Former President Donald Trump.
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Prominent business leaders doubled down on their support for Trump after his conviction.Some called the trial unfair, others felt the guilty verdict would backfire.Small-dollar donors also flocked to the campaign in record numbers, Trump’s campaign said.
Former President Donald Trump’s conviction yesterday on falsifying business records hasn’t dissuaded high-profile supporters on Wall Street — some of whom are newly energized by the historic verdict.
In a post Thursday evening on X, venture capitalist Shaun Maguire revealed his support for Trump, noting “the timing isn’t a coincidence” as he announced a $300,000 donation to the presumptive Republican candidate.
“Bluntly, that’s part of why I’m supporting him,” Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, wrote on X about a potential conviction. “I believe our justice system is being weaponized against him.”
He wasn’t the only prominent business leader who seemed fired up.
Tech investor David Sacks, who was reportedly in talks to hold a Trump campaign fundraiser at his San Francisco home, denounced the guilty verdict on X.
“A sham trial designed for one purpose: to brand Donald Trump as a ‘felon,'” Sacks wrote yesterday on X. “Watch Dems and the MSM endlessly repeat that word.”
The investor Omeed Malik, of 1789 Capital and Farvahar Partners — who hosted a fundraiser for Trump last month that raised over $10 million, CNBC reported — told CNBC he thinks the verdict will “completely backfire,” bolstering support for the convicted candidate.
Maguire, Sacks, and Malik did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
It wasn’t only prominent business leaders on Wall Street circling their wagons.
The Trump campaign said it raised a record $34.8 million after the verdict from small-dollar donors, while the National Republican Senatorial Committee also hit a fundraising high of $360,000 on Thursday.
Even billionaires who haven’t formally announced their support for Trump were quick to lambast the proceedings.
Amid reports that Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman is leaning toward endorsing Trump, the billionaire wrote on X Thursday that he agreed with Governor Ron DeSantis’ assessment of the trial; DeSantis called it “the culmination of a legal process that has been bent to the political will of the actors involved.”
Ackman didn’t immediately respond to Business Insider’s questions about the report that he may back Trump.
Elon Musk, too, said the proceedings had caused “great damage…to the public’s faith in the American legal system.”
“If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter — motivated by politics, rather than justice — then anyone is at risk of a similar fate,” Musk wrote on X.
Musk is being considered for an advisory role in Trump’s White House, though the two have had a bumpy relationship in the past, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Musk has denied that he’s in talks to work with Trump.
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