NEW YORK — Wall Street’s top GOP donors are slowly realizing that former President Donald Trump is all-but-certain to clinch the presidential nomination. While billionaires and their strategists continue to throw Hail Marys, they’re also thinking about when to throw in the towel.
“The street still hopes for somebody else,” Thomas Peterffy, the GOP megadonor and founder of Interactive Brokers, told POLITICO from the sidelines of the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference last week.
The odds are exceedingly narrow, even with former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley’s recent surge in the polls. If Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis or another Republican fails to overtake Trump, Peterffy said, he still hopes for a brokered GOP convention — which hasn’t happened since Thomas Dewey was on the ballotin 1948 — or a viable, as-yet unannounced No Labels candidate.
The risks of a second Trump presidency are “incalculable and unpredictable,” he said. Of course, Peterffy has previously gone on record saying that he would likely vote for Trump in 2024 if the former president clinches the nomination.
Peterffy’s comments reflect the collective angst of Wall Street Republicans whose views on Trump are completely divorced from those of the GOP base, according to conversations with more than a dozen bankers, attorneys, political consultants and asset managers. There was a period when it seemed as though Trump might fade; allowing a younger, calmer alternative to take his place. Instead, the opposite happened.
A series of criminal indictments have had no effect on his popularity.........