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June 2024
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Miriam Adelson’s Unfinished Business

24-5-2024 < Attack the System 26 180 words
 
This week’s issue looks at the billionaire GOP megadonor Miriam Adelson’s potential to transform the 2024 election by supporting Trump. When she met her late husband, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, in the late 1980s, she was a divorced addiction doctor who had left Tel Aviv for New York to pursue a research fellowship on methadone treatment. But like almost all Israelis of her generation, the security of the state of Israel is her true calling. So after she married Sheldon in 1991, she leaned in. Through the 1990s, she switched from making modest donations to Democrats to making large donations to Republicans. Many political-fundraising experts believe Adelson will be Trump’s top patron in 2024, as she was in 2020. What will she expect in return? Beyond unconditional support for the Israel-Hamas war, one can assume she’ll press for the unfinished items of Trump’s Israel agenda from last term. Top of that list: Israel annexing the West Bank and the U.S. recognizing its sovereignty there. This is not just unpopular — it’s illegal under international law.
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