Imagine you are so wealthy that you can throw around $50 million without even blinking. What do you do with such an amount? Feed the poor? Start an enormous college scholarship fund for the underprivileged? Buy the entire Arena Football League? Fill the pools at all your mansions with ginger beer and black rum so you can literally swim in Dark and Stormys no matter where you are? Give some money to your Wonkette?
How about getting a fascist government elected in your country? That worked out so well for billionaire German industrialists in the 1930s.
Yet that is what Timothy Mellon, scion of one of the nation’s wealthiest families, raging bigot, and Amelia Earhart obsessive, has chosen to do. Remember when his ancestors funded, like, libraries and universities and the arts and shit? And now someone like Timothy and his cousin Richard Mellon Scaife can make us nostalgic for Gilded Age robber barons. The world is truly a magical place.
The New York Times reports that Timothy Mellon donated the $50 million to pro-Donald Trump super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc., the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felonies for business fraud connected to his being a terrible lay. This donation accounted for most of the almost $70 million the PAC raised in the month of May. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll blow it on cocaine or rent boys or paying Trump’s legal bills.
Or not:
Within days of the contribution, the pro-Trump super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., said in a memo that it would begin reserving $100 million in advertising through Labor Day.
This week MAGA Inc. announced the first salvo in that advertising: $30 million in TV ads to air in Georgia and Pennsylvania over the Fourth of July. Anyway, the GOP is the party of the working class now.
Mellon had already donated $25 million to MAGA Inc. and accounts for nearly half of what the group has raised in total for the 2024 campaign.
Mellon also donated $25 million to a super PAC supporting the campaign of Robert F. “Brainworm” Kennedy Jr., most likely because his smooth-brained binary view of Republicans and Democrats caused him to assume either that RFK Jr. must be a liberal, or that Democrats are idiots who would see RFK Jr. as a liberal no matter what thanks to his last name. Either way, Mellon thought he would take votes from Joe Biden.
Whether Mellon will ask for a refund on that $25 million now that people know RFK Jr. is a total lunatic who attracts Trump voters remains to be seen. Whether he will also pause and think “Hm, maybe I, a cloistered billionaire in the middle of Wyoming, don’t know as much about politics and American life as I think I do” also remains unknown, though we’re pretty sure we can guess the answer.
Mellon has long thrown his money at stupid causes. For example, he once gave money to Jan Brewer to help her stay in office. And a few years ago he donated $50 million to Gov. Greg Abbott and the state of Texas to build its own border wall. As of last August, Texas had managed to build a whopping 10 miles of wall along its thousand-mile border with Mexico. Clearly Mellon has excellent instincts for investments.
In addition to chronic xenophobia about scary browns crossing the border, Mellon once self-published an autobiography that took so much heat for its insulting caricatures of Black people that it is no longer available anywhere. Even Amazon (we checked), and those guys will sell anything. (Wonkette commission link.)
Personally, we would prefer Mellon save his funding for his real passion of searching for Amelia Earhart. Which, hilariously, he also appears to suck at:
In the course of examining the video, he said that November, he’d spotted something significant in the footage: Earhart’s plane. He could see it all: the tachometer, the altimeter, and a co-pilot’s wheel, among many other things. […]
Somehow that passage manages to undersell just how nuts Mellon’s reading of some murky underwater footage got:
“Tim says, ‘The airplane’s right there.’ I said, ‘Where?’ He said, ‘That’s a part of this and this is a part of this and oh, heck that’s Amelia’s hand. Oh, there’s body parts here.’ I said, ‘Tim, that’s not—that’s coral!’ He said, ‘Nah, nah…’ And this is on an online forum and he’s doing screen captures and circles and arrows and I’m going, ‘Shit,’ and then he decides, oh, there’s her banjo. Banjo?”
Maybe Earhart was so busy playing her banjo that she forgot to fly her plane!
“Stamps, toilet paper—it got really crazy. And then he saw Earhart and Noonan’s heads encased in cellophane bags attached to a hose, attached to a nitrogen bottle they used to service the landing gear.”
Mellon was apparently convinced that Earhart and her navigator, having crash-landed on a deserted island and with no hope of rescue, had committed suicide by pulling plastic bags over their heads and then somehow sucking nitrogen through a hose. This is the guy who has spent $100 million of his own money (so far) to elect the next president.
American politics! There is nothing finer, except for just about anything.
Wonkette is funded by you, the readers, not millionaires throwing $50 million at us.
95% inheritance tax now.
Erm.
Cellophane is notoriously fragile. As well as being wildly flammable (so not something you would normally bring on an aeroplane), it also breaks down really easily. Basically you need to keep it in a freezer.
So this galaxy brain thinks that cellophane bags survived many decades in warm sea water and were also not eaten by fish.
I wonder if he wants to buy a bridge...