At least five mega-donors to the Republican Party claim to have called time on Donald Trump as GOP unease with the former president continues to grow following the party’s poor performance in the 2022 midterms.
Andy Sabin, Ken Griffin, Ronald Lauder, Steve Schwarzman and Thomas Peterffy this week all said they were distancing themselves from Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.
“I’m not going to give (Trump) a fucking nickel,” said New York metal mogul Andy Sabin, who plans to back Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis should he also launch a run for the White House.
“At the end of the day, people stayed away (in the 2022 midterms) because of Trump,” Sabin told CNBC. Trump “endorsed candidates who were not necessarily qualified unless they said ‘I love you, Donald.’”
Trump “did a lot of things really well and missed the mark on some important areas,” hedge fund billionaire and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin told Politico. “And for a litany of reasons, I think it’s time to move on to the next generation.”
DeSantis had his support too, he said.
Billionaire Ronald Lauder, an heir to the Estée Lauder fortune, said he wouldn’t donate to Trump’s campaign, his spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday.
It’s not clear who he’d back but he has donated to DeSantis in the past,
Steve Schwarzman, chair and CEO of The Blackstone Group, said he wouldn’t fund Trump’s run, at least in the Republican primary.
“America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” Schwarzman said in a statement to CNBC. “It is time for the Republican party to turn to a new generation of leaders and I intend to support one of them in the presidential primaries.”
His preferred choice of candidate, though, is not known.
And Thomas Peterffy, the billionaire founder of Interactive Brokers Group Inc., said he would vote for Trump if he won the GOP nomination but hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
“I think we need a fresh face,” he told Bloomberg. “The problem with Trump is he has so many negatives, he can’t get elected, period.”
