The ex-President arrived with his son Eric,
stopping to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with each of the approximately two dozen guests,
a “AAA list” of the G.O.P.’s top funders,
as #John #Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket owner, put it.

Such events, another attendee told me, often feel like a birthday dinner for the host,
except that “there’s a lot of money being given to someone who isn’t the host
—making Donald Trump the birthday boy, so to speak.”

Trump was seated at the head table, between #Fanjul
—a major Republican donor going back to the early nineties
—and #Stephen #Schwarzman,
the C.E.O. of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity fund,
who had endorsed Trump the previous Friday.

Securing the support of Schwarzman was a coup for the Trump campaign.

In 2022, he had said that he would not back the former President again,
because it was time for “a new generation of leaders,”
and, during the primaries, he had given $2 million in support of Chris Christie,
the former New Jersey governor,
who had repeatedly called Trump “unfit to be President.”

In a statement explaining the reversal, Schwarzman said that Biden’s “economic, immigration and foreign policies” were “taking the country in the wrong direction.”

At the dinner, Trump reprised his public rant about the “biased” legal proceedings brought against him,
but an attendee who spoke with me was struck by how “calm and confident” Trump seemed for someone facing prison time.

“He has this very strong internal capability to push those things aside and still feel good about things,” the attendee said.

At the end of the evening, Trump went around the room and solicited opinions on whom he should pick for his running mate.

Haley, Scott, and Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and a wealthy businessman, were mentioned;
-- a couple of the attendees expressed a preference for J. D. Vance,
the young populist senator from Ohio, whom Trump would ultimately choose.

The donors appeared to relish the chance to help select a Vice-Presidential candidate.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the attendee marvelled.
🔸Trump raised about $50 million at the event.

As 2024 began, Trump’s money problems were mounting:

Biden started the election year with almost $120 million in the bank
—nearly three times as much as Trump.

The ex-President, with four criminal indictments and multiple civil lawsuits pending,
was also paying tens of millions of dollars in legal bills through his political operation.

The main super pac of his Republican rival Nikki Haley, meanwhile,
outraised his own by nearly $5 million in the second half of 2023.

In January, Trump posted a threat on social media to the donors defecting to Haley,
whom he had taken to calling Birdbrain:

“Anybody that makes a ‘Contribution’ to Birdbrain, from this moment forth, will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp.
We don’t want them, and will not accept them.”

On February 16th,
the same day as Peltz’s dinner in Palm Beach,
Trump’s business was hit with a
$355-million judgment,
plus interest,
in a New York civil fraud case.

At a fund-raiser in Dallas, in March,
Biden taunted his rival about his dire financial state, joking,
“Just the other day, a defeated-looking guy came to me and said,
‘Mr. President, I need your help.
I’m being crushed with debt. I’m completely wiped out.’
-- I had to say, ‘Donald, I can’t help you.’ ”

But Trump’s cash crisis was misleading.

By mid-March, after Haley dropped out and the ex-President clinched the nomination,
his fund-raising comeback was already under way.

⚠️Many rich Republicans might have preferred to move on from him,
but they were still, above all, right-wing partisans.

They had flip-flopped on Trump before
-- they could do it again.

➡️Later that month, Peltz hosted Musk, Wynn, and a few others for a Sunday-morning breakfast.

This time, Trump was not the subject of agonized debate among the billionaires.
🧨He was the guest of honor.

Trump’s effort to win back wealthy donors received its biggest boost on the evening of May 30th,
❌when he was convicted in Manhattan on thirty-four criminal counts related to his efforts to conceal hush-money payments to the former adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

After the verdict, Trump walked out to the cameras in the courthouse and denounced the case brought against him as “rigged”
and a “disgrace.”

Then he departed in a motorcade of black Suburbans.

🔥He was headed uptown for an exclusive fund-raising dinner, at the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Florida sugar magnate #José (Pepe) #Fanjul.