A YEAR LATER

Top Billionaires of Trump’s Transition Fund Revealed

The president has finally revealed who funded his $13.7 million transition effort.

More than half a dozen billionaires donated to President Donald Trump’s transition to power.

After failing for nearly a year to provide the list of donors who funded Trump’s $13.7 million transition effort, his team has finally released a list of 46 individuals, The New York Times reported.

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The list did not include addresses, hometowns, or professions for the donors, making it difficult to confirm the identities of all the donors, nor does it say how much each person donated.

However, at least seven of the people on the list appear to be billionaires, along with one or two almost-billionaires. Several people on the list were also subsequently given high-level positions with the administration.

Billionaires Linda McMahon and Howard Lutnick chaired the transition and, it turns out, donated to the fund before they were appointed as Trump’s secretaries of education and commerce, respectively.

Billionaire Steve Witkoff donated to the fund and was later appointed Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East and Russia.

The other billionaires who donated to the fund were investor Jeff Yass, hedge fund manager Paul Singer, Johnson & Johnson heir Robert Wood Johnson’s wife Suzanne Johnson, and TD Ameritrade founder J. Joe Ricketts’ wife Marlene Ricketts.

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Three of the billionaires—McMahon, Singer, and Ricketts—also gave about $1 million each to Trump’s inauguration fund, which raised a record $250.4 million, while Lutnick has donated to the president’s $300 million White House construction project.

Robert Bigelow, the almost-billionaire owner of Budget Suites of America, also appears on the transition donor list, as does someone named Robert Bishop.

A Connecticut hedge fund manager named Robert Bishop was an early donor to Trump’s Great America PAC in 2016, Politico reported.

If the same Robert Bishop donated to the transition fund, he is rich enough to own a $35.5 million home in Aspen, Colorado, along with a home in Palm Beach, Florida, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2022.

The third-ranking official at the Justice Department, Stanley Woodward Jr., also donated to the transition fund, as did Dominick Gerace II, who is serving as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio.

Other notable names included Susan Silverie, a vice president at The Heritage Foundation, also donated to the transition effort, and several Washington, D.C.-area lawyers and lobbyists.

Watchdog groups had previously blasted the Trump administration for its lack of transparency surrounding the transition.

Previous administrations signed an agreement with the General Services Administration that made the names of donors public and limited the maximum donation amount in exchange for federal funding and administrative support during the transition.

By not revealing who was contributing or how much, the public was in the dark about potential conflicts of interest or pay-for-play arrangements, according to the Times.

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“President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country,” Trump transition spokesperson Danielle Alvarez told the Times in a statement. “Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”

The Daily Beast has also reached out to the White House for comment.

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