Timothy Mellon, scion of the Pittsburgh banking family, has put $75 million behind Trump while also spending on Kennedy and his heterodox causes.
By Isaac Stanley-Becker and Josh Dawsey, The Washington PostTimothy Mellon outside an inspection train during a property tour in 1981. Exact date and location unknown.
Those same traits are now on display in Mellon’s political giving. A railroad magnate and scion of one of the country’s wealthiest families, Mellon, 81, is the biggest donor to Donald Trump so far this cycle. He has contributed more than $75 million to a super PAC supporting the former president’s bid to return to the White House - significantly more than he gave in 2016 or 2020.
“We share a libertarian bent rooted in free speech and hostility towards censorship, a mutual opposition to government corruption and regime change wars, a skepticism towards the military industrial complex and an antipathy towards the rising security/surveillance state and the growing power of the intelligence apparatus,” Kennedy added. “Tim is intensely curious, skeptical towards orthodoxies and passionate about personal freedoms.
Signs of Andrew Mellon’s patronage are everywhere. His name adorns the neoclassical auditorium that played host to a 75th anniversary celebration during NATO’s summit That year, the Bangor Daily News reported that a nonprofit Mellon once ran had funded alternative energy projects, a feminist law firm and the American Civil Liberties Union - showing what the newspaper described asBut his politics had begun to shift with his expanding business endeavors. In 1977, he established a holding company, Guilford Transportation Industries, that began snapping up debt-ridden railroad lines across the Northeast.
John Nadolny, Pan Am Railway’s former vice president and general counsel, said Mellon wasn’t vocal about his political views in that era but did support conservative causes. He remembered joining Mellon for a dinner in Washington hosted by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has tacked sharply to Trump-style populism in recent years. A Heritage spokesman declined to comment.
He made his political views clear during a 2012 expedition seeking evidence of Earhart’s remains, according to a person on the trip, who said it became apparent that Mellon’s politics “veered to the right,” in contrast to others involved in the search. Mellon kept to himself, this person said, mostly sitting below deck reading books.
“Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the ‘Establishment’ to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations,” he wrote. He was especially critical of government welfare programs, writing that its recipients had “become slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam. Slavery Redux.”
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