Donald Trump is attempting to seize control of the historically independent Federal Reserve by firing one of its leaders. Not the chair, Jerome Powell—at least not yet. Instead, the president has set his sights on another member of the Fed’s board: economist Lisa Cook, who Trump claimed in a Monday night social media post had committed mortgage fraud.  The president’s move against Cook, who has not been charged with a crime, was enabled by Bill Pulte—the 37-year-old head of the little-known Federal Housing Finance Agency. Pulte recently charged in a post to his 3 million X followers that Cook had designated two homes as her primary residence at the same time—posting a side-by-side screenshot of her signatures on two mortgage applications, under a banner reading: “FRAUD AT THE FEDERAL RESERVE.”  The effort marked the latest bid by Pulte—whose aggressive social media efforts have earned him the moniker of “mini-Trump”—to weaponize his job running an agency that oversees the quasi-governmental mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte has anointed himself as a sort of national mortgage fraud sheriff, devoted to harassing Trump political foes over alleged misstatements in mortgage applications, and asking the Justice Department to investigate them.  But Pulte’s attacks on Cook—along with his similar barrages against New York Attorney General Letitia James and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)—invite scrutiny of his own past dealings. The heir to a real estate and construction fortune, Pulte got his job in the administration about three years after his wife, Diana Pulte, donated $500,000 to a super PAC backing Trump. The donation was channeled through a Delaware shell company, ML Organization LLC, that Bill Pulte controlled. It came at a crucial moment, as the former president was just beginning to get his new campaign off the ground following his reelection defeat and the 2021 Capitol insurrection.  This opaque gift drew a complaint from a watchdog group alleging that Pulte violated campaign finance laws by obscuring the source of the funds. A resulting Federal Election Commission investigation concluded only this year, when the FEC quietly announced that the Trump-controlled PAC had erred by failing to properly disclose that Diana Pulte was the real source of the money. The agency said that Bill Pulte had not broken the law, and it did not accuse Diana Pulte of wrongdoing.  “The FEC looked at the issue and determined that there was no violation by Director Pulte,” an FHFA spokesperson told Mother Jones. “He was 100 percent compliant. Anything else is Fake News, an attempt to smear Director Pulte and distract from serious mortgage fraud. SAD.” Pulte did not respond to questions about why the donation went through a shell company, if he was involved in the donation credited to his wife, or whether the large donation helped him land his job in the administration.  He also has not addressed an FEC determination that the “contributor” of the funds—Diana Pulte—had incorrectly filled out a form to indicate the money came from an LLC rather than a member of the Pulte family. That looks like the same kind of paperwork sloppiness—in information ultimately provided to the federal government—that Bill Pulte is now harassing Trump foes over. “I am extremely skeptical that Bill Pulte would come across 1/100th as well as Lisa Cook if his paperwork were scrutinized as closely as he has scrutinized Cook’s paperwork,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the nonprofit Revolving Door Project, which tracks executive branch appointees it says fail to serve the broad public interest. A New York judge ruled in 2023 that Trump himself had committed major mortgage fraud by inflating the value of his real estate holdings and other assets, in a case prosecuted by James’ office. An appeals court last week threw out a $550 million civil fine against Trump but left in place the underlying finding of fraud, which Trump is appealing. As Trump touts untested fraud allegations—ones dwarfed by the large-scale fraud he was found liable for—the president appears to be suffering few consequences. But Pulte’s sudden prominence has put the FHFA director under the microscope. He faces mounting congressional and media scrutiny over his actions at FHFA and his qualifications for the job, which include little housing policy experience beyond working on the board of the private construction company launched by his grandfather. Aside from that, Pulte’s work previously focused on running his private equity firm and on trading so-called meme stocks. Pulte’s financial disclosures show that he is worth about $200 million, much of that through his ties to the real estate market, including as a managing member of the Pulte Family Office, a fund that often invests in construction and building. (Pulte said he would step down from this position after confirmation to the FHFA; it is unclear if he’s done so.) The lower interest rates Pulte and his boss are demanding from the Fed would likely boost the real estate sector, including Pulte’s own holdings. Hauser, of the Revolving Door Project, said that while those business holdings might not trigger ethics alarms for a regular FHFA director who confined himself to running that agency, Pulte’s role is unique. “Because Pulte is involving himself in the Federal Reserve policy as if he is a member of the Fed,” Hauser argued, ethics officials should think “far more broadly about what his work is and what conflicts he has.” In a letter last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.), the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, took aim at Pulte’s focus on assisting Trump’s efforts to control the Fed. Warren noted that Pulte had posted about Powell 114 times between July 1 and July 20—all while making little progress on problems, like housing affordability and homeownership access, that are in his agency’s purview. Amid a housing price crisis, falling home construction, and other economic problems worsened by Trump’s tariffs, she wrote, Pulte has not offered plans for addressing the national housing shortage. The work Pulte has done at FHFA has also generated  controversy. His job involves overseeing the government-controlled mortgage entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which traditionally operate quasi-independently. But Pulte in March named himself as chairman of the boards of both companies and ousted various board members, the CEO of Freddie Mac, and other top officials.  Pulte is now involved in an administration plan to sell stock in Fannie and Freddie. Such a move would mean subjecting these government-owned entities to the profit pressures of publicly traded companies, which could make housing and mortgages even less affordable for average consumers. According to Bloomberg, Pulte’s championing of Trump’s attack on the Fed may be helping the FHFA director regain influence over that planned public offering that he lost amid administration infighting. Pulte’s growing chorus of critics are also questioning how he obtained the mortgage data he has leveraged against Cook, Schiff, and James. If he has been using his authority to request that the companies he oversees—Fannie or Freddie—pull the past mortgage loan files of political enemies, this would be an unprecedented move by an FHFA director. Pulte has denied that he’s done this, instead claiming he is overseeing a general crackdown on mortgage fraud. He said recently that he had “brought in Palantir,” the data-management contractor founded by Peter Thiel, to review “the data set of loans from Fannie Mae” to look for mortgage fraud. He has also claimed that the allegations about Cook resulted from “a tip that we received,” while declining to elaborate.  Yet the only claims of fraud that Pulte has publicized so far are aimed at Democrats in Trump’s crosshairs. His calls for them to be investigated have been quickly taken up by Ed Martin, the far-right former “Stop the Steal” organizer now running the DOJ’s so-called “Weaponization Working Group” that is targeting Trump critics.  Pulte has not explained why he appears to be focused solely on Democrats. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Pulte has ignored Ken Paxton, the Trump-allied Texas Attorney General and Senate candidate who appears to have taken out mortgages on three properties, each of which he identified as his primary residence. Pulte “seems to be going through the enemies list to see, ooh, can he find any place in a complex mortgage document where he alleges someone has said something that doesn’t entirely add up,” Warren said Wednesday on MSNBC. He “is out there trying to engage in a political hit job, and this just happens to be the data that he has access to.” Adam Levitin, a Georgetown law professor, argued recently that Pulte’s focus on three prominent Trump targets suggests the director “used the apparatus of the FHFA to target a political opponent.” “Pulte’s abuse of office is a far, far greater offense than any personal mortgage occupancy fraud by a federal official,” Levitan wrote.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this beautiful Sunday morning, I stand behind this pulpit to share with you—and the tens of thousands of other believers who are watching—a troubling and painful fact: Congresswoman Smith is a tool of Satan. She has sided with him on issue after issue. She is an impediment to the establishment of a godly government run in accordance with the words of our Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Brothers and sisters, you know I do not say this lightly, but she must be cast out. The Bible commands all of us to marshal our time and talents and resources and do whatever is possible to remove her from office, and to elect T.R. Jones, a righteous man and soldier for Christ. You must align your vote with the Holy War that is underway for nothing less than this nation’s future. And the urgency is such that it is time to stretch, to give even more than you think you can by donating to the Jones campaign the maximum of $3,500—a small price to pay for receiving God’s blessing. But your commitment to the Lord does not end there. You must also contribute to the Say-No-to-Satan PAC, a Christ-loving political action committee that can accept unlimited—yes, unlimited—donations. Much as your love for Jesus Christ our Savior is unlimited. You can show what that means right now. There’s a QR code on the envelope in your pew and on the screen… This week, the IRS submitted a court filing in a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters that declared that churches and other religious entities can now endorse political candidates, thus ending a decades-old prohibition on political activity for tax-exempt houses of worship. As Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, explained to the New York Times, “It basically tells churches of all denominations and sects that you’re free to support candidates from the pulpit. It also says to all candidates and parties, ‘Hey, time to recruit some churches.’” Churches have long been allowed to participate in politics in various ways. Clergy could address political issues from the pulpit, and churches could distribute so-called educational material related to elections (such as the voting guides that the Moral Majority and other fundamentalist outfits have produced comparing candidates, which functioned as de facto endorsements). Inviting candidates to speak to congregations has been a popular action within Black churches. But churches were explicitly not allowed to back the election of a specific candidate. Support had to be delivered with a nod and a wink. This constraint was part of a broader ban on campaigning by non-profits, which has been in place since 1954—a prohibition known as the Johnson Amendment, named after former President Lyndon Johnson, who introduced this provision as a senator. But now, under the new IRS guidance, houses of worship are freed from this rule, which still applies to other tax-exempt organizations. In this filing, the agency said that a church directing its flock whom to vote for or against is akin to a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.” It’s easy to imagine what this IRS decision will yield. Endorsements from church leaders will not remain between clergy and their congregants—especially those made by prominent ministers, priests, rabbis, and imams whose sermons and statements are amplified by television and radio broadcasts, live-streaming, podcasts, and other platforms—and these thumbs-ups will be covered as major news events. Videos and accounts of these endorsements will become political fodder, deployed in ads, campaign literature, and social media posts. Candidates and their campaigns will search and compete for religious leaders who can direct money and votes their way. Presumably, PACs and campaigns could even put religious leaders on the payroll—or find indirect methods to compensate churches and clergy for their valuable endorsements. (Will there be pay-to-pray scandals?) A bishop delivering a sermon that endorses or denigrates a candidate will generate significant news. The media will report on it. Clips will fly out. Ads will be cut. The clout of religious leaders of various denominations will increase, as campaigns jockey to nab the most influential clergy. Men and women of the cloth will find themselves pressured to yield to the worldly temptations and shenanigans of politics. This will be a bonanza for many religious outfits and movements, including Christian nationalism. Its adherents, as they aim to transform government into an extension of right-wing Christianity, often proclaim that only those who follow their ultra-conservative faith deserve to be in positions of authority. Christian nationalist pastors are now free to directly use the power of the pulpit to advocate for the election of far-right candidates who share their theocratic desires. They can fundraise for these candidates. Their blessings can be political gold. Other denominations and sects can do the same. Many Black church leaders have long signaled to their congregations which candidates warranted their support. Now they can make it official. Yet the core mission of Christian nationalists is to win over the government and make the United States a Christian country. With this IRS filing, these fanatics have won the proverbial lottery. Half a century ago, leaders of the New Right concocted a plan to recruit evangelical Christians and Catholics—many of whom had voted Democratic up to then. They succeeded wildly in politicizing religion by weaponizing wedge issues—abortion, gay rights, school prayer, and pornography—to draw many of these voters into the Republican coalition. Ever since, right-wing Christian leaders have held an influential role in American politics, and the votes of this bloc have fueled GOP victories. Each time Trump—hardly the exemplar of Christ-like behavior—ran for president, he pocketed about 80 percent of the white evangelical Christian vote, his most reliable group of supporters. This IRS decision will undoubtedly super-charge the participation of religious leaders in American elections. For Christian nationalists, it’s a godsend.

For a couple weeks, I’ve been getting negative campaign mailers for a New York City council district I don’t live in. I’m not really sure why. Maybe there was a data-entry error. Maybe someone’s used an outdated map. Maybe someone hates me.  They’re the sort of mailers you tend to get if you live in a major city these days. Paid for by an innocuous-sounding group called New Yorkers for a Better Future, they attack the incumbent council member—a Democratic-Socialist—for supporting drug injection sites and decriminalizing prostitution, and backing calls to defund the police. The incumbent “doesn’t care about our community,” the flyer reads. And there, at the bottom, is a legally required disclosure of one of the PAC’s largest donors: William A. Ackman.  You know, Bill. The Trump-backing, DEI-bashing, billionaire hedge-funder who does not live in this immigrant-heavy, largely Asian and Latino outer-borough district either—despite all that language about “our community.” He purchased a posh Upper West Side penthouse a few years back. And, from what I can tell, he spends a lot of time in the Hamptons. If X were a real place, he’d probably live there. But he still funneled $250,000 toward this group. And that disconnect makes him a perfect symbol for this week’s elections in America’s biggest blue city. In a lot of ways, as I’ve reported, the city’s Democratic primary elections are the first big test of the party’s post-November reset. The choice in the mayoral race between former governor Andrew Cuomo and a succession of challengers led by assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, is, in part, about what exactly you think Democrats have been getting wrong in the places they govern. But it’s also about money. Mamdani had a lot of it—almost $9 million, with most of it coming from public matching funds. But Cuomo’s super-PAC, Fix the City, raked in nearly three times what the assembly member could spend—with big checks from corporations and billionaires. Those funds have filled mailboxes and saturated the airwaves in the election’s final weeks. There’s a funny little wrinkle to all this spending, though. You sometimes hear people say that politicians should have to dress up like NASCAR drivers, in outfits emblazoned with the logos of their corporate benefactors. Well, New York City kind of does that. Every piece of literature or advertising from a political action committee has to include the names of the three largest donors to the group. Has this dampened the influence of money in politics within the five boroughs? It doesn’t really look like it. Still, every piece of Cuomo literature voters got from Fix The City had to include the disclaimer that it was paid for by DoorDash ($1 million), along with Ackman ($500,000), and former mayor Michael Bloomberg ($8.3 million).  There were more interesting names if you scratched the surface. Media mogul Barry Diller and Netflix chairman Reed Hastings gave a quarter of a million. Home Depot co-founder and Republican mega-donor Ken Langone gave $100,000. Pro-Trump hedge-funder Dan Loeb gave $350,000. James and Kathryn Murdoch offered $50,000 apiece. So did Stephen Ross, who lives in the borough of West Palm Beach, Florida and owns the Miami Dolphins. Alice Walton, of the Bentonville, Arkansas Waltons, pitched in with a humble offering of $100,000. Both Greenwich, Connecticut’s Jeff Wilpon, and the man he sold the New York Mets to—Stamford’s Steve Cohen—were good for $25,000. Another pro-Cuomo PAC, Sensible City, received a big check from Trump-backing hedge-funder Ken Griffin, who lives in Miami by way of Chicago. If Mamdani’s campaign is trying to demonstrate the power of organizing and viral campaigning, Cuomo’s is just a big blunt object—one that tells a different story about how politics and power work. These donors from the worlds of real estate, finance, media, and “philanthropy” each have their own peculiar politics. But faced with the prospect of a progressive or leftist mayor, the things that unite them have proven stronger than the things that divide them. Across different backgrounds and zip codes (if not tax brackets) they came together in an inspiring show of class solidarity. In one attack ad paid for by Fix the City, which the PAC paid $220,000 to run, a voter stands on a subway platform rattling off Mamdani’s promises of “free everything.” “Who’s gonna pay for all that,” he asks. “The tooth fairy?” But it wasn’t such a mystery after all. Mamdani was proposing for the city’s wealthiest residents to foot the bill. The advertisements asked who would be paying for everything. And there, in the list of donors at the end, they answered the question too.

President Donald Trump last week told the Justice Department to investigate Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue, and claimed in a fact sheet that the order was aimed at “foreign contributions in American elections.” Republicans quickly touted the order as cracking down on hidden sources of funds in US elections. “The Democrats’ Dark Money scam has gone on long enough,” Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley said last week. ActBlue last week called Trump’s order part of his “brazen attack on democracy in America,” adding that the act is “blatantly unlawful and needs to be seen for what it is: Donald Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral and ideological opposition.” Trump’s claim that he can order the Justice Department to investigate a fundraising platform used by his political foes based on vague allegations is part of his ongoing effort to use the government’s powers to target political enemies. It’s not a particularly realistic accusation—the fact sheet claims it’s targeting “straw donor” schemes, where one person donates on behalf of another person. Given the fairly strict limitations on campaign contributions—$6,600 in 2024—any straw donor scheme that wants to inject any noticeable amount of money into an electoral system that had $15.5 billion run through it, is a great deal of tedious high-risk work for a scammer. On the other hand, in the post-Citizens United era, there are plenty of ways to inject unaccounted-for-money—even theoretically foreign money—into the election. Super-PACs can accept unlimited donations from fairly easy to obscure sources, for instance, which makes the idea of anyone using a small-dollar conduit like ActBlue (or the GOP equivalent, WinRed) fairly silly. And, notably, the funding for some of Trump’s “data” on an alleged ActBlue “fraud” seems to have come from just such a source: a super-PAC bankrolled by Elon Musk. Last year, an opaque group called the Fair Election Fund began promising to pay “whistleblowers” who cited election fraud “with payment from our $5 million dollar fund.” That never panned out, but the same organization found more success with a claim that “60,000 people who were named as small-dollar donors in the Biden-Harris campaign’s July [FEC] report but did not recall making the contribution when contacted by the Fair Election Fund.” As Mother Jones reported last year, the Fair Election Fund appears to have generated this finding by blasting out ominous sounding texts and emails telling ActBlue donors their donations had been “flagged,” then tallying people who responded – accurately or not – by checking a box saying they did not recall making the contribution. But the Fair Election’s fund’s findings have nevertheless become part of an array of GOP efforts to attack ActBlue, which the White House’s fact sheet cited, vaguely, on Thursday. “Press reports and investigations by congressional committees have generated extremely troubling evidence that online fundraising platforms have been willing participants in schemes to launder excessive and prohibited contributions to political candidates and committees,” the fact sheet says.  The Fair Elections Fund shared its findings, which it said cost $250,000 to produce, with conservative media. And in a subsequent ad questioning Kamala Harris’ fundraising, the group exaggerated them. “The Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue has been accused of stealing our identities to conceal donations from bad actors,” the ad said. The group’s accusations were later cited by state attorneys general and House Republicans investigating ActBlue. Right-leaning media outlets continue to cite the Fair Election Fund’s findings as the product of a “conservative watchdog group.” The group’s claims, however, appear to have resulted not from any independent watchdog effort, but as part of a vast dark money effort by Musk aimed at helping elect Trump last year. The New York Times reported in October that the fund was financed by a nonprofit called Building America’s Future, which was bankrolled in part by Musk. The Fair Election Fund went silent after election day last year. A former spokesperson for the group did not respond to requests for comment. In a March the Investigative watchdog site Documented reported additional details tying the Fair Election Fund to Musk. The report noted that the Fair Election Fund is housed within a non-profit now called Interstate Priorities, formerly known as For Which It Stands Fund, formed in 2023 with a single $8.2 million donation. The group is led by Tori Sachs, a Michigan GOP Republican operative who appears to have set up the groups to support Ron DeSantis’ presidential run, which Musk initially supported. The groups appear to have been repurposed in 2024 to boost Trump’s campaign. The Fair Election Fund allegations last year were part of what appeared to be a broader attack by Republicans on ActBlue. The group’s efforts last year piggybacked on on a 2023 campaign by far right activist James O’Keefe, who accused ActBlue of assigning large numbers of donations to the names and addresses of people who did not remember donating so often. Various GOP probes into ActBlue, which incorporated the Fair Election Fund findings, have largely failed to turn up evidence of significant donor fraud or foreign donations being channeled through ActBlue.  They have instead focused on ActBlue’s past acceptance of some donations without requiring card verification values—the 3- or 4-digit codes on credit cards used to confirm their validity. That is, they allege the possibility of fraud via the platform, without documenting much actual fraud, or any indication that ActBlue is more susceptible to fraud or straw donor schemes than WinRed. A  House Judiciary Committee report released earlier this month did point to 22 suspected “fraud campaigns”  in recent years involving ActBlue, including nine with a “foreign nexus.” But a close look at the report’s findings reveals these were suspected fraud efforts identified by ActBlue itself. And the donations involved were generally tiny. For instance, the report touts suspected fraud efforts from “Iraq, Jordan, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Saudi Arabia.” But the ActBlue document that claim is based on indicates it was not an effort at electoral influence but a scam targeting platform users. And the suspect contributions were “all for $1.” The alleged fraud cited—if real—also represent an infinitesimally small proportion of the donations that went through ActBlue last election. Even if fraud were real, the basic mechanics of ActBlue’s operation as a pass-through for small dollar donations makes the allegation of foreign donors accounting for more than a negligible portion of ActBlue’s fundraising implausible. In the third quarter alone, ActBlue reported to have more than 6.9 million unique donors using their site and channeled $1.5 billion in donations. Republicans have not produced evidence that ActBlue was used for any straw donor scheme at a significant scale, and such a scheme would be extremely challenging to arrange, or hide. Musk, meanwhile, spent hundreds of millions of dollars to back Trump last year, much of it through dark money PACS that shrouded their spending in secrecy. If Trump really wanted to crack down on secretive election influence efforts, he would start not with small dollar Democratic donors, but with Elon Musk.

On March 17, Elon Musk appeared on Sen. Ted Cruz’s podcast and falsely alleged that Democrats were giving undocumented immigrants fraudulent access to programs like Social Security and Medicare to lure them to the US.   “By using entitlement fraud the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants,” Musk claimed. “And buy voters,” Cruz added. “And buy voters, exactly,” Musk said. “They basically bring in 10, 20 million people who are beholden to the Democrats for government handouts and who will vote overwhelmingly Democrat as seen in California.” “It’s an election strategy,” Cruz said. “It’s power.” > When Musk was heckled during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” > without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally > handing out million dollar checks in the race.   Republicans have been alleging for years that Democrats have been buying elections, usually with the help of liberal billionaires like George Soros. Indeed, election deniers, including Musk, widely promoted a conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was “bought by Mark Zuckerberg” because an organization he funded directed election grants to blue areas to juice Democratic turnout. (In reality, it gave grants to both red and blue areas for routine election administration activities to help offset the Covid-19 pandemic.) These claims are particularly ironic in light of how Musk has engaged in the most openly brazen scheme to buy an election in modern American history, with groups linked to him spending more than $20 million and aggressively pushing the boundaries of legality to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an election on Tuesday that will decide the court’s ideological majority. It’s not just how much Musk and his groups have spent—more than any donor to a judicial election in US history—but how he has spent this money that makes Musk’s intervention in Wisconsin so alarming. In addition to funding two dark money political groups that ran TV ads against liberal Judge Susan Crawford and sought to get out the vote for conservative candidate Brad Schimel, Musk resurrected a controversial scheme from 2024, paying voters $100 for signing a petition from his America PAC opposing “activist judges.” He then awarded Scott Ainsworth, a mechanical engineer from Green Bay, $1 million for signing the petition. On the Friday before the election, he dramatically escalated this sketchy tactic, saying he would travel to Wisconsin to “personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote.” Unlike paying a Wisconsin resident to sign a petition, these million-dollar checks were contingent on someone actually voting. Legal experts quickly pointed out that Musk’s pledge violated the state constitution, which prohibits offering “anything of value…in order to induce any elector to…vote or refrain from voting.”  Musk backtracked, saying the money would only go to people who signed his PAC’s petition, holding a rally in Green Bay on Sunday where he hand-delivered two $1 million checks. The Wisconsin attorney general sued to stop him, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court declined to intervene before the event. The recipients were allegedly chosen at random, but the winners aroused suspicion on closer inspection. One check went to Nicholas Jacobs, the chair of the state College Republicans. Another went to Ekaterina Diestler, a graphic designer at a packaging company in the Green Bay area that is owned by a Republican donor who has given tens of thousands of dollars to the Trump campaign and other GOP candidates, including $7,500 to Schimel. Diestler filmed a video for Musk’s America PAC linking her payment to voting—the very thing that is illegal under Wisconsin law. “I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do: sign the petition, refer friends and family, vote, and now I have a million dollars,” she says. (Musk’s PAC has since deleted the post.) When Musk was heckled at one point during the rally, he blamed it on “Soros operatives,” without any acknowledgment that he was the only billionaire quite literally handing out million dollar checks in the race.   Undeterred by legal challenges, Musk unveiled a new scheme on Sunday to recruit “block captains” for Schimel, paying people $20 a pop to “hold a picture” of Schimel with a thumps up, with a bonus $20 for those who posts pictures of themselves on social media with a polling site in the background (Wisconsin law forbids electioneering within 100 feet of a polling place). “You could make over $1000 in one day just by getting out the vote in Wisconsin!” Musk wrote in one post on X. “Easiest money you ever made!” he said in another. The scale of Musk’s spending and the scope of his aggressive pay-to-play tactics has dramatically raised the stakes of Tuesday’s election. “Musk has made this a referendum on the idea of an American oligarchy,” Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler told me when I visited the state last week. “Voters casting a ballot for Susan Crawford are not only voting for their own freedom and their own democracy in their own state,” Wikler added, “they’re also sending a national message about whether wealth has unchecked power in this country, or whether the people still rule.”

Donald Trump launched a multi-billion dollar meme coin just days before taking office and instantly saw his net worth balloon. But then, as the initial excitement passed, the value plunged and occasionally spiked again through the first rollercoaster hours of Trump’s second presidency. Despite the optimism of some crypto-enthusiasts that the $TRUMP coin’s debut on Friday heralded a new era of automatic crypto riches, the value of the coin had plummeted to around half of its weekend high of $72.42 by the time Trump was sworn in on Monday. Meme coins have no intrinsic value or particular usefulness as a currency but serve more as a cultural signifier. They usually are based on an Internet joke such as the Internet’s fascination with the doge dog (Dogecoin), or make use of a celebrity’s image (Coinyo). While real money can be made riding the speculative highs and lows of meme coin trading, it’s also one of the sectors of the crypto world most prone to bubbles and subsequent collapses. If the new $TRUMP coin is more of a way for crypto enthusiasts to signal their support for Trump—which might be the most coherent explanation for a type of crypto product that doesn’t have any point to it at all—the timing of this new Trump product was propitious. After announcing the coin’s creation on Friday night at a party for the crypto industry to celebrate his inauguration, the price spiked to as high as $72.42. A total of one billion coins were created in an instant, so Trump’s ownership of an estimated 800 million of the new $TRUMP coins meant that his wealth almost instantly blew up from a bit less than $7 billion to possibly as much as $65 billion on the eve of his presidency. But then the price started falling and in the minutes shortly before Trump’s official inauguration, the price had fallen to just under $50—and following his inauguration at noon, the price plunged further to $41.30, before rebounding slightly. In theory, that’s still worth about $33 billion for Trump, but the volatility is a good indicator of how reliable of a source of wealth the coin really can be. With this product, no matter what the price, Trump’s holdings will have some value because there was no expense for him in creating it—and that value will be based on nothing but consumers’ interest in buying something (digital) with his name on it. On Monday, the Trumps announced that First Lady Melania Trump had also created her own meme coin $MELANIA, which hit a high of $13.05, but by early afternoon on Inauguration Day had fallen to $5.27. Not everyone was thrilled with the creation of the memes—ethics expert Norm Eisen, told the Washington Post the coin was “the single worst conflict of interest in the modern history of the presidency.” Even some in the crypto community bristled at the idea, calling it a “horrible look” and “predatory,” noting meme coins are generally speculative and essentially worthless. Trump has promised to re-make the US economy in the image of crypto, and his children have started a decentralized finance company—a platform for making financial transactions using crypto instead of a traditional banking institution—that Trump benefits from. However, as the website for both $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins make clear, these are not serious investment vehicles. “Trump Memes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’,” a disclaimer on the $TRUMP coin website reads. “And are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security of any type.” The Melania Memes website puts it even more bluntly: “Melania Memes are intended for collecting and entertainment purposes only. They are not financial instruments or investments. Always do your own research and never invest more than you can afford to lose.”

On Friday night, just days before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump took to X to celebrate…the launch of his new meme coin. “It’s time to celebrate everything we stand for,” he wrote, “WINNING!” It’s a move that, at least on paper, seemed to inflate Trump’s personal wealth by billions ahead of ushering in the most crypto-friendly administration in history. With this launch, Trump joins the ranks of celebrities like Iggy Azalea, Caitlyn Jenner, and more recently, Haliey Welch, better known as the “Hawk Tuah” girl, all of whom have launched their own meme coins in the last year. Wired describes these currencies as “type of cryptocurrency that generally has no utility beyond financial speculation.” Trump’s coin has recently reached a market capitalization of $5.2 billion and a fully diluted valuation of $26 billion, referring to the theoretical value if all possible coins were in circulation. Trump’s new pal Elon Musk is known for being a big proponent of one of the most famous meme coins, the dogecoin, named for the same meme that inspired his newly created Department of Government Efficiency. > “It is literally cashing in on the presidency.” Though the website for the coin states that it “is not political and has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office or governmental agency,” some critics argue that there are serious ethical concerns. “Unlike traditional Trump-branded ventures, cryptocurrency’s pseudonymous nature means anyone globally can invest without identity checks, potentially creating concerns about undue influence on a sitting president,” Boaz Sobrado, a fintech analyst, wrote in Forbes. Adav Noti, the executive director of Campaign Legal Center, noted in the New York Times that, “it is literally cashing in on the presidency—creating a financial instrument so people can transfer money to the president’s family in connection with his office.” “We now have a president-elect who, the weekend before inauguration, is launching new businesses along with promises to deregulate,” Jordan Libowitz, vice president for communications at the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Politico. Trump’s own former spokesperson, now a staunch critic, Anthony Scaramucci posted that $TRUMP is “Idi Amin level corruption,” and “mocks the industry we are working so hard to build.” The meme coin is just the latest in a bizarre line of grifty, super-weird takes on “merch.” Last February, Trump showed off gold “Never Surrender High-Tops” for $399 at Sneaker Con, which had Fox News applauding his appeal to Black voters. In March, he began endorsing the $59.99 “God Bless the USA Bible,” which includes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and handwritten lyrics to the chorus of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” (Trump’s inaugural committee has confirmed that he will not be using one of these Bibles to swear the presidential oath of office on Monday.) In August, Trump released a new round of his “baseball card” NFTs. “These cards show me dancing and even holding some Bitcoins,” Trump explained in a video on Truth Social. Maybe in the next round, he’ll be holding his own meme coins.

This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter. Millions of dollars in last-minute money is pouring into the battle over a pair of abortion-related ballot measures in Nebraska, and it is coming through an unusual and circuitous route. Much of that cash is being spent by a new group called Common Sense Nebraska, which has shelled out a remarkable $4.9 million in the three weeks since it was formed—largely on ads opposing an initiative that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and supporting a separate initiative that would ban abortion. As of the most recent campaign finance filings, the organization still had another $500,000 in the bank. Nebraska is one of 10 states with abortion-related measures on the ballot. Last week, the National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones reported that Catholic organizations around the country had contributed more than $1.9 million to the fight, with millions more flowing in from wealthy individuals with close ties to the church. But what’s especially notable about the Common Sense Nebraska spending is the labyrinthine path that the money has taken. Most of the funds appear to have originated with the conservative, billionaire Ricketts family and with the conservative group CatholicVote, both of which have made the bulk of their donations since mid-October, according to state campaign finance records. Common Sense Nebraska then routed the Ricketts and CatholicVote money to the campaigns of three local political candidates, including two incumbents running for reelection to the University of Nebraska’s board of regents.  These local candidates, in turn, purchased massive amounts of television air time, which they then donated to the anti-abortion-rights PAC Protect Women & Children for ads about the ballot initiatives. Elements of this arrangement were first reported last week by local news outlets, including the Lincoln Journal Star. Gavin Geis, the executive director of Common Cause Nebraska—a watchdog group unrelated to Common Sense Nebraska—told the Journal Star that shuffling money this way is not illegal but obscures the true source of donations and provides significant benefits for the political committees involved. “By contributing airtime to ballot initiatives, candidates can shield donors from disclosing their support for the proposal and give them a financial advantage over their opponents due to federal rules that give candidates discounted airtime,” Geis said. None of the candidates participating in this funding arrangement—University of Nebraska Regents Jim Scheer and Robert Schafer, and state legislative candidate Tanya Storer—responded to requests for comment for this story. The sudden spending by Common Sense Nebraska has greatly increased the amount of money available to abortion rights opponents in the state. Through early October, Protect Women & Children, the PAC leading the anti-abortion ballot push, had raised and spent just over $4 million on the two initiatives. Almost all that money came from the Ricketts and another wealthy family, the Peeds; both families are well-known donors to Nebraska’s Catholic dioceses. But since Common Sense Nebraska was established on Oct. 14, it has raised an additional $5.4 million, almost all of which ended up going to Protect Women & Children in one form or another. Of that $5.4 million, Common Sense Nebraska has donated $3.2 million to Scheer. Scheer, in turn, purchased $3.2 million worth of commercial airtime, which he then donated to Protect Women & Children for anti-abortion ads. Another $687,000 of Common Sense Nebraska funds went to Schafer, who donated $667,000 worth of advertising time to Protect Women & Children. And Common Sense Nebraska contributed $283,000 to Storer’s campaign, which has made $231,000 worth of in-kind advertising donations to the Protect Women & Children. Common Sense Nebraska has also donated $781,000 directly to Protect Women & Children, including donations as recently as Nov. 1. More donations may have occurred that have yet to be filed with the state campaign finance system.  The majority of the money moving through Common Sense Nebraska’s coffers—$3.9 million—was donated by Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts. Another $830,000 was donated by the group CatholicVote on Oct. 21 and 23. The Ricketts family are prominent Catholics, and Joe Ricketts has given millions to the Catholic Church in Nebraska, including an estimated $34 million on the creation of a Catholic religious retreat center. The Ricketts family is also well known for their ownership of the Chicago Cubs baseball team and their involvement in Nebraska state politics. Joe Ricketts’ eldest son, Pete Ricketts, a Republican, previously served as the governor and is currently Nebraska’s junior senator.   Under the leadership of its president, Brian Burch, CatholicVote has become a major player in conservative Catholic political circles. Like much of the MAGA-aligned right, the Wisconsin-based organization was initially reluctant to embrace Donald Trump. In 2016, it refused to endorse him, saying he was “problematic in too many ways.” More recently, CatholicVote has touted Trump’s praise for the organization. In 2020, the group drew national media attention for using geofencing to capture Catholics’ cell phone data while they were attending Mass. The $10 million project then sent targeted political ads to Catholics in battleground states. In this cycle’s Republican primary, CatholicVote hosted a rally for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis but eventually endorsed Trump. Initially a project of the Catholic branch of the Christian Coalition, CatholicVote later became part of the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy, founded by Burch in 2005. Fidelis’ most recent tax documents, from 2022, indicate revenue of $9.4 million—up from $4.8 million the previous year.

The first thing the neighbors on Newport’s Bellevue Avenue complained about was the helipad. The 2-mile stretch of Rhode Island coast has long been a playground for America’s billionaires, lined with lavish, historic mansions. But for as long as most could remember, old money had meant an untouchable kind of peace, not the thunderous noise of a chopper. Now the New Yorkers who’d bought 646 Bellevue—a Gilded Age estate known as Miramar—had turned a patch of grass on their 8 acres of oceanfront land into their very own LaGuardia, and folks weren’t happy about it. “Having Sikorskys land in the neighborhood does seem contextually off, noisy, and potentially unsafe,” one neighbor emailed to another, referring to a brand of helicopter. They didn’t even ask Newport’s zoning board, she’d heard. Her concern, she emphasized, was “the character, livability, and safety of the neighborhood.” This wasn’t about begrudging the mansion’s new owners, Wall Street titan Stephen Schwarzman and his wife, Christine; by all accounts, they were “very nice people.” Schwarzman, the 77-year-old CEO of private equity giant Blackstone, had purchased Miramar the year before, in the fall of 2021. The mansion, which boasts 44,000 square feet of living space, including 22 bedrooms, 14 bathrooms, and a seven-bed, seven-bath guesthouse, was completed in 1915 for a streetcar magnate who later died on the Titanic. Within months of buying Miramar, Schwarzman also acquired the residence next door, Ocean View, which has 15 bedrooms, 12 bathrooms, and a six-car garage. Together, they cost $43 million—making Schwarzman’s megaproperty among Newport’s most expensive home purchases ever. > A slice of Schwarzman’s fortune has gone to indulging his famously extravagant > tastes. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump. Schwarzman’s pandemic splurge came just as his firm decided to double down on scooping up rental housing. During the housing crash of the Great Recession, Blackstone had snapped up underwater homes for cheap and eventually made a fortune. The Covid collapse offered Blackstone another bite at the apple. In 2021 and 2022, it bought up 200,000 new units of rental housing at bargain-basement interest rates, adding to a portfolio of more than 150,000 rentals and making Blackstone the nation’s biggest corporate landlord. The firm’s real estate arm is core to its business, worth about $337 billion—about a third of its total investments—and its rental portfolio has seen a healthy return of about $11 billion over the last decade, hiking rent on some of its properties by nearly 80 percent. A slice of that fortune has gone to indulging Schwarzman’s famously extravagant tastes, such as the $5 million bash he threw in 20o7 to celebrate his 60th birthday, or the roughly $200 million worth of vacation homes he’s purchased in England; Jamaica; Palm Beach, Florida; St. Tropez, France; and the Hamptons in New York. Another chunk has gone to the GOP and Donald Trump. A longtime Republican megadonor, Schwarzman said in 2022 that he’d no longer support the former president, having called the January 6 insurrection “an affront to democratic values.” But when the abstraction of “values” bumped up against the reality of money, money won. Schwarzman is a major donor again this election cycle, giving more than $20 million to Republican candidates—with the GOP’s tax cuts for the superwealthy set to expire less than a year into the next president’s term. It’s not only the roar of helicopter blades irritating Schwarzman’s neighbors: His massive renovation at Miramar has incensed local residents, not for its opulence—this town is used to the wild construction demands of wealthy out-of-towners—but for its Marie Antoinette level of disregard for the community. And as the drama of his Petit Versailles has irked Schwarzman’s neighbors, it has also offered a window into what happens when he throws his might and fortune behind a goal—be it a Rhode Island palace or a potential president. Miramar under constructionCourtesy photo Not as scene-y as the Hamptons or as flashy as Palm Beach, Newport is only a three-hour drive from Wall Street and, for a relative bargain, offers extravagant manors situated along hundreds of miles of idyllic coastline. But the city of 24,000 is squeezed into the corner of an island on Narragansett Bay, which means that less-affluent residents living in the nearby North End, including military families on its naval base, couldn’t ignore the rich and powerful if they tried. “When I go to a barre class, I’ll just see [US Sen. and multimillionaire] Sheldon Whitehouse outside of Le Bec Sucré, you know, standing in line to get his croissant,” says North End resident and Newport Public Schools activist Amy Machado, drawing out the pronunciation: kwaa–SOHN. Nowhere is the gap between rich and regular more acute than Bellevue Avenue, where the homes that surround Schwarzman’s Miramar are lousy with opulence and the sort of melodrama that only the moneyed set have time for. There’s a replica of a 17th-century chateau built for King Louis XIV and his mistress, along with several of the Vanderbilts’ former summer homes—one made of marble and another a 70-room Italian Renaissance-style palazzo. There is also the mansion once home to an alleged murderer, a billionaire tobacco heiress who almost definitely killed her interior designer. On the southern end of the street, old money gives way to nouveau riche: Oracle’s Larry Ellison, currently the world’s second-richest man, has spent more than $100 million renovating his estate and landscaping the grounds with a maze of shrubs and boulders so ugly it has become something of a local pastime to ridicule it. Nearby is a villa owned by another Wall Street CEO that was once home to a Nazi collaborator’s son who was convicted and later acquitted of twice trying to murder his heiress wife. > Schwarzman is spending at least $7 million to add, among other things, a pool, > a tennis court, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, and > a guard house. It’s all gorgeous and gossipy until you start thinking about the source of all this money, a nagging feeling almost as old as the town itself: “There is something in the air that has nothing to do with pleasure and nothing to do with graceful tradition,” Joan Didion wrote of Newport in 1967. “[A] sense not of how prettily money can be spent but of how harshly money is made.” Schwarzman is, indeed, using harsh money to make pretty things. Specifically, he’s spending at least $7 million to add a pool, a tennis court, two bathrooms, a full guesthouse renovation, bronze windows, pergola and lattice pavilions, a fountain, a guard house, a skylight, a generator, a state-of-the-art geothermal HVAC system, and a modern iteration of the estate’s early 20th-century gardens. And that would all be fine—normal, even, for the area—if it weren’t for what happened on nearby Yznaga Avenue. A short, leafy dead-end road right off Bellevue, Yznaga leads to Miramar’s service entrance. Schwarzman’s contractors soon lined the street seven days a week with dozens of trucks, from early dawn well into the night—sometimes past midnight. The single homeowner on Yznaga, Mark Brice, often found himself unable to get out of his driveway. He asked the city for a parking ban that would stop Schwarzman’s crews, and anyone else, from parking on the street and blocking his route. (Brice did not respond to requests for comment.) Banning parking on a single street may not sound like a big deal. But Yznaga Avenue, named after a 19th-century slave-owning sugar merchant, is one of the only streets where people from less-affluent parts of town can park for free and walk to some of Newport’s most beloved green spaces: Rovensky Park, the Cliff Walk, and “Rejects Beach”—a public beach next to Newport’s most exclusive beach club, Bailey’s. The street has been a local battleground for years, with some wealthy neighbors insisting it is private, even going so far as to put up “No Parking” signs. (Newport’s zoning office confirms that Yznaga has always been city owned.) With Schwarzman’s arrival, the street remained public in theory, but in practice, it had become his construction staging area, with little room for Newporters to park and regular blockades for the one unlucky neighbor.  > “The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view > but quite stunning when you see it.” When Brice’s parking proposal went before the city council last spring, residents were furious that the city was considering a parking ban on Yznaga to solve a problem created by a billionaire. They flooded council members with angry letters: “It is both elitist and selfish to move forward,” one resident wrote. “A thinly disguised effort to enhance the exclusivity of that neighborhood,” opined another. “This has been a benefit forever for residents in an area that is mostly conceded to the uber-rich,” wrote a third person. “There’s a reason the beach there is called Rejects.” The council held two hearings on the bill. From their dais at City Hall, they marveled at how sprawling the construction was. One council member said he analyzed Google satellite photos of Miramar and the project’s spillover onto Yznaga, and even drove down to the area himself. How bad could it really be? “It’s bad,” he concluded. “It is actually unprecedented. I haven’t seen anything that bad in this city. The level of construction that is happening there is hidden away from view but quite stunning when you see it.” The council member whose district includes Bellevue agreed. “There is an unfathomable amount of construction,” he told his colleagues. His constituents had taken to sending him videos of the construction vehicles “entering up and down and up and down” Yznaga as early as 4:30 a.m. Every local who testified spoke against the ban, except Brice, the homeowner on Yznaga. For council members, the central question became how to balance public beach access against the needs of a man who couldn’t exit the driveway of his $5 million house. But no one seemed to consider, out loud at least, addressing the root of the problem: the man with the $43 million property who messed up the street in the first place. Eventually, the council voted for a full ban, contrary to the advice of the fire chief and traffic department, both of which recommended prohibiting parking on just one side of the street. So, by inconveniencing his neighbor, Schwarzman got a private driveway where his workers never have to compete for a spot. When I visited in August, I saw six trucks parked bumper to bumper, in violation of the ban. No one from the city seemed to mind. Andrew Rae The fight over Yznaga Avenue, it turned out, was just the tip of the iceberg. About six months after moving in, Schwarzman inquired with the Rhode Island Airport Corp. about registering his Miramar helipad with the Federal Aviation Administration. But Schwarzman abandoned the application, according to the RIAC, and never filed it. That didn’t stop him from having a helicopter land on the property regularly—sometimes multiple times per week. (A Schwarzman spokesperson told Mother Jones that the RIAC’s chief aeronautics inspector visited the site and approved it and that registration is now pending with the FAA. The RIAC told Mother Jones that after the inspector’s visit, no application was ever filed or approved. The FAA also told Mother Jones there is no pending application.) One neighbor in Schwarzman’s flight path wondered why he sometimes opted to fly low right over the neighborhood instead of the water, which would be less intrusive and easy to do, given that Miramar’s landing pad is next to the ocean. “I thought, ‘This is really annoying,’” the neighbor said. “And why is he flying looking down on everybody? Of course, you couldn’t do that to him.” (Schwarzman’s spokesperson denied that the helicopter’s flight path went over the neighborhood.) Then, in January 2022, Schwarzman’s team reached out to the city of Newport for permission to dig up a chunk of Bellevue Avenue to install a fiber-optic cable. Internet in the neighborhood is notoriously slow, and according to emails obtained from the city, it appeared they were planning on installing a private line just Schwarzman’s estate could use. Only after a city official intervened did the team notify neighbors of the upcoming construction and install a public line instead. > When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front > of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it. In August 2023, a Bellevue resident called the city manager to complain about the relentless construction and noise that never let up, with work and deliveries going on 24/7. The office contacted Newport zoning to ask when the construction was permitted and got a curt email in response—it was far from the first time it had fielded complaints about Miramar. “Yes the hours are 7am-9pm I will call her the owners of 646 seem not to care about anyone but there [sic] construction project,” the official wrote. And there was more to aggravate neighbors, including drilling for geothermal wells. Workers also dug up the slope that stretches from the mansion to the iconic Cliff Walk, leading piles of soil to tumble onto the pathway. When a sinkhole suddenly appeared in the Cliff Walk this past April in front of Miramar’s fence, Newporters were pretty sure they knew who had caused it. The scenic bluff overlooking Easton Bay, beloved by locals and tourists, is one of the only places in the world where you can go for a hike surrounded by stunning shoreline views on one side and eye-candy mansions on the other. The city eventually closed a quarter-mile of the walk for repairs—they’d found cracks in a portion of the walk behind Miramar and deterioration in the seawall footers that protect from erosion. The sinkhole’s cause was never confirmed, but a few months later, Schwarzman paid for the entire repair. (Schwarzman’s spokesperson called the implication that construction at Miramar had caused the sinkhole “unfounded,” citing “preexisting natural erosion issues.”) Stephen and Christine Schwarzman attend the 2024 Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Maybe it was a tacit apology. Or maybe it was a way for Schwarzman to make nice with his neighbors and Newport’s high society, whom he’d been courting with large donations to local charities, like the $20,000 he gave to a soiree benefiting homeless animals run by a local animal league and the approximately $100,000 he gave to Newport’s powerful preservation society. In a town where famous titans—the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Dukes—live on forever through palaces constructed in their image, it seems as though Schwarzman is vying to be the next immortal name. In August, he unveiled plans to turn Miramar into a public museum upon his death, saying it would be owned by a foundation and maintained with a special endowment. Not mentioned in the statement is how the move would benefit Schwarzman himself: Without remotely changing his lifestyle, it will help him uphold the philanthropic promise he made in 2020 by joining the Giving Pledge, a club of billionaires who promise to donate at least half of their wealth to charity. The pledge isn’t binding, and it allows any giving to happen after death. Even better: Turning over the home to a foundation could lower future taxes, as would the museum designation—a common tactic used by the ultrawealthy. A month before the 2016 election, a leaked Access Hollywood video showed Donald Trump bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” As the presidential candidate’s lurid remarks ricocheted across the airwaves, Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, was en route to Miramar, where he was scheduled to headline a campaign fundraiser. (The home was then owned by a different Wall Street tycoon.) Local GOP leaders issued statements condemning Trump’s words, then walked through Miramar’s stately gates and joined guests to donate more than $500,000. One Republican state representative explained the decision to proceed with the fundraiser despite the national uproar: “If you want to see this revolution happen, you have to get past the man and go with the ideas he represents.” Schwarzman has done exactly that: Grit his teeth and support the guy he thinks will help his business. > In late 2022, Schwarzman vowed to get behind someone else in the GOP primary. > But after more than a dozen candidates fell short, he returned to supporting > Trump. Schwarzman didn’t back Trump initially, but shortly after the 2016 election, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee and later agreed to work with the new president as an economic adviser. That connection opened some lucrative doors: On a trip to meet with Saudi officials with Trump in 2017, Schwarzman’s firm announced a $20 billion commitment from the kingdom for a new investment fund. He also advised Trump on China policy, encouraging the president to soften his anti-China rhetoric, which would benefit Blackstone’s extensive holdings in the country. On the campaign trail, Trump had promised to end “carried interest,” a decades-old tax break for private equity executives. But with Schwarzman on the team, Trump’s campaign promise never materialized. (Last year, Schwarzman earned about $79.5 million in carried interest.) In late 2022, nearly two years after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol and after Trump-backed candidates in several states lost in the midterms, Schwarzman finally decided he wouldn’t back Trump anymore. This wasn’t the revolution he’d signed up for. He called for “a new generation of leaders” and vowed to get behind someone else in the Republican primary. But after more than a dozen GOP primary candidates fell short, he came back into the fold. In May, with Trump’s Manhattan felony trial in full swing, Schwarzman announced that he would support his bid to defeat Joe Biden. In August, three weeks after Kamala Harris stepped in as the Democratic nominee, rumors swirled that Schwarzman was set to host a Trump fundraiser at Miramar. A spokesperson for the billionaire denied there was ever such a plan. But on a warm summer Thursday, Schwarzman did throw a bash at Miramar for about 200 people—the same afternoon that Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, hosted a fundraiser a few blocks down Bellevue.  Postcard of MiramarLibrary of Congress Schwarzman’s event featured greeters dressed in 18th-century garb and a carnival setup. Bright structures carved to look like castle spires dotted the grounds and guests wandered among them, prohibited from walking through most of the actual palace, which, by now, Schwarzman’s decorators had adorned with a bounty of impressionist paintings and antique French furniture, including a desk that once stood at Versailles. Men in straw boat hats and suspenders ferried attendees to and from nearby parking in golf carts. Walz, meanwhile, went to Ochre Court, a mansion owned by a local Catholic university, Salve Regina. His event had little of Miramar’s pomp: no costumed greeters, no pinstriped chauffeurs, no carnival set. Walz spoke for 17 minutes in the three-story atrium, then sped off to his next event in the Hamptons. By fundraising metrics, the Walz event was a success, raising $650,000. Politically, it stirred up a minor controversy. Nearly half of Rhode Islanders are Catholic, and many, including the state’s powerful diocese, bristled at a Catholic venue hosting a campaign that vocally supports abortion rights. As it turned out, the Walz event organizers had sought out a different space, Belcourt—the third-largest Bellevue mansion. But it wasn’t available. Not because there was an event happening at the 60-room chateau, but because Schwarzman had rented it. He needed a place to store construction equipment during his yard party—and given the dearth of public parking, he would need a spillover lot.