TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. One of the most active and ardent supporters of Donald Trump's campaign is the world's richest man, Elon Musk. Musk and about 13 other billionaires have become the financial core of the Trump campaign. So what do these ultra-rich individuals hope to get in return, and what have they already gotten from Trump? My guest, Susan Glasser, investigates these questions in her new article, "Purchasing Power," or "How Republican Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again." It's published in The New Yorker, where Glasser is a staff writer based in Washington.
Glasser writes Trump's time in the White House provided ample evidence that some billionaires could have extraordinary sway in a second Trump administration. Glasser writes a weekly column on life in Washington and is one of the hosts, along with Evan Osnos and Jane Mayer, of the New Yorker podcast "The Political Scene." Glasser cowrote the book "The Divider" about Trump and his presidency. Her coauthor is her husband, Peter Baker, who covers the White House for The New York Times. Our interview was recorded yesterday.
Susan Glasser, welcome to FRESH AIR. I learned so much from your piece. But I want to start by asking, so Kamala Harris has 21 billionaires supporting her campaign. Trump has 14 billionaires. Harris has had the biggest fundraising quarter ever - $1 billion. So why are you writing about Trump and not Harris?
SUSAN GLASSER: That's a great question. Thank you so much, Terry. It's great to be with you. The thing that I learned coming back to the money and politics beat after, you know, many years of writing about other things is a couple of things. Number one, Democrats have an advantage in the presidential money race in part because they've retained their advantage with small dollar donors. So they actually are able to raise more money from more people. And this has been true more or less since Barack Obama figured out the key to turning on the internet fund raising spigot back in the 2008 campaign. So that's one thing. The other thing is, you're right, Harris has more billionaires supporting her, but Trump is more dependent on his.
They give much larger sums, and as we know, he's also a different figure than Kamala Harris or really any politician of our lifetime. He's the most openly transactional figure. And that's what I wanted to look into is just what is the nexus between Trump and these billionaires? What could he be promising them? What is it that they want from him? And there, I think it's not just structural, but it also tells you a lot about the candidates.
GROSS: So to give an example of what people are giving to Trump's campaign, Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has already given $100 million to the Trump campaign.
GLASSER: We should say to super PACs supporting Trump's campaign.
GROSS: OK. Thanks for the clarification on that.
GLASSER: Because that's one of the tricks - right? - is that, you know, with this crazy legal regime that we have, they've gotten rid of the effective limits, even though the legal limits still exist. So what happens is that the billionaires and the millionaires, they simply find their way around the legal limits because there's this new avenue available to them, which is unlimited contributions to super PACs that are supporting the campaigns and that are now even largely able to coordinate with them in ways that were originally not allowed.
GROSS: Thanks largely to the Supreme Court Citizens United decision. What does it say that you're not writing this piece about lobbies or corporations or political parties? It's about individual billionaires donating to super PACs.
GLASSER: I'm so glad you honed in on that because that's the big structural change for me as a longtime observer of Washington and power. What's fascinating is that the game of money and politics, especially at the presidential level in particular - it's moved away from what we think of as the sort of fat-cat lobbyists and the Washington corporate associations, which is not to say they're not still involved in money and politics.
But at the presidential level, because the sums of money are so extraordinary, what's happened is in the wake of the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision is that it's empowered, essentially, the extremes on both right and left with these enormous amounts that individuals and corporations can now give to super PACs - essentially unlimited amounts. That has changed the game. And it's part of the reason, I think, that our politics is becoming increasingly divisive, partisan, extreme and shouty - is that there's now a money structural incentive for that to occur.
I spoke with Tom Davis - former Congressman, very savvy Republican - what we might call a representative of the old Republican establishment. And he made this point to me that essentially the - Citizens United and what's happened since - it took the money power away from the political parties, which had been a centering influence in American politics for more than a century, and it essentially put it out to the extremes. Fred Wertheimer, who has, you know, spent his lifetime as a public interest lawyer trying to curb the influence of money in politics - he said to me, it's like our money and politics - it's become a sandbox for billionaires, and they're playing in it.
GROSS: So your article starts last February at a lavish Trump administration fundraising event at the mansion of Nelson Peltz, a billionaire investor. His mansion is near Mar-a-Lago. Two dozen of the wealthiest Republicans were there. Now, after January 6, Peltz said that Trump would always be remembered for that disgrace. He said, as an American, I'm embarrassed.
During this year's Republican primaries, he gave a lot of money to Tim Scott. Then after Scott dropped out, he supported Trump and said, he's a terrible human being. But our country's in a bad place, and we can't afford Joe Biden. He told his guests at this lavish fundraising dinner, we've all got to throw our support behind Trump. Why does he think Biden was so horrible that he needed to vote out Biden and support Trump and get other billionaires to support Trump?
GLASSER: Yeah. I think this is just such an incredibly fascinating moment. This dinner takes place on Friday, February 16. And the only difference is Nelson Peltz and a number of the people there - they've publicly disavowed Donald Trump. Peltz wasn't even on speaking terms with Trump at the time he hosted this dinner. I should point out it's not a fundraising dinner, but it's the prelude to the fundraising that will come.
What's happened is that it's clear by mid-February of this year that Donald Trump is once again going to lock up the Republican presidential nomination, and for the - by the way, the third time, unprecedented in the history of the Republican Party, that they would have one person running as their nominee in three consecutive elections. And Peltz - there's about two dozen people at this dinner. They're essentially highly motivated partisan donors, right? And so I think that explains a lot of it - that in the end, they may have preferred somebody else, but in - they're motivated Republican givers. They grasp on to the idea that Biden is terrible for them and they're going to maybe - many of them later said to me, well, he's too old. He's not capable. nd we hate his policies.
But they probably would have said that about any Democratic nominee. Essentially what it is is the pragmatic politics of a bunch of Republican billionaires coming back to the fold and being willing to overlook Donald Trump's egregious excesses. That's really the - for me, the story writ large of the Trump years is that, without people in the Republican establishment, these funders and politicians on Capitol Hill who personally loathe Donald Trump, and they don't think any differently about Donald Trump probably as a person than many of Trump's harshest critics, and yet they're willing to enable and empower him. I think that quote from Peltz is so revealing. Here he is - and by the way, Elon Musk is there, the world's richest man, John Paulson, who's been mentioned as a possible future secretary of the treasury in a second Trump administration. And Peltz gets up there and he literally tells him, I think Donald Trump is a terrible human being, but we should somehow inflict him on the American public again.
GROSS: So some of the people at this dinner had already gotten access to Trump during his presidency, including Peltz himself. And Peltz helped provoke Trump's attacks on the U.S. Postal Service. Can you explain how that happened?
GLASSER: That was one of the really important themes to me as I was trying to look into this kind of highly transactional relationship between Trump and the billionaires, is to point out and to go back and look at - Trump had an actual record in the White House, right? People tend to treat this sometimes as if - Trump as just the rhetoric. But in fact, in his four years in the presidency, there's a record that suggests that Trump really did give extraordinarily unusual access and almost walk-in privileges to certain of his billionaire friends.
There's an incident that Peter and I wrote about in "The Divider" involving Nelson Peltz, who's an activist investor. He buys up stakes and companies, tries to get seats on their boards. And he goes in early in the Trump presidency in 2017 to the Oval Office. And we know about this because of a source, a senior official in the Trump White House who told us of this very curious scene when this official was called into the Oval Office. And they're meeting alone. It's Nelson Peltz and Donald Trump.
Peltz has brought a written dossier to Donald Trump that basically makes a whole bunch of allegations about Amazon and how it is single-handedly, essentially, allegedly, you know, screwing up the U.S. Postal Service. As you know, of course, Donald Trump was predisposed to be against Amazon. He often publicly complained about it because of its owner, Jeff Bezos, who is also the owner of The Washington Post. So, you know, kind of pushing on an open door. And essentially, Peltz is suggesting that Trump should launch an antitrust investigation of Amazon.
GROSS: Yeah, because he was saying that Amazon was getting preferential rates and that was helping to bankrupt the Postal Service.
GLASSER: Exactly, which, you know, we should point out there's no evidence of that, but Trump embraced this idea and then even later publicly tweeted about it repeatedly. We all remember how that played out. This was in 2017, but he continued to complain about the Postal Service all the way up until 2020 in the end of his presidency. But this was just, I thought, a really revealing glimpse into, you know, here's just some billionaire buddy of Donald Trump's from Mar-a-Lago who walks into the Oval Office and, all of a sudden, the president of the United States is demanding on very spurious grounds, oh, shouldn't we look into and investigate the U.S. Postal Service and Amazon? It's a fascinating moment.
GROSS: What did Peltz stand to gain by saying that there should be an antitrust charge against Amazon?
GLASSER: Isn't that a fascinating question? Actually, Trump's own White House staff were kind of perplexed by this. Why is this guy here? They tried to look into it, and the best that they could figure out was that Peltz had recently purchased a stake in Procter & Gamble, which is a, you know, big consumer sales company. And he seemed to believe that Amazon - at the time, it was in the middle of finishing up its purchase of Whole Foods and that this would pose a threat to that business.
GROSS: To Procter & Gamble. Yeah. Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Susan Glasser. Her article "Purchasing Power," or "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again," is published in The New Yorker, where Glasser is a staff writer. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Susan Glasser. We're talking about her new article "Purchasing Power," or "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again." It's about the billionaires supporting Trump, what they hope to get in return if he's reelected and what some of them have already gotten. It's published in The New Yorker, where Glasser is a staff writer.
OK, so let's talk about another guest at this lavish dinner for billionaire would-be donors to the Trump campaign, Elon Musk, the world's richest man - so rich that over the weekend, he announced this kind of sweepstakes where one registered voter a day would get $1 million from Elon Musk. Let's hear the clip of him explaining this. But before we do, he's talking about people who are registered and sign a petition. What is the petition he's asking them to sign?
GLASSER: It's a petition from his political action committee that he has started to support Trump in this election, the America PAC. And what it is, is it's saying that you support the Constitution, the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech, of course, and the Second Amendment with its right to keep and bear arms. But, you know, in a way, this is just a kind of bizarre development in the election. The Governor of Pennsylvania Josh Shapiro, Democrat, has already gone on TV suggesting that this might skirt the limits of legality in that it appears to be essentially $1 million a day given away with the condition specifically that one should register to vote. And is that tantamount to vote buying?
GROSS: Right. OK, so let's hear Musk.
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ELON MUSK: You know, one of the challenges we're having is, like, well, how do we get people to know about this petition? - because the legacy media is - won't report on it. You know, and not everyone's on X. So I figure, how do we get people to know about it? Well, this news, I think, is going to really fly. So...
(APPLAUSE)
MUSK: So every day between now and the election, we'll be awarding $1 million starting tonight.
GROSS: So let's talk about how Elon Musk figures into a possible future Trump administration. It's been announced by Trump that if he wins, he would appoint Musk to head a new commission whose job it would be to cut costs in every aspect of government. So you have the story of how Musk got to that place of being the potential czar of cost cutting. Can you tell that story?
GLASSER: Yeah. It's so remarkable, Terry, because here we have the world's richest man. Not only is he just a wealthy mega-billionaire, but his business, especially his ventures SpaceX and Tesla, have been highly intertwined and dependent upon the U.S. government. SpaceX is one of the largest Pentagon contractors. Tesla would not have become what it is without significant government subsidies as it was getting underway. And, you know, it's an enormous potential conflict of interest to set Musk up as an arbiter of government spending with a direct pipeline and ear of the president himself, and yet that is exactly what he and Trump now seem to be proposing that he would do in a way that is entirely outside of and not accountable to the U.S. Congress or in any other way. This is not a real job. You know, Trump is joking about him as a secretary of cost-cutting. But the proposal that they seem to envision is that he would continue to be a private businessman, work on the outside, and yet also oversee this enormous sweeping portfolio on behalf of Trump and the White House. And it's been fascinating to me to watch the evolution of this. So back in February at the billionaires dinner at Nelson Peltz's house, at that time, Musk is still saying publicly, he's not going to explicitly support any specific candidate. He becomes more and more over time as the months go on in 2024, more publicly and explicitly pro-Trump, and he formally endorses Donald Trump in the immediate aftermath of the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
This summer, as you know, he then turns over his public platform of X, the former Twitter, to an array of pro-Trump lies and conspiracy theories, many of them spread directly by Musk himself. He also has started this new Super PAC, the America Super PAC. He spent $75,000,000 of his own money on that, and that's just according to the most recent filing. It could well end up being way more than that. The Trump campaign seems to have outsourced a significant amount of its get out the vote efforts this year to Musk, which is why I think you're seeing that $1,000,000 giveaway. He's practically moved to Pennsylvania according to recent reports and is frenetically working on ginning up turnout there in what, you know, most independent observers think might well be the crucial state for either Trump or Kamala Harris. And at the same time, he and Trump have been very explicitly, and in more and more detailed ways, saying that he would play this significant role in the Trump administration.
GROSS: So if Trump wins, and Trump appoints Musk to head what would officially be called the Government Efficiency Commission, what possible conflicts of interest would that pose for Musk? And what does he stand to gain from such a position?
GLASSER: Yeah, it seems to me it's a remarkable inherent conflict of interest. This is a man who currently has billions of dollars in federal government contracts and to set him up as a sort of a czar...
GROSS: For things like Tesla and SpaceX?
GLASSER: Correct. His venture SpaceX...
GROSS: And the satellite system?
GLASSER: ...Is - and the Starlink satellite system makes him one of the Pentagon's largest contractors. So imagine setting up one contractor out of all the contractors and giving him power to make sweeping recommendations and advising the president on how his competitors - you know, whether their contracts should continue and at what level? It's one of the largest inherent conflicts of interests I've ever heard of. And of course, if this was not an official government position, as it does not appear that it would be, he very likely would not be subject to the same disclosure laws and giving information to the public that a normal cabinet position would be subject to.
GROSS: Would you say that Musk's behavior has become more erratic, endorsing conspiracy theories on X, which he owns, and jumping up and down when Trump introduced him at a recent campaign rally, saying if Trump doesn't win, this will be the last election?
GLASSER: Absolutely, Terry. I mean, I think it's just extraordinary the extent to which this public spectacle of the world's richest man becoming also the would-be president's most visible public supporter, that he's amplifying lies and disinformation. It's not just a couple errant tweets, I should point out. His behavior on X is dozens and dozens and dozens of examples of him spreading conspiracy theories, untruths, all with the goal, it appears, of electing Donald Trump. I thought that rally that you're talking about in Pennsylvania recently was, for me, one of the iconic moments of the 2024 campaign to have Musk literally leaping up and down on the stage, in a way that suggested Some of this for the Billionaires is about they're dazzled by the celebrity of it all, the chance to be on stage in front of a rally of thousands of screaming people. In a way they've purchased this walk-on role in American democracy. It's a remarkable spectacle. And I think that whatever the outcome is, this is going to be one of the lasting images for me of this campaign.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Susan Glasser, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her latest article is about the billionaires endorsing Trump and what they hope to get in return or what they've already gotten from Trump. Her article has two titles in the New Yorker, depending on where you're reading it. In the magazine, it's called "Purchasing Power," and on the website, it's called "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Susan Glasser. We're talking about her new article in The New Yorker about the billionaires who have been backing the Trump campaign through super PACs. It's about how much money they've given, what they hope to gain and what some of them already got during the Trump administration. Her article has two titles in The New Yorker, depending on where you're reading it. In the magazine, it's called "Purchasing Power," and on the website, it's called "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again."
One of Trump's big fundraising days was right after he was convicted of 34 criminal counts related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. Why did that inspire billionaires to spend more money supporting Trump as opposed to being leery of investing in someone who was just convicted on 34 criminal counts?
GLASSER: That's another one of those enduring questions of 2024. Donald Trump, it seems to me, was very, very successful at selling the idea, at least to, you know, Republican motivated donors and his part of the electorate, that this was essentially weaponization of the government against him, that this was a partisan case brought by a Democratic DA in highly Democratic New York City, and that therefore, it should be seen in the context of some kind of politicized persecution of him. And so when he is convicted, the first time in American history that a former president has ever been convicted in a criminal case of anything - he's convicted on 34 felony counts at the end of May of this year - it turns into one of the biggest fundraising days of the year for him.
I was really struck in doing my interviews for this piece at how even some Republicans who had not like Donald Trump all along, they really bought into the idea that this was a political case. I spoke with Ed Rogers. He is a big figure here in Washington, where I'm based. He's a, you know, big, careerlong Republican lobbyist. And he had always been kind of a public Trump skeptic. And I called him up, and I was beginning this reporting on Republican fundraising. And he said, Susan, I am now a Trump donor. And I thought, wow, that's really something. And he had never been that in 2016, never been that in 2020.
And he gave the day after Trump's conviction, and he told me at the time that he thought a lot of people who had been, quote, "allergic" to Trump, like him, would do so because of the case. That very same night, Donald Trump left the courthouse, where he complained about the rigged trial against him, and he went uptown to a major fundraiser. And this was a gathering of about two dozen of the party's biggest donors. And one participant told me they raised as much as $50 million that same night of his conviction.
GROSS: One of the people there was Stephen Schwarzman, who is the head of Blackstone. He's the CEO. And that's an investment company?
GLASSER: That's the world's largest private equity firm. And it was a huge coup for Donald Trump that Schwarzman, just a few days before the verdict, had agreed to support Trump again. Schwarzman was one of, you know, many Republican donors, and Republicans at all levels, who had publicly distanced themselves from Trump after January 6. He had given a large amount of money to Chris Christie in the Republican primaries, who was explicitly running, as you know, as the anti-Trump candidate in the Republican primary, saying that Trump was unfit for office. And yet Schwarzman, just a few days before the verdict, had put out a statement, again, citing Joe Biden and Biden's policies in the rationale for why he flip-flopped on Trump.
GROSS: So Schwarzman had access to Trump during the Trump presidency. Trump asked him to help negotiate NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and Schwarzman was also Trump's intermediary with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Schwarzman made eight trips to China on behalf of the administration, reporting back to Trump about his efforts to, quote, "assure senior Chinese officials that Trump wasn't looking for a trade war." So why did Trump ask Schwarzman to take that role, and what did Schwarzman have to gain by taking it?
GLASSER: You know, at the time, none of this was disclosed, the idea that one of the world's biggest investment figures was also privately playing a role on behalf of the U.S. government that turned out to be, according to Schwarzman's own memoir that he later published, he played a pivotal role in the renegotiation of NAFTA with Canada and Mexico. According to his memoir, he not only was serving as an intermediary but very explicitly on behalf of the U.S. government. He writes that he made eight different trips to China on Trump's behalf in 2018 alone, that he was the one who directly went to Xi Jinping and invited him to Mar-a-Lago in 2017.
And, you know, again, what a conflict of interest that is. That's the, you know, very concept of why we have disclosure laws and conflict of interest laws, is so that people are not playing a role for the U.S. government while also having unclear personal business interests. And this is almost the very definition of a conflict of interest that was not properly, you know, made clear to the American people. He's running a fund that is the largest private equity fund in the world. And that means that it has enormous amounts of money that depend upon things like, what is the state of the trade relationship between the United States and China?
And, you know, this is the very reason that we have public disclosure laws in this country. It's the reason that U.S. cabinet secretaries and senior officials in our executive branch are subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. Then they testify on Capitol Hill. All the kinds of things that you have to do when you're a senior government official, Schwarzman did not have to do. And we don't know to what extent he was comingling his personal business interests and the business of the U.S. government.
GROSS: We mentioned that there are even more billionaires supporting Kamala Harris than are supporting Trump. Do you think that they are expecting a transactional relationship like the transactional relationships you've outlined in your piece about Trump's billionaire supporters?
GLASSER: Yeah, I mean, there is no evidence to suggest anything on the scale and scope of Trump and his dealings with the billionaires. You know, it would be a huge scandal if any one of these things that I've written about regarding Trump and his dealings with individual donors, if Harris were doing the same thing. I was told that she has made pretty aggressive personal outreach to some of the business types in the effort to get some of them back. But, you know, I think it would be the subject of an investigation, frankly, if Harris was proposing to give a campaign contributor the kind of access that Trump is proposing to give to Elon Musk.
And this is what we have laws for. It's what we have the Justice Department for. You know, the FEC has largely been rendered toothless in the wake of Citizens United. But again, we do actually have laws that are, you know, meant to regulate conflicts of interest and to minimize them. And I think that this is another area in which Trump is operating in a whole different scale and scope. That doesn't mean that there can't be inappropriate influence of money in politics among Democrats, including and up to a Democratic president. I hope that people are going to look aggressively at that. But, you know, I was specifically interested in looking at Donald Trump. And exactly what is he promising to his Republican billionaires?
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Susan Glasser. Her article "Purchasing Power," or "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again," is published in the New Yorker, where Glasser is a staff writer. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Susan Glasser. We're talking about her new article "Purchasing Power," or "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again." It's about the billionaires supporting Trump, what they hope to get in return if he's reelected and what some of them have already gotten. It's published in The New Yorker, where Glasser is a staff writer.
OK. Another example of Trump's flexibility and sometimes seemingly suiting the desires of his major donors has to do with crypto. He had been calling cryptocurrency potentially a disaster waiting to happen and that Bitcoin seemed like a scam. But he started promoting crypto in 2024. How is that change connected possibly to his financial donors?
GLASSER: So for years, he's been a very unambiguous critic of cryptocurrency and specifically of Bitcoin. He said publicly he thought it looked like a scam. He was very dubious of it, and he has done a complete about-face on this this year. He has not only embraced cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. He has put it into the Republican Party's own platform with great specificity. He has gone and appeared in person this July in Nashville at the Bitcoin annual conference. He has aggressively raised money and support from many of the crypto industry's biggest backers. And in fact, he's even made the co-chair of his transition committee a Wall Street billionaire named Howard Lutnick who has become one of the crypto industry's largest public proponents.
GROSS: So if Trump wins and Lutnick becomes the head of Trump's transition team, Lutnick has already promised that people who are appointed to the administration would be subject to a strict loyalty test to avoid the kinds of senior aides who tried to constrain him during his first term, people who weren't, quote, "pure" to Trump's vision. So what does that say to you?
GLASSER: You know, Terry, I was really struck by that interview. Here is a guy who has no government experience his entire career has been at this Wall Street brokerage firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. In recent years, he's gone from being a modest donor to Republicans and Democrats into an enormous donor to pro-Trump super PACs. He's flown around the country with Trump. He went from that Nashville to currency conference. He got on Trump's airplane, went to a campaign rally with him. Trump - kind of like with Elon Musk, he let Lutnick on stage at the rally to introduce his vice presidential nominee. Then he appoints him - just a couple weeks after he has a $15 million fundraiser at his Bridgehampton summer estate, Trump appoints him as a co-chair of the transition committee. He's given, I think, something more than $10 million to pro-Trump super PACs in this campaign.
Now Lutnick is giving an interview to Financial Times - that's where that remarkable quote is drawn from - in which he's openly speaking about a loyalty test for U.S. government employees. And I was particularly struck by one aspect of that quote, Terry, in which Howard Lutnick tells the Financial Times interviewer, we're going to make sure that there are loyalty not only to the policies but also to the man.
GROSS: In September, Trump announced that he and his sons Eric and Don Jr. were getting into the crypto business. There were new companies called World Liberty Financial. What stage is that at? Do you know?
GLASSER: You know, this is so amazing, right? So he goes from saying it's a scam to actually participating in crypto himself.
GROSS: And saying that if he wins, that the U.S. will become the crypto capital of the planet.
GLASSER: Exactly. And so he does this rollout on X, now that it's become the favored platform for everything involving the Trumps, for this business venture called World Liberty Financial. And Trump goes on and on and on in this thing, and he can't even explain what exactly this business is going to do, when it's going to roll out. And there's this very revealing quote that he says in this rollout for it on X on this live stream. He says, well, essentially, I'm not really sure about it, but it's just something we have to do.
And I'm really struck by that. That - you know, that's the transectionalism of Donald Trump right there. I don't really know what this business is, but I've got to support it with my campaign. I've got to get into the business myself. It's interesting, by the way, that World Liberty Financial - according to an interview he himself gave to the New York Times, one of the people who helped to set it up and helped get Trump in the crypto business was another of his big campaign donor friends, a man named Steve Witkoff who helped to set it up and got Trump in business with two very little-known crypto entrepreneurs, one of whom later turned out to be a very controversial figure who was, you know, quoted saying some crazy things about himself as the, you know, kind of, like, sleazeball of the internet, in effect.
And that's who a future would-be president of the United States is putting himself in business with in the fall of an election year. I mean, again, I think we're inured to the many conflicts of interest and things that would be extraordinary scandals for any other politician. Imagine just changing out the names and saying Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is going to go into business with some shady internet entrepreneurs and campaign fundraisers and a crypto business two months before the election. People would go crazy. And yet somehow, I don't even think people registered with Donald Trump that this was even happening.
GROSS: Something I don't understand about the billionaires who are backing his campaign - several things, really. One is that he often turns against the people he's hired in his administration. You know, he's turned against so many people who had been his supporters. What makes the billionaires think that he won't necessarily turn against them or retract his promises?
GLASSER: (Laughter) That's a great question.
GROSS: And also, are they not concerned that his behavior seems to be very erratic now, that he's sometimes incoherent, that he spends time - 30 minutes or more - dancing at one of his rallies after two people collapsed? That was his response to that, like, let's hear some music. And, you know, over the weekend, he talked about Arnold Palmer's man parts and how enhanced they seemed, like, how impressive they were in the locker room. That's strange. Why aren't they concerned about that? They're investing tens of millions of dollars in helping him to get reelected.
GLASSER: I think that, you know, these are smart, accomplished people. I think they have a pretty clear read of who Trump is, which is why for many of them, it strikes me as a fairly cynical transaction that they're making. And that's what I was told explicitly from some sources that I have among very senior Republicans who have observed up close this donor class. They believe that it was very transactional. And they think that, in fact, they're purchasing a level of access and seats at the table in a second Trump administration that they simply wouldn't have had in a continued Biden or Harris administration.
So that's part of it. But then another part of it is, really, it's truly remarkable to watch partisanship triumph over, you know, the evidence that they see with their own eyes. And, of course, we've had many, many examples of that in this election cycle. But I think, you know, these billionaires, you know, they know who Donald Trump is.
GROSS: You had written a book about Trump's presidency, but you found a lot of surprising things in your new article about the billionaires who are backing him and what they hope to get in return. What surprised you most about what you learned in the course of your reporting for this article?
GLASSER: So I was actually surprised at how much the dollar amounts have gone up even in the space of the Trump era. And I spoke with a figure people may remember from the Trump era, Gordon Sondland, who was Trump's ambassador to the EU after giving $1 million to Trump's inauguration committee. And Sondland told me, you know, that was the difference, that even from when he was a Republican fundraiser that, you know, basically, add a zero to the amounts being asked for and being given by these large donors, and that in return for it, they're asking for much more for their money.
So No. 1, much more. No. 2, Elon Musk has gotten so much of the attention in this election cycle, and deservedly so, because it's amazing to see the world's richest man trying to play this role in American politics. But I was struck by the fact that it's not just Elon Musk, that it's a broad category of people, many of whom have widely divergent and highly specific interests they seem to want to put in front of Donald Trump. So that's No. 2. And then No. 3, I would say that there's a certain structural neediness on Trump's part for these billionaires that may make him even more vulnerable to them. You know, his strategy actually does depend on raising more money from each of these billionaires than his Democratic rivals. And that means he's more dependent on them.
GROSS: Susan Glasser, thank you so much for your reporting and for coming on our show. It's been really interesting.
GLASSER: Terry, thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be back with you.
GROSS: Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her new article is titled "Purchasing Power." On The New Yorker's website, it's titled "How Billionaires Learned To Love Trump Again." After a short break, our book critic Maureen Corrigan recommends a new comic novel she says may give you some stress-relieving laughs. This is FRESH AIR.
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