Who is Timothy Mellon, the super-donor funding Trump’s anti-LGBTQIA+ attacks?

In the last two years, Mellon has donated over $225 million to at least 30 Republican candidates, including a whopping $140 million to the pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA, Inc.

THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED ON UNCLOSETED MEDIA A NEW INVESTIGATIVE LGBTQIA+ FOCUSSED NEWS PUBLICATION.

WORDS BY TOM SAYERS
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY SPENCER MACNAUGHTON AND SAM DONNDELINGER

On 16 October, Kamala Harris was “grilled” by Fox News host Bret Baier about her position on healthcare for trans people. In a gotcha moment, they played a recent Trump campaign ad that brought to the surface a clip of Harris discussing gender-affirming care for incarcerated trans people. When pressed on what she might do in her presidency, Harris said she would follow the law. To show the scale of the issue, Harris told Baier that “Trump spent $20 million on those ads trying to create a sense of fear in the voters,” calling the issue “remote” to the public.

Analysis by The New York Times found that Republican candidates have spent over $65 million on anti-trans messaging since Aug. 1. The Trump campaign has spent roughly $15.5 million on two ads, including one where the narrator says “Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for You.”

But who exactly is footing the bill? Well, there are a handful of Republican mega-donors, including Jeff Yass, Richard & Elizabeth Uihlein, and Miriam Adelson. While all of them have given millions of dollars, no one has given as much to Trump’s 2024 campaign as Timothy Mellon. In the last two years, he has donated over $225 million to at least 30 Republican candidates, including a whopping $140 million to the pro-Trump super PAC, MAGA, Inc. His latest donation of $25 million was in September, according to the most recent FEC filings. And whether Mellon knows it or not, much of his money is likely funding the anti-LGBTQIA+ messaging that has taken centre stage in recent weeks.

This includes messaging from super PACs, which are political groups that can raise and spend unlimited money to support or oppose candidates as long as they don’t work directly with them, and candidates who are pushing anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation and forcing anti-trans messaging front and centre in the lead-up to the 5 November election, which is on track to become the nation’s most expensive election in US history. 

Eighty-two-year-old Mellon is an heir to the Mellon Banking fortune, which is estimated at $14.1 billion. He’s now the biggest donor to the Republican party and has increased his spending since the 2016 election more than 5,000-fold. But he was not always an arch-conservative. A New York Times article from 1971 described him as “a quiet Yale graduate” who had “applied computer techniques to city planning.” At this time, he founded and endowed Sachem Fund, which donated to various progressive causes, including a corporation to help formerly incarcerated people start businesses and one of the first all-women “feminist collective” law firms. But as time passed, Mellon’s political perspectives – and donations – veered in the opposite direction.

Mellon’s cousin, Richard Mellon Scaife, who passed away in 2014, also used his money to power the conservative movement. He was a founding contributor, vice chairman and $34 million donor to The Heritage Foundation – the conservative think tank that penned Project 2025. He also donated to the Free Congress Foundation, which published “The Homosexual Agenda,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as “an anti-LGBT call to arms that links homosexuality to pedophilia and other ‘disordered sexual behaviour.”

In the late 70s, when Mellon was in his 30s, he began sharing his cousin’s animosity toward the institutions of liberal America. He wrote in his 2014 memoir – panam.captain – that “Black people … [have become] even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations … They have become slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam. Slavery Redux. For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on.”

He also declared that “Black Studies, Women’s Studies, [and] LGBT Studies…have all cluttered Higher Education with a mish-mash [sic] of meaningless tripe designed to brainwash gullible young adults into going along with what he calls “the Dependency Syndrome.”

He writes that “Main Stream [sic] Media … is ”largely the propaganda arm of the Federal Government … [reporting] only that which supports the Dependency Message.” He adds that “MSNBC has become a caricature: Rachel MadCow, Ed “The Horse[‘s as$$]” Schultz, Chris “Haze,” and Chris “Trickle Down” Matthews, contending with one another for Chief Laughing Stock and gradually sinking their pathetic little cable station into oblivion.”

Mellon did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.

Before 2010, Mellon wouldn’t have been able to give $140 million of direct support to the pro-Trump super PAC to MAGA, Inc. But in 2010, a Supreme Court case in favour of Citizens United made it legal for corporations and other groups to spend unlimited funds on elections, and designated corporate spending on elections as free speech. Since this ruling and the subsequent creation of super PACs, these committees “can accept unlimited money from a corporation or an individual,” Andrew Mayersohn, the committee researcher at the political finance research organisation OpenSecrets, told Uncloseted Media.

But there’s a catch. “They can’t donate it to a candidate at the federal level, but [super PACs] can run ads explicitly saying vote for or vote against a candidate,” he says, adding that this is a “big upgrade” that has “opened the floodgates” for wealthy individuals and corporations to “play the money politics game.”

Unlike many countries like Canada, France, and the UK, which limit private funding through caps or source from public funding models, the US heavily relies on private donations, resulting in costly, privately funded campaigns. In this election cycle, for example, both Harris and Trump have raised hundreds of millions.

“I think there is reason for folks to be concerned about the role of large money in politics,” Conor Dowling, professor of political science at the University of Buffalo, told Uncloseted Media. “Certainly to an outside observer, meaning outside the United States, it’s different and it seems odd.”

According to a 2023 report by Pew Research Center, roughly seven in ten US adults say that there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organisations can spend on political campaigns.

One consequence of this structure is that this can put mass amounts of money behind a hateful message if a particular candidate is attacking another minority group in an effort to win.

When Trump first ran in 2016, Dowling says anti-immigrant rhetoric dominated the election cycle. But now, he says, this has broadened to include “trans [people], and perhaps the broader LGBTQIA+ community.”

“I think it signals that the Republican Party thinks that that’s an issue that they can sway some voters on,”  says Dowling, whose research focuses on elite political behaviour. “And I think that’s troubling,” he says, adding that “the idea behind a democracy is to provide protections for minority groups.”

As Trump’s transphobic rhetoric has intensified through the current election cycle, Mellon’s money is likely funding many of the anti-trans attack ads. In May of this year, Trump announced that on day one of his administration, he would rescind Title IX protections for transgender students. He has repeatedly – and falsely – claimed that children are undergoing sex-reassignment surgery at school and, in a town hall with Fox News, said he will “absolutely stop” schools from allowing transgender athletes to play on sports teams that match their gender identity if he wins the 2024 election.

According to Accountable For Equality, a nonpartisan research group, roughly 40 percent of Trump’s TV ads attack trans healthcare. “Ohio, Wisconsin, Montana, and Texas are getting hit hard with anti-trans messaging,” a spokesperson for Accountable for Equality told Uncloseted Media.

Mellon – who hasn’t said much about the LGBTQIA+ community publicly – has also given $11 million since 2022 to Sentinel Action Fund, the super PAC arm of The Heritage Foundation – the group that wrote Project 2025, the 920-page book that is widely viewed as the most radically right-wing transition document in modern American history.

The document has been denounced by LGBTQIA+ advocacy organizations in part because it conflates trans visibility with pornography, suggesting that the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.

In their launch video, Sentinel Action Fund’s president – Jessica Anderson – says it has “a renewed commitment to disrupting the swamp.” The committee fundraises for The Heritage Foundation’s policy arm “Heritage Action,” whose vision is to “organise communities of patriots all across the country and work directly with representatives to turn conservative policies into law.” Heritage Action stands against trans rights, stating that “instructing children to question their own gender and biology at young and developing ages is a radical new experiment in social engineering.”

Since The Heritage Foundation was founded in 1973, it has advocated against marriage equality, LGBTQIA+ people serving in the military and LGBTQIA+ Boy Scout leaders, and in favour of conversion therapy.

“One potential concern with these ads is that they’re leading to more hate and more violence against those groups,” Dowling says, adding that the ads are meant to instil fear. “If people are really taking those messages in the way that the people airing them seem to want them to be intended … There is certainly some reason to be worried about potentially some sort of a political violence as a result.”

In addition to Sentinel Action Fund, Mellon has donated to at least 11 other super PACs and hybrid PACs since 2022, including $25 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund who produced an ad that criticises Democratic state Senator David Min for voting in favour of California Senate Bill 357. Min argued that the bill would protect Black, Latino, and transgender Californians. Mellon also donated $5 million to Wisconsin Truth PAC who are connected to Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) – who scored 7 out of 100 on Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Scorecard in 2022 for his anti-LGBTQIA+ track record. Sentinel Action Fund and Congressional Leadership Fund did not respond to requests for comment.

Mellon has also given directly to congressional and senate candidates at the federal and state levels. In the current election cycle, he has given almost $30,000 to some of the most anti-LGBTQIA+ elected officials in America, each at $3,300 apiece.

While this amount pales in comparison to what he’s given to Trump, Mayersohn of OpenSecrets explains that $3,300 is the maximum amount you can give this cycle, “You’ll see a lot of donations in that amount.”

In this cycle, Mellon has donated to Congresswoman Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who once boasted a 100% score on the vote scorecard by Family Research Council, which is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group. Her Congressional website declares, “Children should never be used as pawns to advance radical gender ideology. Permanently altering and disabling the physical bodies of children is never ok – and it is especially deplorable when done to gain cheap political points with the radical left.” Boebert regularly pushes for anti-trans legislation such as requiring “schools to notify parents if biological males are permitted to use women’s restrooms” and introduced legislation to honour Emma Weyant – who placed second – “as the rightful winner of the 2022 NCAA Division I Women’s 500-Yard Freestyle,” in an attempt to strip Lia Thomas – a trans athlete – of her win. Boebert also “oppose[s] efforts to redefine marriage as anything other than the union of one man and one woman.”

Mellon also gave to Nancy Mace (R-SC), who – according to her congressional website – stands firm “against the radical agenda that seeks to impose divisive DEI policies.” Mace opposes any mention of the existence of trans people in the classroom and regularly targets protections for trans kids in school. Boebart did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment and a representative for Mace had no comment.

As Mellon continues to fund super PACs and Republican candidates with anti-LGBTQIA+ track records, Conor Dowling doesn’t believe laws around limits on campaign financing will change anytime soon due to First Amendment protections because expenditures of money are viewed as a form of freedom of speech.

Despite this, he believes the use of such money toward anti-LGBTQIA+ messaging could change in a post-Trump political landscape. “Nobody’s going to know the answer to this until after he’s no longer running for office,” he says. “How much of this is about Trump and Trumpism versus a more common part of American politics generally?”

“If elites are not talking in this way, perhaps we won’t see this at the mass level as well.”

Additional reporting by Spencer Macnaughton and Sam Donndelinger

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