Sheldon Adelson, the Republican Party’s biggest funder over the past
decade, used a $20 million donation to a super PAC to pressure
then-president Donald Trump to adopt the highly controversial decision
to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That
quid-pro-quo is described in New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman’s
new book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking
of America.”
“Adelson’s singular focus was Israel,” wrote Haberman, effectively
acknowledging that the former president’s biggest funder was most
interested in promoting the interests of a foreign country.
“[In] Trump he saw a chance at enacting change in American policy
toward [Israel], and gave $20 million to a super PAC working to elect
him,” wrote Haberman. “As a candidate, Trump promised that he would open
an embassy in Jerusalem ‘fairly quickly,’ and after his victory,
Adelson pushed him to act on it. Over meetings during the transition and
first year of the administration, Adelson assured Trump that the
nightmare scenarios that he would be warned about in briefings as a
possibility following such a move were overblown.”
Haberman goes on to detail how Trump appointed his bankruptcy lawyer
David Friedman as ambassador to Israel and worked with his son-in-law
Jared Kushner to “shift the U.S. approach to the region.”
“He and Kushner, ignoring concerns about treating Palestinians as if
they were on equal footing with Israel in pursuing peace, pushed through
a string of measures, such as slashing financial aid to Palestinians,
forcing the Palestine Liberation Organization from its Washington
offices, and the embassy relocation,” she wrote.
Recognition of the role played by Adelson’s campaign contribution
apparently went all the way to the top of the Israeli government,
according to Haberman,” who reports, “A confidant to Israel’s prime
minister credited ‘David Friedman’s brains, Sheldon Adelson’s money, and
Trump’s balls’” for the embassy move.
The relocation resulted in protests where 58 Palestinians were killed in protests and 2,700 injured.
While a highly controversial decision that calls into question
the U.S. commitment to a two-state-solution with Jerusalem as the
shared capital of Israel and a future Palestinian state, the Biden
administration declined to reverse the policy shift allegedly made
possible by Adelson’s $20 million contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC.
Last year, the Democratic controlled Senate voted 97-to-3 in favor of
an amendment supporting the embassy relocation.
Sheldon Adelson died early last year but not before he and his wife
Miriam Adelson flaunted their influence by ferrying Jonathan Pollard — a
former U.S. Navy analyst who spent 30 years in prison after pleading
guilty to spying for Israel — out of the country and to a hero’s welcome
in Israel on one of the Adelsons’ private 737s after Pollard’s travel
ban was lifted.
Miriam, who holds both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, and is worth $27
billion, continues to loom large as a potential GOP megafunder in the
midterms and beyond, but she’s largely held back, thus far, from the
level of political giving she engaged in alongside her husband.
Whether or not she chooses to reemerge as a bankroller of the
Republican Party — and potentially a shaper of the party’s foreign
policy in the Middle East — she enjoys souvenirs from the influence she
and her husband appear to have held over the Trump administration on
sensitive U.S. foreign policy decisions.
After the Adelsons invested $133 million in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign efforts and Republican congressional campaigns Trump awarded Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.
But an even more tangible trophy was revealed in the final weeks
of the Trump presidency when the deep-pocketed supporters of the
embassy put up a roadblock for the next president to reverse the move.
The U.S. government sold the Adelsons the U.S. ambassador’s home in a suburb of Tel Aviv for $67 million.