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In July, after a would-be assassin’s bullet grazed Trump’s ear during a rally in Butler,
Pennsylvania,
-- another wave of giving came in to the Trump campaign.

Musk officially endorsed him on X within an hour of the shooting.

But the following week,
Biden dropped out of the race
and endorsed Kamala Harris as his successor.

Democrats, especially those who had been reluctant to support the eighty-one-year-old incumbent,
began dumping record sums into the race:

Harris brought in $200 million in her opening week as the Party’s official candidate.

In August, her first full month atop the ticket, Harris’s network raised $361 million to Trump’s $130 million.

Her operation, the Times reported, was bigger than Trump’s “in nearly every discernible category.”

But, even as Trump’s momentum faded,
most of the billionaires who had returned to his side were sticking with their choice.

“Do they have buyer’s remorse? No,”
one veteran Republican fund-raiser told me in August.

He allowed that “there’s concern about Trump being able to turn to a disciplined message,”

but, for this group, at least, Harris was never a conceivable option.

“They view her as even further left than Biden from a policy perspective,” the veteran fund-raiser said.

“There wasn’t an alternative to not be for Trump
—the alternative would be for no one.”

Another possibility was for major Republican donors to switch their emphasis to the Party’s efforts to hold on to the House and win back the Senate.

One Republican fund-raiser, a former Haley supporter,
spoke to me from the sidelines of a summer retreat that House Speaker Mike Johnson held for big givers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming,
where he found a number of donors more skeptical about the White House race.

“They’re just saying they’re going to sit out the Presidential for the time being and focus on the down ballot,” he said.

“The races where, even if Harris wins, if we unleash gargantuan resources in that particular race, we can still win.”

Among the donors who have reluctantly swung to Trump was the billionaire
#Thomas #Peterffy,
a Wall Street mogul and a six-figure donor to Trump in 2020,
who had vowed to do
“whatever I can”
to make sure the G.O.P. had a different nominee in 2024.

Federal campaign-finance records show that,
through the summer,
Peterffy donated some $7 million to G.O.P. politicians and Party organizations,
-- but he had given nothing publicly to Trump.

In August, he donated $844,660 to the Trump 47 joint fund-raising committee,
which helps support the ex-President’s campaign.