One of many largest donors to assist President-elect Donald Trump was Timothy Mellon, an inheritor to the generational fortune of Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Mellon.
Within the 2024 election cycle, Mellon, 82, donated $125 million to the tremendous PAC Make America Nice Once more, Inc. that supported Trump, in response to Federal Election Fee paperwork.
And together with, donations to assist Republican congressional candidates and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mellon donated a complete of $165 million, in response to the marketing campaign finance tracker Open Secrets and techniques.
Mellon wasn’t the one billionaire to make nine-figure outlays for Trump. Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave a minimum of $119 million to a PAC he set as much as re-elect Trump. When together with cash for different Republicans, Musk gave a minimum of $132 million.
However he did so in a way more public method than Mellon, who is thought to eschew the highlight. Mellon is a grandson of Andrew Mellon and reclusive billionaire who prior to now expressed pointed views about federal entitlement packages, which he termed “slavery redux.”
Mellon seldom speaks to the press and seems to have little curiosity in hobnobbing with the politicians to whom he donates. Despite the fact that he’s disbursed big sums of cash to political teams and politicians, many have by no means met him. And through the 2020 election, Republican staffers needed to search him on Google to seek out out who he was when he reached out with the supply of a serious donation, in response to the New York Occasions.
Mellon didn’t reply to requests made by way of his household’s basis. Different efforts to succeed in him had been unsuccessful, together with queries to writer he labored with. A lawyer who labored with him prior to now stated he doesn’t characterize him anymore.
In a uncommon interview from 2020, Mellon instructed Bloomberg he believed Trump had delivered on what he’d stated on the stump.
“He’s finished the issues he promised to, or tried to do the issues he’s promised to…in commerce and righting the steadiness between our nation and the remainder of the world, particularly China,” Mellon stated.
Mellon donated to RFK Jr. earlier than he dropped out
Along with Trump, Mellon donated to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for president. He additionally gave $25 million to the political motion committee American Values 2024 that supported Kennedy.
Kennedy blurbed Mellon’s self-published autobiography panam.captain launched in 2015.
“Tim Mellon is a maverick entrepreneur who embodies probably the most admirable qualities of what FDR referred to as ‘American Industrial genius,’” Kennedy wrote of Mellon. (Mellon and Kennedy share a writer in Skyhorse Publishing).
A few hundred years in the past, the Mellon household was closely concerned in American politics. Mellon’s grandfather Andrew was Treasury secretary from 1921 to 1932. In that function, he lower taxes for America’s wealthiest and efficiently campaigned to take away any property taxes in order that he may depart his fortune to his heirs. Previous to his time within the public sector, the elder Mellon made his cash in banking, industrials, and investing within the early phases of corporations.
The Mellon household stays one of many nation’s richest with a mixed web price of $14 billion, in response to Forbes. Timothy Mellon’s precise monetary holdings are usually not effectively understood. In a 2014 deposition, he stated his web price was roughly $700 million. The London Occasions has estimated it at $1 billion. A relative instructed Vainness Honest that Mellon didn’t need folks to know his true web price, placing it nearer to $4.2 billion.
It appears the youthful Mellon got here to politics later in life. From 1996 to 2018, Mellon donated about $350,000, in response to the Wall Avenue Journal, far lower than the tons of of hundreds of thousands he has poured into backing Trump-era Republicans. Within the 2020 election, Mellon donated $60 million to Republican candidates, together with $20 million to Trump, in response to Open Secrets and techniques. Within the 2022 midterm elections, he gave $41.7 million to candidates.
‘He desires nobody to tax him’
Along with donating to candidates and their political motion committees, Mellon has additionally given cash to different conservative causes.
In 2021, Mellon donated $53 million to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s fund to construct a wall on the state’s border with Mexico, in response to reporting from the Texas Tribune. Mellon’s donation amounted to 98% of the cash the fund ended up elevating. The donation was seemingly tax deductible as a result of it was made to a state authorities for use for public works.
Different members of the Mellon household had been shocked and, even appalled, at their relative’s help of Trump, although some suspected it could must do with taxes.
“I feel what it comes right down to is he desires to be left alone, and he desires nobody to tax him,” one member of the Mellon household instructed Vainness Honest. “It’s that libertarian viewpoint that’s develop into radicalized. There are loads of actually wealthy folks on the market who simply don’t want to consider what’s greatest for America anymore.”
Despite the fact that he inherited one of many nice American industrial fortunes, Mellon nonetheless went into enterprise for himself. Within the Nineteen Eighties, he took over a railroad firm referred to as Guilford Transportation Industries that purchased up a number of smaller rail traces within the Northeast. A number of years later he rebranded it Pan Am Programs after he purchased the emblem and title from the defunct airline. In 2020, Mellon offered the corporate to CSX Transportation for $600 million.
Politically Mellon is ‘to the appropriate of Attila the Hun’
Like the lads he donated to, Mellon is the scion of a rich household who through the years noticed his oddball tendencies morph into virulent rightwing views.
Years in the past, Mellon was fascinated by the disappearance of flier Amelia Earhardt, even donating $1 million to explorer Ric Gillespie who was looking for her lacking aircraft. In trade for the donation, Gillespie let Mellon be a part of the expedition. Mellon’s posts on an internet discussion board about Earhardt, moderated by Gillespie, ultimately became political screeds in opposition to the IRS, the intelligence businesses, and local weather change. Gillespie needed to restrict his potential to submit on the positioning.
“His views had been someplace to the appropriate of Attila the Hun,” Gillespie instructed the New York Occasions.
Mellon later sued Gillespie, alleging the latter already knew the place Earhardt’s aircraft was situated when he obtained the $1 million donation.
In his self-published 2015 autobiography, Mellon expounded on his political beliefs. In a single passage, Mellon takes a very sturdy situation with authorities packages, which he believed made their beneficiaries depending on welfare relatively than work to get by.
“For delivering their votes within the Federal Elections, they’re awarded with but increasingly more freebies: meals stamps, cell telephones, WIC funds, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on,” Mellon wrote. “The largess is funded by the hardworking of us, fewer and fewer in quantity, who’re too sincere or too proud to permit themselves to sink into this morass.”
All through the guide he referred to Black folks with racist stereotypes that they’ve a poor work ethic and are aggressive. “Black folks, regardless of heroic efforts by the ‘Institution’ to proper the wrongs of the previous, grew to become much more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to enhance their very own conditions,” Mellon stated in his guide.
Mellon stood by the feedback he made in his guide. “I stated every little thing I wished to say. I don’t have any regrets,” he stated within the 2020 Bloomberg interview.
As a result of Mellon makes few public appearances, it’s tough to divine his intentions behind the donations he made. Many candidates he has donated to report by no means having met him, regardless of receiving hundreds of thousands in contributions.
Although for some in his household that reclusiveness isn’t a shock. Members of the family quoted by Vainness Honest referred to as him “socially awkward” and “not a really social particular person.”
A 1978 guide on the household’s historical past titled The Mellon Household: A Fortune in Historical past by Burton Hersh hints at Mellon’s isolation. “My view of households is that they’re an anachronism. The household unit isn’t a functioning entity anymore. It not serves an financial want. I suppose it’s attention-grabbing as a social phenomenon,” Mellon instructed Hersh.