The US presidential election is an expensive business. An expensive private business: The Democratic Party’s election machine for Hillary Clinton has collected $1.35 billion in private donations from millions of ordinary citizens and dozens of billionaires and multi-billionaires. Donald Trump and the Republicans have collected $710 million in donations, including $56 million from the candidate’s pocket himself.

Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter



Hillary has not used any of her own money. According to her report to the Federal Election Commission, she is worth between $15-50 million. Trump claims to be worth $10 billion. His sums cannot be verified.

Hillary Clinton with donors Haim and Cheryl Saban (Photo: Ralph Alswang)

The Supreme Court of the United States permitted, in a historical ruling from 2010, unlimited financial donations from individuals, corporations and unions to “political action committees” which fund the different candidates’ election campaigns. The donations are monitored by non-profit organizations.

The Washington Post published an nearly complete sum of the incoming funds for both candidates, and the abovementioned figures were derived from there and updated to this past week. “Since modern-day campaign finance rules were put in place in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal,” The Washington Post wrote, “no president has ever been elected with the help of wealthy contributors who doled out such huge sums.”

It’s interesting to note that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have declared and sworn that they do not approve of the system in which elections are funded through unlimited private donations. But as long as the law allows it, they have buried their hand deep in the bowl. Some will see it as hypocrisy, and some will see it as a political game with no other choice.

I went over the list of Hillary Clinton’s mega-donors and felt great discomfort. What I am about to write has not been written, implied or whispered in the quoted report or in any other article or on websites which have published the list of donors, like the famous OpenSecrets non-profit group. It is definitely reasonable, therefore, that I am the only one who found something troubling on that list.

I am troubled. By what? Well, of the nine top private donors to Clinton’s election campaign, eight are Jewish. All of her top five mega-donors are Jewish: Donald Sussman, J.B. Pritzker, Haim Saban , George Soros and S. Daniel Abraham. Sussman controls hedge funds, Pritzker is a hotel and real estate tycoon, Saban owns popular television channels, Soros is active in the capital and foreign exchange markets and Abraham owns a diet food company. Together, they donated about $69 million to Clinton’s election campaign.

Through my keyboard, I can sense the readers’ anger. Aren’t America’s Jews allowed to donate to the presidential campaign, they ask amazedly and defiantly. You are a racist, Plocker.

I am not a racist. As a Jew, I am proud of the wealth and influence of American Jews. And if I am haunted by some unpleasant analogies from Jewish history, it’s my problem. These are my ghetto-like fears. After all, it’s as clear as daylight that not a single sensible American will argue that Hillary Clinton, as the president of the United States, will have to serve as a puppet in the hands of the Jewish money which funded her election, right? Say “you're right” and I’ll calm down.

US President Barack Obama, by the way, did not reach out to the big donors from the very beginning and relied on grassroots funding in his election campaign.