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Billionaire Republican donors Liz Uihlein and her husband Dick Uihlein will help bankroll Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, providing a much-needed boost to the former president as he tries to blunt Joe Biden’s money advantage.
The Uihleins had been among the biggest donors to the campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who sought to challenge Trump for the Republican party’s presidential nomination but dropped from the race in January.
“We back Trump,” Liz Uihlein, the president of the packing supply giant Uline, told the Financial Times.
Her interview with the FT came after Trump swept 14 of the 15 states voting on Super Tuesday this week, forcing his last Republican rival, Nikki Haley, to drop out of the race.
The Uihleins are the highest-profile Republican megadonors yet to announce their return to Trump’s fold, as the former president tries to build a financial war chest to fight what is expected to be the most expensive White House battle in history.
The Uihleins each gave $1.5mn to DeSantis’s failed presidential bid. Liz Uihlein told the FT she would give a similar amount to Trump.
The billionaire couple, founders of the Uline shipping and packing company, have given more than $250mn to federal candidates and political groups since the 2016 election cycle, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets. The couple backed Trump in the two previous elections, before joining several other megadonors in seeking an alternative candidate to support for the 2024 race.
But in her interview with the FT Liz Uihlein expressed some exasperation about her political influence in the Trump era.
“These two guys are very well-defined. I don’t understand why everybody has to give all this money,” she said, referring to Trump and Biden. “Neither of them have to spend a penny. We all know who they are. It’s ridiculous.”
Despite her plan to support Trump and other Republicans in the 2024 election, she also expressed qualms over the former president’s rhetoric.
“Everybody likes Trump’s policies,” said Liz Uihlein. “But we have almost 10,000 people that work for us and I would never talk to them the way Trump talks to people.”
The Uihleins’ contributions will be important for Trump as he sews up his party’s nomination and tries to close Biden’s lead in the money race. At the end of 2023, Biden groups had about $118mn on hand, compared with about $66mn for Trump groups. The difference — $52mn — was equal to the Trump groups’ legal costs in criminal and civil cases.
Trump is also vying to win over megadonors who had backed Nikki Haley as an alternative to the former president. In January, the former president warned her billionaire backers that they would be “barred” from his “MAGA camp” if they continued to contribute to her campaign.
Many of Haley’s top donors are now debating whether to back Trump, or just focus on Republican efforts to win the Senate and protect the party’s majority in the House of Representatives.
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Art Pope, a North Carolina retail baron who gave a pro-Haley Super Pac $500,000, said any support for Trump would be conditional.
“It depends on who he picks for vice president; whether he welcomes traditional conservatives and listens to them on issues where there are differences; the policies Trump elaborates on, emphasises and formally adopts; whether he runs a positive campaign rather than a grievance campaign; and on any black swan event,” Pope told the FT.
Liz Uihlein said she previously thought the fight over abortion rights would help Biden win re-election, but now said Americans’ unhappiness with inflation and immigration, coupled with the US’s inability to stop Houthi attacks on shipping routes, were now working in Trump’s favour.
“I think Trump can win,” she said, adding that the litany of criminal charges and legal threats to the former president had “enormously” helped him win Republican support in the party’s primary.
“The American people see through things,” she said. “It’s so trumped up.”
Trump is all but assured to earn the Republican nomination in the coming weeks and will formally accept it at the party’s convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in mid-July. The event would be a “showcase” for her home state, Liz Uihlein said. Her political advisor Tony Povkovich is on the host committee.
“We’re crazy about Wisconsin,” said Liz. “We love it here.”
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