2024 Elections

Many high-dollar donors had turned their backs on Trump after the stolen election lie and Jan. 6, but now have returned.

GOP donors grew increasingly skeptical about Democratic claims that a second term for former President Donald Trump would spell doom for democracy. | Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

By Sam Sutton

06/10/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Link Copied

NEW YORK — Wall Street executives spent three years doing everything they could to distance themselves from former President Donald Trump. Now they’re busy coming up with reasons to vote for the guy.

Many high-dollar donors at banks, hedge funds and other financial firms had turned their backs on Trump as he spun unfounded claims that the 2020 election had been stolen and savaged the judicial system with attacks. Today, they’re setting aside those concerns, looking past qualms about his personality and willingness to bulldoze institutional norms and focusing instead on issues closer to the heart: how he might ease regulations, cut their taxes or flex U.S. power on the global stage.

“I don’t know that anyone really believed he was a threat to democracy,” said Point Bridge Capital founder Hal Lambert, an investor and Republican donor. Lambert had backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the 2024 primary but is now supporting Trump.

Republican business titans from hedge fund executive Nelson Peltz to hotel mogul Robert Bigelow have come out in favor of the presumptive GOP nominee. Even those who loudly denounced Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election are backing his bid to return to the White House.

Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman — who once labeled the U.S. Capitol insurrection that followed a Trump speech on Jan. 6, 2021, “an affront to the democratic values” of the country — is once again one of the former president’s most important allies on Wall Street. Top financiers like hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who called on the then-president to resign over the riot, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin, who........

© Politico