Why Trump’s chief fundraiser made a beeline for Las Vegas

By Alexandra Stevenson, New York Times News Service

Friday, May 13, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Less than a week after being recruited by Donald Trump to be his campaign fundraiser, Steven Mnuchin did not waste any time looking for big-money donors.

On Wednesday, Mnuchin met with hedge fund managers at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, where the nation’s largest hedge fund conference, the SkyBridge Alternatives Conference, or SALT, runs through today.

On the sidelines of the conference, Mnuchin sat with Scott Brown, the former Republican senator from Massachusetts, as he shook hands with prospective Trump donors.

Later, Mnuchin attended a dinner that included billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth C. Griffin; David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director and general; and John A. Boehner, the former House speaker. The host of the dinner was Anthony Scaramucci, who runs the investment firm SkyBridge Capital and who last week publicly endorsed Trump.

It is hard to avoid presidential politics this year at SALT, where prominent hedge fund managers weigh in on subjects like the economy and geopolitics and tax policies in the United States. It is the main topic in the speeches delivered on the brightly lit stage and in the closed-door meetings and Champagne-filled after-hours events.

Trump picked Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive who is a hedge fund veteran, to be his finance chairman to help him raise as much as $1.5 billion for his campaign.

For many on Wall Street, however, publicly supporting Trump is awkward. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has been vocal in speaking out against hedge fund managers, talking tough about their pay and saying they “get away with murder.” He has also said he plans to put an end to a tax advantage called carried interest that enables private equity and hedge fund executives to treat their income at the lower capital gains rate, rather than having it taxed as ordinary income.

Many of the biggest political backers in the financial world have put sizable amounts of money into the failed campaigns for other Republican presidential hopefuls, like Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. While many have said they would never support a Democratic candidate, they have also publicly objected to Trump.

Before becoming one of the first on Wall Street to back him, Scaramucci had been one of Trump’s loudest critics. Less than a year ago, he called Trump a “hack politician,” warning that his politics were divisive.

Scaramucci had served as Scott Walker’s top fundraiser and his national finance co-chairman. After Walker dropped out of the political race in September, urging some of his rivals to follow his lead so the party could unite against Trump, Scaramucci became a fundraiser for Bush.

But at SALT, Scaramucci took a very different approach.

Trump, he said, was “saying cuckoo-la-la things to insult the intelligentsia because what he’s discovered is that the average American, the red-meat eating Middle American, loves the swipes at the know-it-alls and I think Donald Trump is enjoying doing that.”

Scaramucci met twice with Trump to talk about his election campaign. The two even discussed the possibility of Trump coming to speak as a surprise guest at the SALT conference this week.

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens said at the conference that he expected most Republicans to eventually fall in line and back Trump.

“You sit there and you say, well, Donald Trump wasn’t who I wanted — but you have no other choice,” Pickens said in an interview. Next month, Pickens will hold a fundraiser at his ranch in Texas to raise money for Trump, but he declined to comment on how much he might be willing to donate.

Speaking to an audience of money managers Wednesday, Pickens said he agreed with Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims unless they were vetted.

“I’m tired of having politicians as president of the United States,” he added. Yet a year ago, Pickens announced he would back Bush, the former governor of Florida.

In private and public, hedge fund managers here in Las Vegas have expressed concern that the possibility of Trump as president could pose a risk to the economy and markets.

Others have lamented a decision by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, not to run for president.

Bloomberg, who addressed an audience in the ballroom of the Bellagio on Wednesday, considered entering the political arena as an independent candidate but decided not to run out of concern that he would help Trump to secure the nomination. He declined to endorse any candidate when pressed onstage.

Boehner, the former House speaker, made the rounds of the conference, speaking onstage and in private sessions about his views on the apparent unraveling of the Republican Party as Trump won primary after primary.

“When you look at Donald Trump and you look at Bernie Sanders, what it tells you is that there is a lot of frustration in America,” Boehner told a small group of money managers in a session held by Morgan Stanley.