CRAZY RACIST BILLIONAIRE ILLEGALLY DONATES TINY PORTION OF U.S. MILITARY WAGES

The New York Times has identified the rich man who's making it possible for President Trump to pretend he's found a clever workaround to get the troops paid during the shutdown:

Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and a major financial backer of President Trump, is the anonymous private donor who gave $130 million to the U.S. government to help pay troops during the shutdown, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Trump announced the donation on Thursday night, but he declined to name the person who provided the funds, only calling him a “patriot” and a friend.

This is a drop in the bucket.

It remains unclear how far the donation would go toward covering the salaries of the more than 1.3 million troops who make up the active-duty military. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Trump administration’s 2025 budget requests about $600 billion in total military compensation. A $130 million donation would equal about $100 a service member.

So it doesn't remain "unclear how far the donation would go toward covering the salaries" -- it won't be even one day's pay.

Also, this is completely illegal.

... the donation appears to be a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services.

As Fortune noted last year, Mellon's politcal donations to Trump in the last presidential cycle exceeded those of a better-known billionaire:

One of the largest donors to help President-elect Donald Trump was Timothy Mellon, an heir to the generational fortune of Gilded Age tycoon Andrew Mellon.

In the 2024 election cycle, Mellon, 82, donated $125 million to the super PAC Make America Great Again, Inc. that supported Trump, according to Federal Election Commission documents.

... Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave at least $119 million to a PAC he set up to re-elect Trump.

And as an earlier Times profile notes, Mellon also gave $25 million to Robert Kennedy Jr.'s presidential campaign. He has also been "a significant donor to Mr. Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense," bankrolling RFK Jr.'s dangerous anti-science crackpottery. Fortune notes that Kennedy blurbed Mellon's memoir:

“Tim Mellon is a maverick entrepreneur who embodies the most admirable qualities of what FDR called ‘American Industrial genius,’” Kennedy wrote of Mellon.

That memoir is full of racism.

Throughout the book he referred to Black people with racist stereotypes that they have a poor work ethic and are aggressive. “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 said in his book.

Decades ago, Mellon ran a regional railroad and an airline like a stereotypical supervillain.

Under his control, the railroad cut costs and rejiggered operations, battling with unions and regulators over wage cuts, layoffs, worker deaths and safety concerns. In the 1980s, strikes stretched on for months, disrupting service and, in at least one case, prompting congressional intervention....

His companies were repeatedly accused of violating environmental and safety standards. In 2006, they were convicted by a jury and fined $500,000 in Massachusetts for covering up an oil spill. (Mr. Mellon was not charged.) In 2008, federal regulators revoked certification for the airline company he had tried to rebuild after finding the company was falsifying financial records and operating in poor financial condition, forcing it to shut down. And in 2014, a jury awarded a worker $400,000 after finding he had been fired for reporting environmental concerns to the authorities.

An audit completed last year by the Federal Railroad Administration into two fatal employee accidents that occurred during Mr. Mellon’s ownership cited “critical safety concerns” and attributed them to the “apparent failure of Pan Am’s leadership” to develop a “positive safety culture.”

As he's aged, he's indulged in eccentricities, including right-wing politics and Amelia Earhart, sometimes in conjunction:

Years ago, Mellon was fascinated by the disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhardt, even donating $1 million to explorer Ric Gillespie who was trying to find her missing plane. In exchange for the donation, Gillespie let Mellon join the expedition. Mellon’s posts on an online forum about Earhardt, moderated by Gillespie, eventually turned into political screeds against the IRS, the intelligence agencies, and climate change. Gillespie had to limit his ability to post on the site.

The latter screeds weren't just about climate change, but about the scientists who study it:

When another forum member took exception to Mr. Mellon’s comparing climate-change scientists to terrorists, he did not back down.

“Not when people use phony science as a pretext to take political action to ruin the world economy and unilaterally relinquish our sovereignty in order to control human behavior,” he wrote. “Join their phalanx, if you wish, but not I.”

Mellon's theories about Amelia Earhart were utterly bonkers, and he was (to use his own term) belligerent in defending them after participating in Ric Gillespie's expedition.

The expedition failed to find Earhart’s plane. But in subsequent online discussions, where members of Mr. Gillespie’s forum shared theories about the Earhart mystery, Mr. Mellon became increasingly fixated on video taken during an earlier underwater search.

He wrote hundreds of posts over many months, some with annotated screenshots of the ocean floor, where he claimed to see airplane wreckage, personal effects and, eventually, bodies. Others tried to explain that he was only seeing rocks and coral, but Mr. Mellon insisted he could discern items they had missed: a banjo, a severed hand, even 75-year-old rolls of toilet paper.

It was apparent, he said, that the heads of Earhart and her navigator were encased in cellophane bags connected by a hose to a nitrogen tank, and that they had committed suicide.

Mr. Gillespie, fielding complaints from members about Mr. Mellon’s “outlandish ideas,” eventually limited his forum privileges. Mr. Mellon sued, claiming his $1 million gift had been unnecessary because the expedition team already had video evidence of Earhart’s plane but did not act on it.

He spent at least $150,000 on his own forensic experts trying to prove his assertions and pursued the case all the way to an unsuccessful appeal.

While a judge dismissed Mr. Mellon’s claims as “no more than theories and opinions,” the case dragged on for two years, imperiling the group’s finances.

“Tim gets pissed off at somebody, and he uses his wealth and the legal system to punish them,” Mr. Gillespie said.

I assume he's the reason Trump announced plans to open the Amelia Earhart files late last month.

Rich head cases like Timothy Mellon run our country. We're required to defer to their whims. And now that we have a president who's effectively dismantled the non-punitive parts of the government and created a culture of government by large donation, the country will be run according to rich lunatics' whims more than ever before.