Tag: Trump

Meet Robert Mercer, the conservative billionaire who was a megadonor for Trump during the 2016 campaign but is notably absent in 2020

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Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah.
Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah.

Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

  • Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, were amongst the most prominent conservative megadonors in 2016, extending unwavering support to President Trump.

  • So far, Mercer has only made one six-figure donation to Trump’s reelection campaign.

  • An influential figure in the hedge-fund industry and a computer scientist, Mercer made principal investments in both Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica in the past.

  • The Mercer Family Foundation and Trump Campaign did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.

  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

A billionaire donor who bankrolled President Trump’s 2016 campaign has been notably absent during his reelection efforts.

Robert Mercer, a hedge fund manager, donated upwards of $25 million dollars in the previous election cycle across multiple conservative efforts. So far, Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, have made a single $355,200 donation to Trump’s reelection effort. 

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The Trump campaign’s fundraising emails have gotten very in-your-face and awkwardly personal, especially with Eric and Don Jr.’s guilt trips

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Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. speak during a ribbon cutting event at Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in The Bronx.
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. speak during a ribbon cutting event at Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point in The Bronx.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

  • Aggressive, in-your-face fundraising emails from political campaigns are nothing new, but the Trump campaign has taken it to a new level.

  • Following in the Obama campaign’s pioneering tactic of using campaign surrogates as the apparent email senders, many of the Trump campaign’s money requests come from his adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric.

  • “I convinced my father to give you another chance,” a recent subject line from Eric read, before he signed off with an ominous “We won’t extend your match offer again. Don’t let the President down.”

  • To keep up with the Trump campaign’s strangest fundraising emails without having to see them pile up in a personal inbox, you can follow @TrumpEmail.

  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

For

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As Trump Calls for Schools to Fully Reopen, His Son’s School Says It Will Not

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St. Andrew's Episcopal School, which President Donald Trump's son Barron attends, in Potomac, Md., April 29, 2020. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)
St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, which President Donald Trump’s son Barron attends, in Potomac, Md., April 29, 2020. (Samuel Corum/The New York Times)

WASHINGTON — The school attended by President Donald Trump’s son will not fully reopen in September out of concern over the coronavirus pandemic despite the president’s insistence that students across the country be brought back to classrooms in the fall.

St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, a private school in Washington’s Maryland suburbs, said in a letter to parents that it was still deciding whether to adopt a hybrid model for the fall that would allow limited in-person education or to resume holding all classes completely online as was done in the spring. The school will decide early next month which option to follow.

“We are hopeful that public health conditions will support our implementation of the hybrid model in the fall,” said the letter signed by Robert Kosasky, the

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Donald Trump cancels Republican convention speech over virus fears

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Donald Trump admitted that his speech would be risky because of the outbreak - REUTERS
Donald Trump admitted that his speech would be risky because of the outbreak – REUTERS

Donald Trump has cancelled his Republican convention speech in Florida because of the coronavirus outbreak there, saying he did not want to “take any chances”.

The US president had moved his speech to the state from North Carolina, claiming the governor there would not let him hold one with a big crowd, but now has cancelled that plan.

Mr Trump said he will still do a speech formally accepting his party’s nomination but that the details had not yet been worked out, suggesting it was possible it could be online only.

“I’ll still do a convention speech in a different form but we won’t do a big, crowded convention per se. It’s just not the right time for that,” Mr Trump said.

Follow the latest updates below.

02:49 AM

An Israeli firm is developing a

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Kimberly Guilfoyle under fire for Trump fundraising disarray

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News that Kimberly Guilfoyle contracted the coronavirus had barely surfaced on July 3 before she hopped on a private flight from Mount Rushmore back to New York with her boyfriend, Donald Trump, Jr.

Left behind in her wake after President Donald Trump’s pre-Independence Day address were more than a half-dozen junior campaign staffers whom Guilfoyle oversees as the president’s national finance chair. The aides, who’d been in proximity to Guilfoyle, were forced to quarantine in their Rapid City, S.D., hotel rooms for three days and barred from face-to-face contact with colleagues as they pleaded with the campaign to get them home.

The campaign tried to reassure the staffers, checking in with them and stressing the need to wait a few days to take a coronavirus test. But the aides felt deserted and scared they’d get sick in a city they’d never set foot in before. They were so distraught that

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Combative TikTok Founder Races to Save App Before Trump Ban

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(Bloomberg) — Zhang Yiming is the little-known Chinese entrepreneur who built TikTok into one of the most promising franchises on the internet. Now the brainy, combative founder is under pressure to save the business from Trump administration threats.

Venture investors in TikTok parent ByteDance Ltd. have approached Zhang with a range of proposals to address U.S. concerns that the short-video app is a security threat, according to people familiar with the matter. They include selling a majority stake in TikTok to American interests, perhaps strategic investors or the venture firms themselves, said the people, asking not to be identified because the talks are private.

Zhang, who controls the company, has so far resisted. He’s tried building up TikTok’s operations in the U.S., hiring an American chief executive officer and reassuring regulators that user data will not be shared outside the country. TikTok has also stepped up its lobbying in Washington,

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Trump sours on online learning that his administration evangelized

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President Donald Trump’s newfound disdain for online education is a sharp departure from what his administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have long championed in terms of policy on virtual learning.

As he presses schools and colleges to physically reopen their doors this fall, Trump has dismissed online learning as an acceptable strategy that local education leaders can employ as they face surging coronavirus cases in many parts of the country.

“Now that we have witnessed it on a large scale basis, and firsthand, Virtual Learning has proven to be TERRIBLE compared to In School, or On Campus, Learning,” Trump said in a tweet last week. “Not even close! Schools must be open in the Fall.”

In events and media appearances over the past several weeks, the White House and administration officials have repeatedly insisted that the nation’s schools and colleges must physically reopen classes — and that online

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Team Trump Frantically Plots New Ways to Make Him Feel Good About Himself

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Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty
Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast/Getty

On Tuesday night, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro—whom Donald Trump affectionately calls “my Peter”—decided to dump gasoline on a simmering fire when he sent USA Today a statement that it published as an op-ed in which he slammed Dr. Anthony Fauci for standing in the way of “the president’s courageous decision” making on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Having just downplayed the significance of anti-Fauci talking points that they themselves had sent to media outlets, members of the White House press office were left, once again, to repair the residual damage, insisting that the USA Today opinion piece didn’t go through the “normal White House clearance processes.”

But the fact that Navarro didn’t get official clearance for his statement was largely an irrelevant point. After all, he didn’t need it. According to three individuals familiar with the matter, in the past few months Trump

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Trump humiliates Sessions, Senate battleground hardens

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President Donald Trump’s interests in Tuesday’s primaries went beyond politics and his grip on the Republican Party.

Tuesday night was personal for Trump — and, on that measure, he won.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general and the target of his derision over the past three years, got drubbed in Alabama. Trump’s former White House physician, Ronny Jackson, won in Texas and is all-but-certain to come to Congress in January.

But the Trump-driven GOP contests weren’t the only ones on the ballot. Democrats are on the verge of finalizing their lineup of candidates for their Senate takeover drive, including tapping Sara Gideon to take on Susan Collins in Maine, one of the top races in the country. Both parties picked nominees in House races that point to their November strategies. And even the GOP’s under-the-radar primaries continued to be defined by Trump and his mutable cast of allies.

Here are

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Trump administration reverses new visa guidelines for international students

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The Trump administration walked back a sudden policy change that would have potentially blocked hundreds of thousands of international students from remaining in or returning to the U.S. while pressuring universities to resume in-person classes in the fall amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Following a week-long fight by Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and more than a dozen state attorneys general, the government agreed on Tuesday to “rescind” a policy that would have affected international students who are attending institutions that have opted to go completely remote over the fall.

“For the hundreds of thousands of international students across this country who enrich our institutions and strengthen our communities — we celebrate this victory with you,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said in a statement. “This ICE rule was senseless and illegal the minute it came out, and the Trump Administration knew it didn’t have

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