Wall Street billionaires are rushing to back Trump, Verdict be damned


(Bloomberg) — Before 12 New Yorkers convicted Donald Trump of being a criminal, a very different jury — one assembled at the luxury Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue — had reached a verdict of its own.

Even if the courtroom jury found him guilty as charged, wealthy Wall Streeters concluded in Pierre, he would still be their choice for the White House.

That meeting, 16 days before Thursday's historic verdict, highlighted the cold calculations now at play in American finance.

From longtime supporters to reluctant fellow travelers, a growing number of prominent figures in US business and finance are embracing the prospect of a Trump restoration — criminal convictions be damned.

“This verdict will have less than zero impact on my support,” said Omeed Malik, president of 1789 Capital and a co-organizer of the Pierre fundraiser for Trump, as he processed the news Thursday evening. Echoing Trump and Republican leaders, Malik characterized the entire hush money trial as a “weapon of the legal system” and “jurisdictional justice.”

This much is certain: Some funders who ditched Trump after his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and kept their distance as he continued to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen — are now ditching him again their weight behind him.

One big reason, in one word: money. Trump has promised to cut taxes for the wealthy and eliminate regulations. President Joe Biden wants the opposite.

The gilded Pierre fundraiser, organized by billionaire Howard Lutnick, reached deep pockets in upper-caste Manhattan, even as Trump's historic trial unfolded in grim detail in a bleak downtown courtroom. Malik doubted that the guilty verdict would change the mind of a single person who was there.

Or the minds of many others, it seems. Less than two weeks after that meeting, without waiting to learn the jury's verdict, private equity magnate and longtime Republican donor Stephen Schwarzman announced he was behind Trump again. Co-founder of Blackstone Inc. is among the 40 richest people in the world, with a fortune of $41 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Hours before the decision reverberated through Wall Street and Washington on Thursday, another prominent New York billionaire, hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, said he was bent over to support the former president. Later, in a post on X, Ackman pointed to a tweet by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suggesting that the US justice system — the Manhattan prosecutor in this case, the judge and even the jury — were “bent.” for political purposes. Similar claims have been circulated on social media.

A spokesman for Ackman declined to comment, while Schwarzman and Lutnick could not be reached for comment after the guilty verdict.

The developments and, more so, their timing underscore the shifting dynamics between Trump and some of the nation's financial leaders. Nowhere is this more evident than in gentrified Manhattan, where Trump first rose to fame and fortune. For decades, elites in Trump's hometown sneered and dismissed him as a small player in real estate — to please, but never to acknowledge.

Now, with Election Day just five months away, the former president's promises on taxes and regulations are winning over leaders, even as Trump has now been convicted in the first criminal trial of a US president in the nation's history.

“Wall Street has never been known for high character and high values,” said Dan Lufkin, co-founder of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, the investment bank where Schwarzman once worked.

“Is there a willingness to support Trump if it seems that he is on the right track? Yes,” Lufkin continued. “I'm not proud of it, and I'm not a part of it.” (Lufkin initially endorsed Nikki Haley, an early Wall Street favorite who received endorsements from Citadel's Ken Griffin and others.)

Others like billionaire Barry Sternlicht want candidates to appeal to moderates. “I am now sitting out,” he said in an email minutes before the decision.

After two days of deliberations, a jury of Trump's peers found him guilty of falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment to a porn star. The verdict capped an extraordinary seven-week trial that transformed familiar scenes and traditions of election-year politics into a split-screen tableau of sex and scandal.

Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee, now enters the final race of a slim race for the White House with a black mark that would end the career of virtually any other presidential candidate. Set to be sentenced shortly before the Republican National Convention in July, he will likely appeal.

How voters will react to this extraordinary turn of events is unclear.

But the former president's supporters — including those in the business and financial community — have already begun to rally around him. Within minutes of the guilty verdict, Trump's campaign circulated a fundraising email that characterized him as a “political prisoner” and asked, “Is this the end of America?” A spike in interest caused a temporary outage on WinRed, the site the Republican party uses to collect online donations.

The campaign raised a total of $34.8 million from “small dollar donors” after Thursday night's decision, she said in a statement.

Trump has previously capitalized on his legal troubles to raise money. His campaign raised $25 million more than Biden in April — a first this election season. But Biden and the Democratic Party still hold a $192 million war chest, about twice as much as Trump and the GOP.

Scott Bessent, the former chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, who is among those running to be Trump's Treasury Secretary, said he was “personally disappointed” by the decision but didn't think it would matter. in November.

“I think people have already made up their minds,” Bessent said, adding that the development could also fuel enthusiasm for Trump.

Billionaire John Paulson, whom Trump has publicly floated as a potential nominee for Treasury Secretary, condemned the trial and conviction as politically motivated, calling it a “black stain on our judicial system.” The decision would boost support for Trump, he said in an email.

Read more: Ex-Soros star Bessent Jockeys with Paulson to run Trump Treasury

Even some Wall Street leaders who have previously attacked Trump have softened their stances.

Jamie Dimon, at a gathering of JPMorgan Chase & Co. alumni. at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan on Thursday night, just hours after the decision, pointed out that the former president had 74 million people who voted for him in 2020 and stressed the need to respect them. . It was a departure from his injury tirade for Trump at an earlier group meeting, when the events of January 6 were still fresh in everyone's mind.

The remarks echoed comments Dimon made at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, when he said Trump was “kind of right” about certain policies and that Democrats should “be a little more respectful” of his supporters. his. Some of those gathered Thursday night speculated feverishly that Trump's perceived martyrdom would serve him well in the November election.

Privately, Trump's supporters on Wall Street insist it's about more than money. Some point to what they see as a growing tolerance for anti-Semitism among progressive Democrats, especially after the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel and the Jewish state's subsequent bombing campaign in Gaza. (Schwarzman distanced himself from the first Trump administration, after Trump spoke out when asked about the torch-carrying right-wing protesters who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, chanting anti-Semitic slogans.)

Others complain that progressives with a dim view of capitalism — and Wall Street capitalists, in particular — have elected Biden and the Democratic Party. Still others worry that Biden, 81, is too old to be president (Trump is 77).

What baffles people like Whitney Tilson is the bitter sentiment toward Biden among some colleagues in the financial community, even in the face of consecutive stock market gains, low unemployment and rising corporate profits.

“For people in the investment business, Joe Biden's presidency has been extremely good for them,” said Tilson, who once ran Kase Capital Management, a $200 million hedge fund. “It's really strange to me how the people who did the best under Joe Biden seem to be the most unhappy with this presidency.”

The financial industry has no shortage of opportunists. And Tilson suspects that extends to Trump supporters in the upper echelons of the business community.

“They have come to the conclusion that Trump is going to win,” Tilson said. “And if he's the next president, then it's in their best interest to support him early.”

To contact the authors of this story:
Amanda L Gordon in New York at (email protected)
Sridhar Natarajan in New York at (email protected)



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