Many of the billionaires lining up against President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign share more in common than exorbitant wealth.
Perhaps it isn’t a surprise that ruling class members with China links are lining up against a populist that says he wants to “launch an all-out campaign to eliminate America’s dependence on China.”
Take the Murdochs, for example. Their New York Post mocked President Trump’s campaign roll-out with the headline: “Florida Man Makes Announcement.”
Perhaps Trump should respond by highlighting a more shocking headline – this one from Crikey in Australia, “Murdoch empire borrows US$100m from state-owned Bank of China.”
The article details how News Corp, the parent of the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, took a 9-figure loan from a Chinese Communist-owned bank.
The Bank of China is the second biggest player in the 13-bank News Corp syndicate after Bank of America, which is contributing US$111.7 million. The Bank of China is massive — it has an estimated US$3.7 trillion in assets and is the largest and oldest bank on the Chinese mainland.
And that’s just the beginning of it. Perhaps Murdoch’s ex-wife, alleged Chinese Communist spy Wendi Deng, could shed more light on the matter.
Then there’s Ken Griffin. Two days before the midterms, the financier spoke to Politico about how he wants to spend his billions to get Gov. Ron DeSantis in the White House. Keen observers will note Trump’s first salvo against DeSantis came hours before this Politico puff piece which had been in the works for some time. It’s no stretch to connect the dots: Trump heard about the piece. Perhaps he was even asked for comment on the fact that a China-linked billionaire was now one of Ron DeSantis’s largest donors.
Surely, he gave one.
Griffin himself became massively wealthy – an estimated net worth of $22 billion – through his investment firm Citadel. A report this year revealed that in 2006, Citadel “loaned $110 million to China Security & Surveillance Technology. The company used the funds to acquire ‘10 of the 50 biggest surveillance companies in China.’”
Citadel is also partly owned now by Sequoia Capital, which is the venture capital firm that “has produced more investment gains from China” than any other firm and has close ties to the CCP. Sequoia’s China division even employed a daughter of a politburo member.
Griffin and Murdoch are not alone. As Murdoch’s New York Post reported Wednesday, “GOP megadonors ditch Donald Trump’s 2024 White House run.” One of those megadonors is Stephen Schwarzman.
The day after Trump’s announcement speech attacking Chinese dependence, Schwarzman let Axios know that he will back any other Republican than the former president in the 2024 primary.
It shouldn’t surprise you that Schwarzman has deep ties to the Chinese Communist regime.
Schwarzman is the chairman and CEO of Blackstone Group, that’s the company that was partly owned for over a decade by the Chinese sovereign wealth fund. Between 2013-2018, his firm did $32 billion of Chinese deals, according to the Financial Times.
If you were the CEO of a company that’s done tens of billions of dollars worth of deals in China, would you want a populist that wants to punish Xi Jinping for the “China virus” in office? Probably not.
It’s rather shocking how the elite is trying to re-engineer the dynamics of the 2016 primary. The stage is set for Trump to rail against the billionaires putting China’s interests ahead of yours. Will he take advantage of it?
