Sheldon Adelson sees a lot to like in Trump’s Washington

By Jeremy W. Peters, New York Times News Service

Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2018 | 2 a.m.

WASHINGTON — The return on investment for many of the Republican Party’s biggest political patrons has been less than impressive this year. But not for Sheldon Adelson.

Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate, and his wife, Miriam, a physician, have emerged as the biggest and potentially most influential contributors to Republicans in the midterm season. Despite initially harboring qualms about President Donald Trump’s leadership, the Adelsons have found much to like in a Republican-controlled government that has aligned with their most cherished priorities: unflinchingly pro-Israel, unaccommodating to Middle Eastern adversaries and dedicated to deregulation and lower taxes.

Adelson in particular enjoys a direct line to the president. In private in-person meetings and phone conversations, which occur between the two men about once a month, he has used his access to push the president to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and, more recently, to cut aid to the Palestinians, according to people familiar with their discussions, who spoke anonymously to discuss private matters. Trump has done both, triggering a backlash from some U.S. allies.

Republican control of the House and the Senate is so vital to maintaining these policies, the Adelsons believe, that they have given $55 million in the last few months to groups dedicated to making sure it stays that way. That makes them not only the largest donors to national Republican electoral efforts in this election cycle, but the biggest spenders on federal elections in all of American politics, according to publicly available campaign finance data.

In meetings with the consultants and political strategists who have visited his office on the Las Vegas Strip to ask for money, Adelson and his wife ask pointed questions, hoping to ensure that their money will be spent wisely, people who have pitched them said in interviews. They demand campaign plans, preferably in writing.

They are critical of strategies that appear overly reliant on television advertising, preferring to invest in ones with a wide network of field offices and staff on the ground. When advertising does come up, they have surprised some of the people pitching them with detailed questions, like when they would book airtime and what percentage they were paying up front.

More than a dozen people who know the Adelsons professionally or personally, some of whom are also friendly with Trump, said in interviews that the durability of Adelson’s relationship with the president hinges not on any personal affinity between the two, but on a mutual appreciation for something both men have built their careers on: the transaction.

“I think there are a lot of leaders in the establishment Jewish community for whom Donald Trump is not the kind of guy they’d want to break matzo with, but they sure like his polices and what he’s doing,” said Ari Fleischer, the former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush who is on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition with Adelson.

“In a lot of circles outside the ‘Always Trump’ base,” Fleischer added, “Trump has made a lot of progress with people who don’t like him personally but like him professionally.”

Through a spokesman, the Adelsons declined a request to be interviewed.

The Adelsons’ growing influence comes as other Republican megadonors — Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists; Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, two of Trump’s most influential supporters; Foster Friess, a major benefactor to conservative causes; and Dick and Liz Uihlein, the Midwestern couple who have written big checks to anti-establishment candidates — have scaled back their spending or placed bad bets on losing campaigns.

So far this year, the Adelsons have steered their money to two groups with proven track records of defending Republican seats — the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC allied with Speaker Paul Ryan, and the Senate Leadership Fund, which has close ties to Sen. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader. Though they are known to probe prospective recipients about their plans up front, they do not tend to meddle in strategy after the fact or demand that their money be steered toward certain states or races, people who have worked with them said.

Their $55 million commitment dwarfs their contribution during the last midterms in 2014, when Republicans were in a much stronger position politically and the couple was more focused on projects in Nevada. That year, they had donated only $382,000 as of Aug. 31 to federal campaigns, and gave only $5.5 million overall. In 2016, a presidential year, they had donated $46.5 million by this point.

They have yet to give to Trump’s re-election efforts, however, reasoning that for now their money is better spent on maintaining Republican control of Congress.

Representatives from America First Policies, the super PAC that is acting as the main vehicle for Trump’s 2020 effort, recently visited Adelson in Las Vegas to make a pitch for financial support, according to several people who had been briefed on the meeting. One of these people said Adelson told associates afterward that he was not convinced of their strategic plan, saying it was too vague and unformed, but has not ruled out donating in the future.

The relationship between Trump and Adelson has come a long way.

In the fall of 2015, Trump attacked Adelson on Twitter after rumors swirled that the casino mogul might support a rival for the Republican nomination, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. “He feels he can mold him into his perfect little puppet. I agree!” Trump vented.

A few months later when Trump spoke to the Republican Jewish Coalition, the conservative, pro-Israeli group the Adelsons help fund, he played to Jewish stereotypes with a crack about how many people in the room must know how to renegotiate deals. “Perhaps more than any room I’ve ever spoken to,” he said.

But after Trump’s election in 2016, Miriam Adelson was crying tears of joy. “I can’t believe it!” she exclaimed, according to one person who witnessed the exchange, hugging Trump in a meeting in January 2017 at Trump Tower in which the president-elect promised he would move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

It was the beginning of a raft of decisions and personnel changes by Trump that, while not always at the top of his priority list, would deliver major, long-sought policy victories for conservative Jews like the Adelsons.

The couple was seated in the front row for the ribbon-cutting ceremony in Jerusalem in May. That day, Miriam Adelson, who is Israeli, described Trump as “the Truman of our time” in an extraordinary front-page editorial in the newspaper she and her husband own, the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Sheldon Adelson plays an outsize, if largely behind-the-scenes, role in Israel. Long a staunch supporter of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he began financing a free, right-leaning tabloid newspaper, Israel Hayom, in 2007 that many Israelis consider a mouthpiece for Netanyahu. It has since become the largest-circulation Hebrew newspaper.

Longtime supporters of Jewish settlement projects in the West Bank, the Adelsons have also pledged millions of dollars for the expansion of Ariel University, in the heart of the occupied territory, including a medical school that will be named for the couple.

The embassy move and other recent decisions by the president have been in line with the Adelsons’ worldview, which sees Israel’s existence in a state of perpetual uncertainty and facing potential obliteration. The Trump administration announced last month it was cutting more than $200 million in aid to the Palestinians.

Trump installed a longtime Adelson ally and Iran hard-liner, John Bolton, as his national security adviser. Bolton displaced Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, whose ouster Sheldon Adelson helped hasten when, after some hesitation, he decided to support a campaign that publicly accused the general of undermining Israel’s security.

The president has also begun to undo the nuclear nonproliferation deal the Obama administration negotiated with Iran, which many Republicans and conservative Israelis opposed.

The millions the Adelsons put behind Trump in 2016 — mainly through a super PAC that attacked Hillary Clinton — did not come until after it was clear Trump would most likely be the Republican nominee. But it was funding Trump badly needed given how many of the party’s other major donors had shunned him.

The Adelsons’ support remains critical to the administration as other longtime party donors recede. Although Adelson and Trump are not personally close, according to people who know both men, the Adelsons still believe that big money can produce big results and that Trump can continue to deliver them if he has a Republican Congress behind him.

Trump respects Adelson’s success as a global casino, convention and hotel mogul — businesses that the president has bought into on a smaller scale. And Adelson has long demonstrated the kind of bare-knuckles business approach that Trump identifies with.

As controlling shareholder of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., Adelson was involved in long-running litigation with a former employee at his operations in Macau that spawned investigations by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department.

Adelson has also filed libel lawsuits against multiple journalists who have written about him and sent one writer into bankruptcy when he sued him at a time his daughter was suffering from brain cancer.

Adelson also has the currency the president appreciates most: a vast personal fortune that places him among the world’s richest people. As a result, he is one of the rare people whose advice Trump will take. Aides to Trump said they noticed a difference in his tenor — albeit a brief one — on the campaign trail in the summer of 2016 after Adelson encouraged him to act with more humility.

Morton Klein, a longtime friend of Adelson’s and fellow pro-Israel activist, said an overjoyed Adelson called him from the car right after the meeting in which President-elect Trump declared how seriously he took his promise to move the embassy.

“I know he was in the car because he kept yelling at the driver for making wrong turns,” Klein said. “And he said, ‘Mort! I just came out of Trump Tower, and Donald Trump just promised me in his first term he’s going to move the embassy to Jerusalem,'” Klein recalled.

The plan favored by some senior aides at the time, including Steve Bannon, a key strategist for Trump, was to announce the embassy move on Inauguration Day, people familiar with the discussions said. Trump’s staff went so far as to look up the time the sun would go down that day — a Friday, the start of the Jewish Sabbath — so they could plan appropriately to have Jewish leaders like Adelson there for the announcement.

But officials at the State Department and others in the government talked the president out of it, pointing out that it would provoke mass unrest in the Arab world.

The Adelsons were initially frustrated by the delay, but their annoyance has long since faded. And while Sheldon Adelson’s commitment to Israel and U.S. foreign policy has always been paramount, associates described his focus on political concerns at home as a close second.

“There’s a Hebrew word, ‘Neshama,’ and that’s what Sheldon has for Israel — a heart for Israel,” said Brad Blakeman, an adviser in George W. Bush’s White House who ran an Adelson-funded foreign policy group, Freedom’s Watch.

But, Blakeman added, “that’s the land of his religion. The land of his patriotism is America.”