Candidate Donald Trump waged a bitter fight with some of the Republican Party’s biggest donors, but President Trump is assiduously courting some of those same donors as he tries to consolidate control of his party and begins preparing for an expensive reelection campaign in 2020.

This Friday evening, Trump is set to speak in Palm Beach to a retreat for the Republican National Committee’s most generous donors. On Thursday evening, Trump's Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made a personal appearance at a Washington gathering of megadonors organized by a political operation fronted by hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and his allies.


Perhaps no single contributor embodies Trump’s turnabout as much as Singer, whose announcement of support for Marco Rubio in the 2016 GOP presidential primary prompted Trump to suggest he didn’t want Singer’s support, and to ominously warn of a “lotta controversy with Mr. Singer.”

Singer, in turn, donated $5 million to a pro-Rubio super PAC and then another $2.5 million to an anti-Trump PAC after Rubio dropped out of the race, and warned that if Trump pursued anti-trade policies as president it would be “close to a guarantee of a global depression.”

Yet in the days after Trump’s stunning victory, after some staff-level smoothing, a phone call from the president-elect to Singer was arranged. Singer congratulated Trump on his victory; Trump suggested they should meet. Later, Singer wrote a $5,000 check to Trump’s transition team and then a $1 million check to his inaugural committee, according to someone familiar with the transactions. After the inauguration, Singer reached out for that meeting.

Trump was hanging out in the Oval Office with a handful of his top advisers in mid-February, prepping for his first solo news conference as president, when Singer arrived, according to three people familiar with the visit.

“Bring him in!” Trump bellowed.

Singer was directed to a seat beside Trump’s desk, where he got to listen as senior aides tossed Trump a handful of murder-board-style questions. Then, after everyone else shuffled out, Singer stayed for a one-on-one meeting. They discussed economic policy, according to a person briefed on the conversation.

Singer, whose representatives declined to comment, is just one of many GOP donors who have been the subject of entreaties from Trump and his closest confidants —and the charm offensive appears to be paying dividends.

Several major GOP donors told POLITICO that Trump has shored up their support through his team’s outreach, as well as his performance in Tuesday's address to Congress.

The speech is “going to have a positive effect on donors,” predicted Michigan real estate investor Ron Weiser, a former RNC finance chair who served on Trump’s inauguration committee. “People who might have some questions before about where he’s going, now it’s pretty clear. They like the fact he was very presidential,” said Weiser, who is headed to the RNC donor retreat.

Senior Trump advisers acknowledge the contact with donors, particularly those who did not support Trump, but insist it’s not so much Trump doing outreach as responding to the deluge of donors who wanted on the Trump train, starting election night.

“He was literally inundated with calls starting that night. It was a tsunami,” said one top Trump adviser. “Trump is only reaching out to people who come reach out to him. He’s only getting back to people.”

The White House declined to comment on Trump’s donor maintenance efforts, and the RNC declined to comment on the retreat.

But sources said a few hundred people were expected to attend. While Trump’s Friday night speech is to be the main attraction, Rubio and Florida Gov. Rick Scott were scheduled to speak Saturday, and donors were abuzz about the prospect of a party aboard the $215-million yacht of casino mogul Steve Wynn. A former bitter business rival of Trump’s, Wynn supported Rubio’s campaign before switching to Trump’s team, and he has said he agreed to become RNC finance chairman after a personal request from Trump this year.

Other big donors getting the personal touch from Trump include Wall Street tycoon Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, who invested $15 million in super PACs supporting Trump’s rivals for the GOP nomination. Greenberg recently got an invitation to the White House, according to someone familiar with the matter. Though Greenberg has yet to visit, he did score a private audience with the president-elect in Trump Tower in December.

Phil Ruffin, a billionaire casino owner and friend of Trump’s who gave more than $500,000 to support Trump’s election in 2016, said of Trump's outreach to previously unsupportive donors, "He's doing the right thing," noting that the president’s outreach would prove “important four years from now.”

In January, for instance, Vice President Mike Pence placed a courtesy call to the billionaire megadonor Charles Koch to ask about hiring a speechwriter who had worked in the advocacy network spearheaded by Koch and his brother David. The Kochs and Trump had traded barbs throughout the presidential campaign, with Trump suggesting his rivals were “puppets” of the billionaire brothers. Charles Koch, in turn, compared the choice between Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to being asked to choose cancer or a heart attack. His network sat on the sidelines of the presidential race.

Yet Trump’s influential son-in-law Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser who has served as an unofficial liaison to the GOP’s elite donors, reached out to the Koch network during the campaign to set up a meeting, said sources familiar with the call.

Trump’s coddling of the GOP’s most generous patrons is the clearest example yet of his evolution from being an outsider crusading against the political establishment to a politician looking to protect his place at its center. Not only did Trump bash the donor class as a whole for being self-interested puppeteers, he singled out specific donors from his own party — including the Koch brothers and the Ricketts family — for personal criticism in a manner seldom seen in modern politics.

Yet, as Trump closed in on the GOP nomination, he made peace with the Ricketts family and other major donors, while a handful became part of his campaign team — such as hedge fund impresario Anthony Scaramucci, tech billionaire Peter Thiel and hedge fund heiress Rebekah Mercer — even as Trump continued running against the donor class clear through Election Day.

Trump boasted that as president he wouldn’t be beholden to donors because he was wealthy himself and poured $66 million from his own fortune into his campaign, which didn’t get much support from big-money super PACs. His side was outspent dramatically by the campaign and super PACs supporting Clinton, but Trump benefited from an unprecedented wave of free publicity that swirled around his unconventional circus-like campaign.

Inside GOP finance circles, there’s a growing recognition that Trump might not be able to run that type of asymmetrical campaign after four years of the types of scandals and critical media coverage that have buffeted him during his early days in the White House. So Trump and his team have set about systematically courting the biggest GOP moneymen with the types of perks typically used to win over new donors and keep old ones happy, among them access and appointments.

Trump has tapped or is considering megadonors who supported his rivals for all manner of positions, from his pick for deputy commerce secretary, Todd Ricketts, to his stalled pick for director of the Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs, Anthony Scaramucci, to his likely pick for ambassador to Canada, Kelly Knight Craft.

Meanwhile, his Cabinet is a who’s who of Trump’s top donors, including Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon, who gave $6 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who was Trump’s campaign finance director and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who gave more than $200,000 to aid Trump’s efforts. Trump’s withdrawn pick for labor secretary, Andy Puzder, was also a major donor.

“Trump has been very methodical and clever,” said one person who works closely with major Republican donors. “The process began within days of the election.”

Trump had once chided casino magnate Sheldon Adelson for trying to mold Rubio into a “perfect little puppet,” but after Adelson and his wife spent $20 million boosting Trump, they were rewarded with primo seats at Trump’s inauguration, as well as a February dinner in the White House.

Soon after the election, Trump also spoke with Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman and offered for him to chair a council of business leaders to advise him on jobs creation. Schwarzman had given $4.2 million to congressional GOP super PACs in October after refusing to say which presidential candidate he supported in September. No money went to Trump.

When Schwarzman threw a blowout 70th birthday party for himself in Palm Beach (there were camels and fireworks), attendees included Ivanka Trump and Kushner, and no less than three Cabinet secretaries: Mnuchin, Ross and Elaine Chao.

Other Trump supporters aren’t in the Cabinet but lined up for other unofficial Trump-related posts, such as the one Schwarzman now occupies. Trump friend and major donor Carl Icahn has been named a special adviser for regulatory reform, for instance.

Trump has also floated appointing Stephen Feinberg, who gave nearly $1.5 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, including nearly $1 million in the last week of the campaign, to lead a review of the intelligence community, which Trump has accused of leaking negative information about him. One senior administration official said Feinberg could also still end up inside the administration.

A top Trump aide said the president treats these fellow billionaires and businessmen as his equals in a way that past presidents could not.

“These are his peers,” said the adviser. “There are not President Bush or President Obama’s peers.”

In December, Trump attended a lavish costume party at the home of the family of Rebekah Mercer, who along with Thiel sat on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team.

In remarks to the crowd at the closed-press party, Trump praised the Mercers, telling the family’s guests about just how closely he worked with Rebekah Mercer, who recommended Trump bring on three key members of the brain trust that helped carry him across the finish line — Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway and Dave Bossie.

Trump told a story about how his phone rang in the middle of a recent night and he’d picked up in a daze. The person on the other end just launched into a long discussion. When Trump tried to figure out who it was, she replied, “It’s Rebekah.”

“Rebekah who?” he recounted replying in a late-night fog, despite their familiarity.

Since then, Mercer has been spotted in the White House more than once.

And it’s not just Trump courting the big donors — some of his top advisers have embraced donor maintenance with gusto, including family members like Kushner and Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

“I don’t have his cellphone number but I have Donny’s,” said Doug Deason, whose family has been a major Trump donors referring to Trump’s son, Donald Jr. “But I have Reince Priebus’ and Kellyanne Conway’s [numbers]; I have easy access to his staff if I wanted it.”

Deason, heir to an information-technology fortune, praised Trump’s overall donor outreach: “In my eyes, he’s doing a great job about that.”

But where Republicans see a pragmatic and cunning strategy, Democrats see bald-faced hypocrisy.

“Drain the swamp? He’s filling the swamp,” accused Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, who glad-handed donors for years as a top fundraiser for the Clinton family. “He ran on something else. The people whom he attacked are the same people he’s put in charge of the government. That is hypocritical. You can call it whatever you want. But don’t think for one second people aren’t paying attention.”