Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
They were, in many cases, Donald Trump’s most fervent backers: rich Wall Street types, lawyers at corporate firms, business tycoons, and tech engineers who fervently backed the president by raising and donating many millions of dollars for his election, risking the opprobrium of their fellow moneyed elites.
But after he declared a global trade war, leaving the stock market in free fall and a recession seemingly imminent, many donors found themselves earlier this week in the same position as the rest of us: squinting at Trump’s moves and trying to make sense of it all.
“I just, I just …” said one Trump donor, a New York–based banker who had been supportive of the former president since Trump first rode down the golden escalator in 2015, pausing to gather his thoughts as he rode on the Acela to Washington, D.C., last week for a fundraiser for congressional Republicans. “I just don’t really understand what the strategy here is.”
“The people speaking, L and B,” this person said, referring to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, but using their initials in case anyone overheard in business class, “it seems like they don’t really know what is going on either. But it has just been a couple of days, and I think we need to give it up a couple of weeks or a month before [Trump donors] really start to panic. There is a hope that maybe we will start to see some adjustments.”
The MAGA money class, many of whom fancy themselves knowledgeable about matters related to the markets and the global economy — and who have likely collectively lost billions of dollars in the market over the past week — were divided as Trump instituted a global tariff regime that some administration officials said was permanent and others insisted was merely a negotiating strategy, only to then call off the tariffs for 90 days while also raising tariffs further on China. Andy Sabin, the billionaire chairman of Sabin Metal Corporation, said he had no problem with tariffs in theory but that “I don’t like the way this was handled.”
“We don’t really know where this is going to go. I don’t care what anybody says; we are in uncharted territory here,” Sabin added. “And I don’t see this as a [stock] buying opportunity. Who would be a buyer right now? People are scared, and we don’t know how or when this ends.”
But even as titans of finance like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Home Depot founder Ken Langone warned against raising tariffs — Langone called the 46 percent on Vietnam in particular “bullshit” — on the basis of the expected economic damage they would do. Some Trump donors insisted that they and mainstream economists were wrong.
“None of these idiots understands a fucking thing about tariffs,” said Nirmal Mulye, a pharmaceutical entrepreneur, clarifying that the idiots he was referring to were “Paul Krugman and all the rest of the so-called Nobel Prize winners. America needed tariffs to compete” with China, which, he added, uses child labor and is free to pollute as it pleases. In the U.S., he said, “we can’t hire anybody if they are white or Asian.”
“There is no such thing as a free market in the world,” Mulye added, and Trump’s tariffs helped level the regulatory playing field.
When I told him on Wednesday that Trump was pausing the tariffs, however, Mulye paused.
“I think that is a mistake.”
A week of chaos provided each donor their own interpretation of events. Richard Porter, a retired corporate attorney at Kirkland & Ellis in Chicago, made the analogy of the U.S. being the world’s most desirable mall, one where every other country in the world wants to set up shop. Trump, he added, is merely charging them the fair value for the space to sell.
“We are still the essential market, the market that every other country in the world needs to be in,” he said, adding that the tariffs were necessary to reshore critical industries like armaments and pharmaceuticals. “We cannot be a leading nation if other countries have this kind of leverage over us.”
Many donors saw another strategy at play: Trump’s tariffs are less about resetting global alliances and more about the coming AI revolution, which, combined with the president’s immigration crackdown, will right-size the American labor force for the future. Once the tariffs were in place, Porter predicted, investment would surge in the U.S., and by the summer of next year, Trump would preside over a “golden age” of full employment and rising incomes, at which point the current turmoil would be largely forgotten.
This was a view that echoed across MAGA. On X, Tavni Ratna, a policy adviser to the World Economic Forum, wrote a 15-post thread that was passed around Trump-friendly circles and described the escalating trade war as a “deliberate ‘detox’ to cool the economy and cut refinancing costs,” one which would ultimately lead to tax cuts and and a new global order: “Tariffs now serve as leverage to renegotiate terms based on America-First policy.”
Hal Lambert, a Republican megadonor and the founder of Point Bridge Capital, an investment-management company, said as the tariffs were being implemented that “I don’t have any problem with tariffs. I think they are necessary and ultimately they are going to cut deals with these countries and we are going to end up in a better position.”
Trump’s abrupt reversal on Wednesday afternoon did little to shake his faith in the president. “This was always the likely outcome,” he said after the pause. “However you want to frame the ending of it, Trump is going to get what he wants.” Lambert predicted that by the end of negotiations, there would be zero tariffs between most countries and the U.S.
This idea that Trump is a master negotiator who will bring the rest of the world to heel was behind much of the enthusiasm in this cohort for Trump’s tariffs, even as they watched the economy tumble.
“I think the Chinese people are smart, and I think Donald Trump is a smart person, and they are going to sit down and come to a deal,” said John Catsimatidis, the grocery-store magnate and longtime Trump friend. Catsimatidis had just gotten off the air from the radio show he hosts on WABC, a station he also owns.
“What song did we play on my show today? ‘Edge of Destruction’? We were on the edge of destruction. If we keep borrowing money and giving it away, at some point we were going to blow up. I don’t like this stock-market pain, but it is what it is, and I think in the long run we are going to be better off.”
And even among the donors who fretted about the long-term damage Trump could do to American primacy on the world financial stage, there remained a belief among the donor class that he was still better than the alternative.
“This is absolutely insane. It makes no sense whatsoever. I can’t find anyone in the banking world or the business world that supports it,” said one Trump megadonor, an attorney based in the city. “But every donor I talk to says the same thing, that this is way better than having Kamala Harris as president.”
