THE WEIRDOS BEHIND THE WEIRDOS
If you think Trump and his posse of MAGA clowns often seem like escapees from a scary carnival, take a look at his billionaire backers. Now that’s a flock of whacky birds
First, there is the former Commander-in-Freak.
An obese man with bleached hairs (now newly styled); fake, overly white teeth; and until recently, skin the color of a Popsicle.
And did I mention his obsession with numbers, ratings, and size – especially crowds and hands?
A blowhard. A Draft dodger who kisses the Flag. For decades a New York tabloid “personality” who, like Bill Clinton, and others hung out with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. In short, a local joke and late-night punchline. Creepy. Self-obsessed. Craving ink of any variety. On the edge of bankruptcy at least once despite being born on third base. Bailed out by Hong Kong Chinese interests. A flim-flam man cravenly trying to fleece the poor sheep who drifted his way. Trump Casino. Trump University. Trump Steak. Trump Vodka. All busts.
The maestro of MAGA is a cheap guy in a fat-man suit who doesn’t even know how to tie his dangling tie properly.
And aside from Donald John Trump, the “movement” is lousy with low-rent oddballs who weirdly don’t seem to recognize or respect their roles as members of the second branch of America’s democracy: the heinous, rabble-rousing Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who never met a conspiracy theory she didn’t want to swallow; Representative Lorraine Boebert of Colorado, who was fondling her date and being fondled when she was kicked out of a theatre in Denver for disorderly behavior; Representative Matt Gaetz, the all-grown-up Eddie Munster from Florida who beat a DOJ sex-trafficking investigation; Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who has been accused of closing his eyes to the sex abuse of athletes when he was an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State and who defied a subpoena by the Select Committee investigating the January 6 Uprising while issuing more than 90 subpoenas as chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
Then there are the Botoxed beauties in Trump’s extended family exemplified by Kimberly Guilfoyle, who seems well on her way to Bride-of-Wildenstein status. But hey, everyone can look the way they want, right Right?
Still, if Trump & Co. – who to their eternal frustration got permanently branded as “weird” by now-Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz – seem somewhat “off,” they are amateur nut cases compared with the filthy rich whack-jobs propping up the degraded Grand Old Party with their multi-million-dollar donations.
Palm Beach Horror. If there ever was a reveille for democrats (with both a small and capital “d”), it should have been the confab of assorted fat cats who gathered in Palm Beach on April 6 for a Trump fund-raiser.
The swanky night pulled in more than $50 million for the Trump campaign, his legal defense, and Republican Parties, both national and state. That was the beginning of a surge in donations to the former President, and Reuters reported that Trump raised more than $76 million in April.
At the top of the list of organizers for the fund-raiser was the 2012 financial crisis billionaire John Paulson, currently locked in mortal legal combat with his ex-wife and a former business associate in Puerto Rico. He hosted the evening with a girlfriend who looks like she’s skipping high school classes.
Then there was former World Wrestling CEO Linda McMahon, who Trump put in charge of the Small Business Administration and whose steroid-freakish husband Vince is facing a lawsuit from a young woman employee of the WWE he allegedly groomed and viciously violated. That civil suit, filed in January, has been paused while the Justice Department pursues its own investigation, according to Bloomberg.
And while reportedly not in attendance, another organizer was John Catsimatidis, the loud-mouthed New York grocery magnate who looks as though he swallowed everything in one of his supermarkets. Catsimatidis, once a candidate for mayor of Gotham, is also proprietor of WABC and in May fired a former real mayor of New York, the pitiable remains of one Rudolph Giuliani, because he wouldn’t stop talking about the election of 2020 being stolen. (Not that Catsimatidis has any scruples; he was just afraid of getting his large caboose sued.)
There were odious others sheep-dogging the gilded, arthritic flock to rally round the Good Shepherd from Queens, but none were as ominous as Rebekah Mercer.
In the historical hierarchy of the grotesquely wealthy and equally strange – think Howard Hughes, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk – Mercer and her father, Robert, are a hard-to-match duo of the daft.
A 2017 New Yorker profile of Robert Mercer by Jane Mayer revealed a math genius who rarely speaks, has a multi-million-dollar toy train set, and supports crackpot biochemist and climate-change denier Art Robinson (now an Oregon state senator) who is collecting thousands of urine samples in a quest to find the Holy Grail of longevity. A patron of the right-wing news site Breitbart, the now-retired Mercer has donated many of the millions he raked in as co-CEO of the fabulously successful quant firm Renaissance Technologies to anti-government Republicans. Which, of course, is his right.
Rebekah Mercer, in contrast to her mostly mute father, is an aging firebrand with a forceful presence and a finger in many far-right pies (she and her two sisters also own a cookie company). Importantly, she is a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025, a controversial plan to remake the federal government and place more power in the hands of the President (presumed to be Donaldo). Trump has disavowed the effort to disembowel Washington, but why would anyone believe the biggest liar since Simon Peter said he didn’t know Jesus?
The Mercers, who are widely credited with salvaging Trump’s 2016 campaign, have counted Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway among their hired hands. Rumors are that Conway may join the current Trump campaign, and Bannon could, too, if there’s time once he finishes a four-month stretch as a guest of the federal prison system.
The Mercers either largely sat out the 2020 presidential election or were considerably less out front in their support of Trump, delivering their dollars through the dark-money fund Donors Trust. But their step back into the orange glow of the limelight is troubling indeed.
Another Trump benefactor is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ sugar daddy, the Texas billionaire Harlan Crow. As Nina Burleigh mentioned in the initial column of her Substack American Freakshow, Crow’s home is chockablock with Nazi memorabilia and his backyard includes multiple statues of evil dictators. Is having Lenin for a lawn jockey really that odd? Um. Yes.
Miriam Adelson, the widow of major Trump donor Shelly Adelson, was trumpeted by New York magazine last May as “The Mega Donor” because, the story said, she has a $100 million plan to make the 45th President the 47th, too. Dr. Adelson doesn’t seem that strange, but she does have one thing in common with other weirdo Trump supporters: like X-Man Elon Musk and tech billionaire and JD Vance rabbi Peter Theil, she is foreign-born.
Adelson, a ferocious fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, is an Israeli native, and her embrace of Trump seems largely about her homeland, not the United States. That doesn’t make her weird – just not very concerned about America.
Perhaps the second- or third-oddest Trump supporter (after Mercer and Musk) hails from old-moneyed, red-blooded America, however. That would be Timothy Mellon, heir to a banking and railroad fortune, whose grandfather, Andrew Mellon, was Treasury Secretary in the Roaring Twenties.
The reclusive Tim Mellon seemingly out of nowhere has donated some $75 million to the Trump campaign (he also gave $25 million to the now-faltering candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose weirdness is as long as Ulysses).
As The New York Times reported, Mellon was responsible for the nocturnal removal of the Narragansett Runestone, a boulder off Pojac Point in North Kingstown, R.I., in 2012. The Runestone, visible only at low tide, is believed by some to have carvings made by Vikings or Native Americans or Icelanders centuries ago. But Mellon, who has a home on Pojac Point, apparently got annoyed with the masses nosing around the shoreline looking for the rock. So, he had it yanked.
An investigation ensued, followed by negotiations, and Mellon agreed to return the Runestone. No charges were filed. But what an entitled, stone-ass-crazy nut!
The outsized sway on presidential elections wielded by the ultra-wealthy with their pet eccentricities and aims — often completely unrelated to the commonweal — can be traced back to the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court. That won’t change anytime soon, but it’s important to constantly cast a spotlight on the gilded gaggle trying so desperately to impose their will and weirdness and greed on the public.
A Forbes report based on available Federal Election Commission data says that between January 2023 and June 2024, Trump raised about $217 million, while Kamala Harris raised more than $284 million (that includes the cash Uncle Joe chipped in). But according to Forbes, Harris pulled in $314 million in July, compared with $138 million for Trump.
Better start beating the bushes for a few more rich screwballs willing to dig deep, Donald.
My Book Report
By Deidre Depke
Well, That Was Depressing
It’s early to declare a winner, but Sarah Manguso’s Liars could be the most affecting thing you’ll read this year. This impressive little novel is comprised of short paragraphs, some standalone, others linked, chronicling the 14-year marriage of Jane, a writer of fiction, and John, an aspiring artist (read, failed). Jane is our first-person guide here; we never hear from John. And, really, thank God. The guy is a complete ass.
Here’s how Jane introduces herself:
“In the beginning I was only myself. Everything that happened to me, I thought, was mine alone.
Then I married a man, as women do. My life became archetypal, a drag show of nuclear familyhood. I got enmeshed in a story that had already been told ten billion times.”
Jane fights cancer, raises their child, is forced by John to relocate cities four times in five years, cooks, cleans, buys the holiday gifts, and spends thousands financing John’s crappy art and seemingly limitless parking tickets. And so on. And on. You can probably guess how it all ends; I’ll spare you the details.
Anyway, Manguso’s Jane is so exquisitely rendered that the book’s narration is much less important than its portrait of a character capable of rising above clichés about women and bad marriages. If I hadn’t had to vacuum the house for company, I would have read Liars in a single sitting.
Manguso is also the author of the excellent Very Cold People, a chilling coming-of-age story set in New England. In the novel’s opening paragraph, its little protagonist declares: “My parents are liars.”
It’s a theme, I guess.