Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has chartered such a crazy route to the White House that hiring banker Steven Mnuchin as his Campaign Finance Chair might seem on the surface one of his more conventional moves.
After all Mnuchin was a partner for 17 years at Goldman Sachs where his father worked for 30 years. But like the man he is now raising money for, Mnuchin is an unconventional, controversial selection.
He has precious little experience in GOP fundraising. Since 1998 he has donated $71,000 to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, nearly double his contributions to the Republican Party during the same period. Mnuchin also started a hedge fund in 2003 with wealthy liberal financier George Soros who has pledged to spend millions to stop Trump get elected .
Mnuchin, the chairman and CEO of private investment firm Dune Capital Management, has come under fire for having been sued for the return of $3.2 million in fake profit that he made from his mother’s account with convicted Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff. He also reportedly made millions from fraudulent foreclosures just after the 2008 financial crisis, buying a failed Californian lender IndyMac, renaming it One West Bank and doubling his investment when he sold it to CIT Group for $3.4 million.
Mnuchin has been entrusted with making good on Trump’s pledge to NBC’s Lester Holt that, “We are going to try to raise over a $1 billion.” Following Trump’s hitherto self-financed campaign (he is estimated to have injected around $50 million of his own funds into his successful primary strategy) Mnuchin has spent the last month wooing potential Republican donors including New York Jets owner Woody Johnson, energy mogul T.Boone Pickens and businesswoman Diane Hendricks, the richest woman in Wisconsin.
New Trump finance chair Steven Mnuchin is a hedge fund manager; Trump has bashed them as “paper pushers” “getting away with murder.”
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 5, 2016
Trump struck a deal earlier this month with the RNC (Republican National Committee) setting up the Trump Victory Fund which enables potential benefactors to donate nearly $450,000 to finance his campaign. It was Mnuchin who organized the first fundraiser of his campaign- tickets started at $25,000- held last Wednesday at the home of private equity investor Tom Barrack in Santa Monica, California.
The location of the first Trump fundraiser was appropriate since during the last decade Mnuchin has set his sights on conquering Hollywood as a producer. Usually financiers who have a crack at becoming film producers carefully limit their choices to spread the risk of investing in entertainment.
But Mnuchin has pursued an all-in movie investment strategy with his company Dune Entertainment investing in 170 Hollywood films over the last ten years.
Mnuchin, who is now required to persuade the Republican establishment to significantly bankroll Trump, has spent a considerable amount of time during the last decade helping make happen the passion projects of many of his new boss’s leading liberal celebrity detractors.
Take one of the first films he invested in- Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 hit comedy Borat. The comedian has become one of Trump’s biggest showbiz tormentors, telling James Corden’s The Late Late Show earlier this week: “Well… I was the first person actually to realize he’s a dick.”
Dune Entertainment co-financed dozens of films with 20th Century Fox between 2006 and 2012. They included James Cameron’s Avatar and three films in the X-Men franchise. But Mnuchin also helped bankroll Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. It’s a movie Trump is unlikely to have in his Blu-Ray collection since he filmed a cameo for the film alongside Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko only for it to be cut by Oliver Stone during post-production of the film because he felt it was too “distracting”.
When the Fox deal broke down, Mnuchin merged Dune Entertainment with RatPac Entertainment, a film company run by director Brett Ratner and billionaire James Packer in 2013. The trio made a $450 million deal to co-finance 75 films distributed by Warner Bros.
Mnuchin is a long-standing acquaintance of George Clooney and was an executive producer of 2013 hit space film Gravity starring Clooney and Sandra Bullock which reputedly made RatPac-Dune $40 million. Mnuchin also served as an executive producer of last fall’s political satire flop Our Brand is Crisis, c0-produced by Clooney, in which Bullock starred as a political consultant who engineers the unlikely Presidential election victory for an out-of-control, egomaniac populist candidate.
Our Brand is Crisis flopped but during its promotion and sensing the similarities between fact and fiction, Clooney told a press conference at the Toronto Film Festival that Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants were “idiotic” and that his popularity was “good for the movie but bad for the country.” During another promotional event for the film Bullock was critical of his proposal to force Mexico to pay for a border wall.
Mnuchin was also an executive producer of last year’s Black Mass starring Johnny Depp as Boston mobster ‘Whitey’ Bulger. Depp recently popped up playing Trump in a Funny or Die sketch that went viral.
A producer source said that Mnuchin is still a partner in Ratpac-Dune but has taken a backseat because of his new role and won’t be producing the company’s upcoming biopics of disgraced French former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn- to be played by Depp- and late Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky.
But Mnuchin’s reputation in movie circles took a battering when he joined mini-studio Relativity Media as an investor and co-chairman in October 2014 only to quit the post just before Relativity filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy less than a year later. According to the New York Post, Mnuchin’s OneWestBank took nearly $50 million from Relativity in the period up to its bankruptcy and was blamed by the company for causing it to postpone the release of Masterminds, a comedy starring Kristin Wiig and Zach Galifanakis, had viewed as a potential rescuer of the company’s fortunes.
Given so much of Mnuchin’s experience lies with Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, neither of which have embraced Trump, it remains to be seen how successful he will be as the Donald’s Finance Chairman. The task is even tougher when so many rich Republicans are dead set against Trump.
Connecticut investor Michael K. Vlock, who has donated close to $5 million to Republicans since 2014, told the New York Times of Trump: “He’s an ignorant, amoral, dishonest and manipulative, misogystic, philandering, hyper-litigious, isolationist, protectionist blowhard.” Hedge Fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller told the same source: “Not sure why anyone would give money to Mr. Trump since he asserts he is worth $10 billion.”
But there has been some success. Trump arranged for Mnuchin to meet with Anthony Scaramucci, hedge fund tycoon and founder of Skybridge Capital, who has recently reversed his opposition to his Presidential bid.
Mnuchin and Scaramucci, who worked at Goldman Sachs together, recently banged the drum for Trump at the SALT Conference, the annual Las Vegas finance event founded by Skybridge where they reportedly met with T. Boone Pickens, former House Speaker John Boehner, former Senator Scott Brown and Republican socialite Georgette Mosbacher.
But his new company is a far cry from his LA movie circles he ran in until recently. Sources tell Heat Street Mnuchin celebrated Gravity‘s Academy Awards success by showing up at Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party (the magazine and Trump are sworn enemies). Last March he was on the committee of environmental nonprofit Conservation International’s Los Angeles gala alongside the likes of actor and activist Ed Norton and Kristin Gore, daughter of Al Gore.
Also on the committee was Mnuchin’s girlfriend Louise Linton, a 29-year-old Scottish actress who has been his companion since the break-up of his marriage to his first wife Heather.
Linton’s credits include a small role in Robert Redford’s Iraq war film Lions for Lambs as well as Warren Beatty’s upcoming Howard Hughes biopic. A less distinguished role was playing Vanessa Rose Bellows, a fictional friend of Kate Middleton, in trashy 2011 royal TV movie William and Kate.
https://t.co/XnAv3GVAWJ @HillaryClinton
— Louise Linton (@LouiseLinton) April 12, 2015
What does Linton- who has expressed vocal support of Hillary Clinton- think of Trump? She told the Edinburgh Evening News earlier this month: “I sat next to him at dinner and he was charming and engaging.
“I appreciate he is polarizing individuals politically, but in person he is thoughtful, personable and polite.”
If her boyfriend fails to fill up polarizing Donald’s war chest, that polite and personable nature will surely be tested to the full.
