willingness to work with other countries. It calls for abandoning all of those partnerships and alliances.
Also on July 1, Orbán took over the rotating presidency of the European Union. He will be operating for six months in that position under a slogan taken from Trump and adapted to Europe: “Make Europe Great Again.” The day before taking that office, Orbán announced that his political party was forming a new alliance with far-right parties in Austria and the Czech Republic in order to launch a “new era of European politics.”
Tomorrow, Orbán will travel to Moscow to meet with Russian president Vladimir Putin. On July 2, Orbán met with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, where he urged Zelensky to accept a “ceasefire.” In the U.S., Trump’s team has suggested that, if reelected, Trump will call for an immediate ceasefire and will negotiate with Putin over how much of Ukraine Putin can keep while also rejecting Ukraine for NATO membership and scaling back U.S. commitment to NATO.
“I would expect a very quick end to the conflict,” Kevin Roberts said. Putin says he supports Trump’s plan.
Roberts’s “second American revolution,” which would destroy American democracy in an echo of a small-time dictator like Orbán and align our country with authoritarian leaders, seems a lot less patriotic than the first American Revolution.
For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
—
Notes:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/politics/steve-bannon-report-to-prison/index.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/179776/heritage-foundation-viktor-orban-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/21/magazine/heritage-foundation-kevin-roberts.html
https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/what-is-project-2025-and-why-is-it-alarming/
https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-orban-visit-kyiv-ukraine-peace-putin-zelenskiy/33022024.html
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/02/europe/viktor-orban-visits-kyiv-intl/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/02/nato-second-trump-term-00164517
Khrystyna Bondarieva, “Putin on Trump’s proposal to quickly end war in Ukraine: Russia supports it,” Ukrainska Pravda, July 4, 2024.
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