Trump donor’s book used racist language
The top donor supporting President Trump’s reelection and GOP congressional lawmakers is a reclusive heir to the wealthy Mellon family fortune who used racial stereotypes to describe Black people in an autobiography.
Timothy Mellon, the 77-year-old founder of a rail and freight company, who poured $30 million into three GOP super PACs in five months, wrote that Black people were ‘‘even more belligerent’’ after the expansion of social programs in the 1960s and 1970s and that Americans who rely on government assistance were ‘‘slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.’’
In a self-published 2015 autobiography, Mellon called social safety net programs ‘‘Slavery Redux,’’ adding: ‘‘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. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.’’
Mellon declined to comment.
The Wyoming-based donor, whose family fortune dates to the Gilded Age, gave his first major pro-Trump donation in April, with a $10 million check to America First Action, the main super PAC supporting the president’s reelection. His donations are the biggest known contributions to the group by far, and he is also a top donor to GOP congressional super PACs, according to campaign finance records.
America First Action, a super PAC chaired by Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration, declined to comment on Mellon’s contribution.
Mellon’s company, Pan Am Systems, did not respond to requests for comment on the views expressed in his autobiography, which its website described as ‘‘a refreshingly candid look into his family life as well as his business successes.’’
The book was available for free download on the company’s website until this week, when it was removed after inquires by The Washington Post. Copies are still available through a separate website.
Mellon, who is the great-grandson of Mellon family patriarch and banker Thomas Mellon, and grandson of Andrew W. Mellon, a former Treasury Department secretary, had given smaller amounts to state and federal GOP candidates for years, but increased his giving in the Trump era, campaign finance records show. His first major federal donation came in May 2018, when he gave $10 million to the super PAC that supports the House GOP.
Since February 2018, he has given $40 million to three super PACs, and tens of thousands of dollars more to an array of GOP candidates.
He now rivals other prominent donors who have increased their political giving during Trump’s political career, such as shipping supplies magnate Richard Uihlein and Stephen Schwarzman, the Blackstone chairman and chief executive.
In his autobiography, Mellon wrote that while his family had been Republicans for generations, it wasn’t until the presidency of Ronald Reagan that he fully considered himself a Republican. He said Reagan ‘‘understood that people did best for themselves when shackled with the least amount of governmental constraints.’’
‘‘Something had obviously gone dreadfully wrong with the Great Society and the Liberal onslaught. Poor people had become no less poor. Black people, in spite of heroic efforts by the ‘Establishment’ to right the wrongs of the past, became even more belligerent and unwilling to pitch in to improve their own situations,’’ Mellon wrote, describing his view of the United States during Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign.
Officials with the Senate Leadership Fund declined to comment. The Congressional Leadership Fund did not respond to requests for comment.
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