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 dubbed Trump a “three-time loser” in elections, are considering offering their support.
The new embrace of Trump threatens to further blunt the fundraising edge that President Joe Biden maintained through the opening innings of the 2024 campaign. But beyond that, it suggests that a key Biden argument — that Trump’s actions since his 2020 defeat have made him unfit to lead the country again — is falling flat with a pivotal constituency that has an especially large stake in the rule of law.
The former president “is a much better choice than what we have now. Just check out the four years that Trump was in office versus the three years that President Biden was in office,” said John Catsimatidis, the billionaire New York radio station owner and real estate investor. Gas and food prices were lower. It was easier to conduct business, he said, and it was a lot cheaper to secure financing for second homes.
“I remember I got a mortgage on one of my homes I bought in the suburbs for 2.75 percent,” said Catsimatidis, who is estimated by Forbes to be worth $4.3 billion. “It’s horrible what’s going on.”
Though he’s a longtime Trump ally, Catsimatidis is no longer an outlier among the Republican Party’s top donors. Trump will have a major opportunity to persuade even more corporate leaders to support him when he speaks to the nation’s top CEOs at the Business Roundtable’s quarterly meeting on June 13. Biden will be traveling to Italy for the G7 meetings, so White House chief of staff Jeff Zients will address the Roundtable in his stead.
“Donald Trump is a self-obsessed convicted felon who would do anything to regain power — and if he does, has made clear he intends to rule as a dictator on day one,” Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said. “But for some billionaires none of that matters. They’ll prop up a convicted white-collar crook so long as Trump slashes their taxes.”
