The Billionaire's Expedition to Impeach Trump
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| Tom Steyer (Newsweek) |
Narcissism was in the air in Washington. On a February night a few hundred yards from the White House, Tom Steyer, the hedge fund billionaire and political activist, had taken over three rooms at the National Press Club for a panel called Presidential Mental Health & Nuclear Weapons. On the dais, two psychiatrists, a psychologist, a Jungian author, and a warhead-security specialist were settling into blue chairs in front of a blue curtain. They were there to discuss the matter of Donald Trump’s ego. But Steyer, stepping to the lectern by their side, was unmistakably the star of the show. Applause broke out. He smiled and locked eyes with people around the room. Fans following the Facebook livestream sent thumbs-ups by the thousands as he and the five speakers set about explaining why Trump’s sadism, paranoia, unpredictability, and self-obsession make him ill-suited to nuclear weaponry.
Steyer has commanded the spotlight before. His fund, Farallon Capital Management, made him a finance kingpin, and he became a darling of environmentalists after quitting in 2012 to fight climate change full time. His third act began six months ago, when he paid for and starred in his first nationwide ad agitating for Trump’s impeachment. If you’ve watched cable news recently, you’ve probably seen him, 60 years old with a healthy tan and a look of grim concern, staring into your soul.
“I’m Tom Steyer, and like you, I’m a citizen who knows it’s up to us to do something,” he says in the first spot, his voice gravelly and grave. He’s sitting by a fireplace wearing a folksy-billionaire midnight-blue denim shirt. His name comes on screen above “American Citizen” in smaller letters. Strings murmur eerily as the camera closes in. “People in Congress and his own administration know that this president is a clear and present danger,” Steyer says. Within four months of the ad’s first airing, 5 million people had joined his campaign, Need to Impeach, providing names for an impeachment petition and email addresses for his budding list.
Steyer isn’t the first to claim there are grounds for booting Trump from office, but his enormous pools of wealth, outrage, and ambition mean he can do more than the members of Congress responsible for impeachment proceedings: He can spend the money required to stoke a fire and fan its flames until a real chance to burn down the administration presents itself. Thus far, he’s pledged about $40 million for Need to Impeach and an additional $30 million to get millennials into voting booths in November. He views himself as the leader of a movement to deliver America from evil—not one of those billionaires who cut checks merely to buy influence in Washington. Never mind that Steyer spent more on disclosed donations during the 2014 and 2016 election cycles than anyone else, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
His spending over the past year has bought him at least three kinds of opponents. The first are supporters of Trump, the celebrity-king who’s survived bedlam, bankruptcy, and scandal that would have wiped out, or at least embarrassed, mere mortals. To them, Steyer is a younger George Soros, pulling strings from the shadows. The second are fellow Democrats who think his fixation is distracting at best and harebrained at worst. They point out that no president has been removed via impeachment, that Democrats don’t have the congressional majority they would need to initiate the proceedings, and that polls show less than half the country wants them to try. Steyer’s third set of opponents are skeptics who see his vast resources as the symptom of a disease, not its cure. Does America, they ask, need one billionaire to save it from another?
At his event in Washington, Steyer toggled between his two dominant modes, apocalyptic and jubilant. Toward the end, he riffed on the motivational value of fear. “When you’re absolutely sure you’re right,” he said, “and you’re fighting for the things you think are most important, then there’s also great joy in being able, once you’re in it, to push as hard as you can.”
He stepped down from the dais and was mobbed. As aides tried to usher him out, Steyer hugged and high-fived. Only when a lawyer launched into a sales pitch for a project did Steyer start to extract himself—except, no, he couldn’t help but stick around to listen. When he finally moved on, an aide tried again to focus his attention, but Steyer swung around him to say something into a supporter’s ear. He leaned back to show he was listening as the man replied, then plunged back in, aiming his finger at the guy’s heart. He was still gabbing as he left, the long goodbye of a born candidate.
A chemical reaction seems to take place inside the brains of the megarich when their fortunes grow from extraordinarily big to inconceivably vast. It convinces some of them that they possess the power to solve a great challenge or crisis of the day. This might help explain why billionaires go on quests to colonize space (Jeff Bezos), slow the aging process (Larry Ellison), build flying cars (Larry Page), or bore holes into the Earth for transportation by tunnel (Elon Musk).
Steyer isn’t living out a sci-fi fantasy. A former prep school jock who says he crushes 300 crunches a day, he’s cast himself as the hero of a black-and-white Western, ever preparing for a showdown at high noon. He even wears cowboy boots these days, though he says it’s for the heel support.
Before he can take down Trump, though, Steyer will have to claw past his own party’s sheriffs. Congressional minority leaders Nancy Pelosi of California and Chuck Schumer of New York are among those who’ve aired their displeasure with calls for impeachment, arguing that such talk is divisive and premature. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s former senior adviser, has punched harder. “Steyer impeachment ads seem to me more of a vanity project,” he tweeted in November. “It is-at least [at] this point-an unhelpful message.” It took Steyer exactly one hour to slap back: “Unhelpful to whom, David?” He followed up a minute later with the less aristocratic “No fear.” The spat resumed a few months later. “Dems should NOT commit to impeachment,” Axelrod wrote on April 8. Steyer really didn’t like that. “Appeasing Mr. Trump and being polite is what’s wrong with the Establishment,” he replied. “Spare me,” Axelrod wrote back. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing your ad copy for a bill of impeachment.”
This kind of talk infuriates Steyer. A week before the Washington event, he was at a hotel bar in Las Vegas, banging his hand on a table. “There was no one in the United States who wanted to make a big deal out of impeachment!” he said. Some billionaires find Vegas irresistible for its bacchanalia, but Steyer was drinking seltzer with cranberry juice, light on the juice. He was in town to demand protections for young immigrants and to back an effort to make Nevada’s electricity greener.
Steyer’s most distinctive feature is a Roman nose, though it often cedes the stage to eyebrows that perform circus tricks when he gets excited. Trump gets them going. Steyer maintains that the president has disqualified himself from the land’s highest office by obstructing justice, conspiring with Russians, violating the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, undermining the free press, and simply being dangerously crazy. “We believe we have a gigantic threat to our democracy,” he said at the bar. “We believe this guy is very dangerous to the health and safety of American citizens.”
“When you’re absolutely sure you’re right and you’re fighting for the things you think are most important, then there’s also great joy in being able, once you’re in it, to push as hard as you can”
The “we” risked coming off as royal, but Steyer was reaching for the unifying vibe of a stump speech. Decades ago, he ran (successfully) for student body president at Phillips Exeter Academy, the New Hampshire school where Abraham Lincoln sent one of his sons. Steyer went from there to Yale, joining Morgan Stanley’s training program after graduation. He left, earned an MBA at Stanford, and in 1983 got a job at Goldman Sachs on Robert Rubin’s merger arbitrage team, which trained at least three future billionaires. Steyer quit a few years later for the only comparably glamorous job in finance: managing his own fund. While getting it up and running, he scored an intro to the investment firm Hellman & Friedman from Matthew Barger, a friend from Yale. “Tom’s possibly the only person I’ve ever met who I think could be president of the United States someday,” Barger told his colleagues at the time.
Hellman & Friedman helped Steyer set up the fund that would become Farallon, based in San Francisco and named for nearby islands that jut out of shark-infested waters. It made money every year for decades, buying up the junk bonds of distressed companies, betting on some stocks, shorting others, investing in real estate, and doing some private equity. Before 2008, when the financial crisis reached its nadir, Farallon’s main fund was returning an annual average of almost 15 percent, and the firm was overseeing more than $30 billion, making it one of the biggest hedge funds in the world.
It was also, to Steyer’s growing embarrassment, investing in oil, private prisons, subprime lending, and coal. By 2008 he’d grown alarmed about climate change; he was going to church more often and thinking seriously about politics. When a proposition to suspend some of California’s robust air pollution rules reached the state ballot in 2010, he donated $5 million to the campaign that ultimately defeated it. Two years later he left Farallon and went on to start NextGen Climate, a nonprofit with a super PAC arm, writing seven-digit checks that helped candidates willing to fight for the environment.
The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, to strip away long-standing limits on corporate money in politics had inaugurated an era of historic hospitality to politically motivated billionaires. Some of the cash they’ve spent has stayed hidden, but as far as disclosed donations go, Steyer reigns supreme. By that measure, he outspent even notable Republican kingmakers Charles and David Koch, Sheldon Adelson, and Robert Mercer during the 2014 and 2016 national campaigns. The $75 million Steyer spent in 2014 exceeded the total from the next three donors combined, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (One of those three was Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, which publishes Bloomberg Businessweek.) Steyer spent even more in 2016, about $91 million.
Bankers love to talk about their return on investment, but his was mediocre. Half of the eight Democrats he backed in big races in 2016, including Hillary Clinton, lost. That was slightly better than in 2014, when three of his seven candidates in Senate and gubernatorial races won. Steyer had a better run backing California ballot propositions, helping kill the 2010 air pollution plan and, two years later, spending more than $29 million on a measure that changed corporate tax rules and funneled money to green jobs.
“Politics is understood by very few people in the United States of America, and if you want to understand it, then I think you’ve got to put in your 10,000 hours. I have, actually. Do the math”
He didn’t see Trump coming. But only a few hours after the election, he published a pledge that he’d stand up to the incoming president. In July, six months into Trump’s term, something new took shape. Steyer changed NextGen Climate’s name to NextGen America and said its mission would expand to include health care, equality, and immigration issues.
That wasn’t enough for him, though. He was also thinking about running for the U.S. Senate or for governor of California, his home since he left Goldman Sachs. (He and his wife, Kat, own a mansion overlooking San Francisco Bay, a place whose marketing brochure showed a ballroom, five bedrooms, and two fireplaces. They also have an 1,800-acre cattle ranch down the coast.) In September, Steyer met Democratic consultant Kevin Mack, a direct-mail specialist who’s worked for Planned Parenthood and the AFL-CIO. “I sat down with him to talk about a whole range of things: ‘This is what it might look like to run for office, this is what it might look like to start a movement,’ ” Mack said.
Within days, they’d landed on a crusade for Steyer—something national and big. The logic was that Steyer could spend, say, $150 million to try to win a Senate seat—or he could start “running a national movement right now to hold this president accountable,” Mack said. “You do that for a hell of a lot less.”
Steyer decided to launch this movement outside the auspices of NextGen America, choosing the name Need to Impeach. He shot the fireplace spot and bought time on cable, including enemy territory: Fox News. It took mere days to catch the attention of his target. On Oct. 27 at 6:58 a.m., before the sun rose over Washington, Trump tweeted that Steyer was “wacky & totally unhinged.” Fox pulled the ad not long after. In a statement, the channel’s co-president cited “the strong negative reaction to their ad by our viewers.”
With that, Steyer had earned his spurs, complete with a pair of shiners to exhibit to the resistance. Signatures soared. He filmed more ads, set on a ranch, in front of the White House, by the Liberty Bell, and in Times Square, where he also paid for jumbo impeachment billboards. By February, Need to Impeach had about 40 staffers and a headquarters in a San Francisco Beaux Arts building. The group set up a war room for opposition research, plus a media arm and a legislative outreach team, and sent Steyer on a 30-stop tour to press his case across the U.S. The plan for November is to compare the organization’s list of millions against voter files, register anyone who isn’t signed up, and turn out everyone on Election Day.
Mack likes to say that Steyer’s list is now bigger than the National Rifle Association’s. But there are reasons why old hands such as Axelrod see the campaign as a billionaire’s vanity project. As with the ads, almost every Need to Impeach press release places Steyer front and center, announcing plans to file Freedom of Information Act requests about Trump or to mail 5,100 impeachment guides to 2018 candidates.
Still, Steyer has fans inside the impeachment cottage industry who are grateful for an ally rich enough to turn their ideas into zeitgeist. Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor who teaches a class on Trump and has a book about impeachment coming out in May, credits Steyer with pushing the topic into late-night talk shows and dinner-table conversations. “He’s encouraging people to take seriously something that might have been too much in the background,” Tribe said. “People need to be conditioned to think about it. And he’s certainly put it on the national agenda in a really important way.”
As Steyer’s eyebrows bounced across the airwaves late last year, talk about his political ambitions grew louder. In January he stepped before a row of American flags in Washington to announce that he wouldn’t run for office in California, at least not in 2018. Instead, he said, he would double his impeachment spending and focus on registering millennial voters.
Watching him, though, you sense that the itch hasn’t subsided. His teams at NextGen and Need to Impeach include flacks and Obama veterans, even a body man who keeps his Honest Tea at the ready. He’s been known to invoke Lincoln twice in an hour while espousing policies that position him as a billionaire Bernie Sanders: single-payer health insurance, higher taxes for the rich, and clean energy.
In the past year, a titillated press has played are-they-running with entertainment mogul Oprah Winfrey (after she delivered a galvanizing speech at the Golden Globe Awards in January), Facebook Inc. co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (after he hired two top Obama campaign operatives), and Starbucks Corp. Chairman Howard Schultz (whose unofficial side job is calling for nationwide transformation). Each eventually offered the ritual not-I.
Although Steyer did the same for 2018, he’s been coy about 2020, refusing to say whether he’ll run for the White House. He nevertheless gets exercised when asked about one hypothetical billionaire rival. “The day that Howard Schultz gets up with me at 4:25 to walk in Palmdale, I’m going to start thinking differently about him,” Steyer said, invoking a recent NextGen door-knocking trip in California. Schultz didn’t respond to an email asking for comment about Steyer, but Dallas Mavericks owner and Shark Tank star Mark Cuban, who’s said there’s a chance he’ll run, obliged. “Don’t know him. Never met him,” he wrote. Eight minutes later, Cuban sent a follow-up: “Don’t have any thoughts on him at all.”
Whether he’s thinking about a presidential run or not, Steyer is clearly enjoying himself. In Las Vegas he met with young immigrants at the University of Nevada, then headed out into the desert sun to ask students what they cared about. Afterward, sitting outside a campus cafe, he was practically glowing. He teased a reporter and laughed at his own zinger, then kept on laughing, clapping his hands and thumping the table before taking a breath and howling some more. Finally, 12 seconds on, he silenced himself with a final slam of the hand.
Moments later, talk of Trump flipped him to apocalyptic mode. But like a hero saddling up against formidable odds, he professed to be up to the task. “Politics is understood by very few people in the United States of America, and if you want to understand it, then I think you’ve got to put in your 10,000 hours,” he said. “I have, actually. Do the math.”
A week later, at a Presidents Day panel in Philadelphia, he was confronted by the possibility that five digits wouldn’t be enough. As Steyer sat on a stool in his jeans and cowboy boots, a man in the audience interrupted. “You’re talking about good and evil,” the man said, “and there are those of us who think that a billionaire who has $1.6 billion to throw around of his own money may be a threat to democracy.”
Steyer listened, hands on knees. “So you want me to address that?” he said.
“I think so,” the man replied.
Steyer’s mood seemed to dim. “OK, fine,” he said. “Let’s talk for a second about money in politics.”
“Let’s talk about you,” the man said. The room fell so quiet you could hear a throat clear. Before Steyer could address the expensive elephant in the room, a fan piped up: “Thank God you’re doing what you’re doing!” People clapped.
“Let me answer this question,” Steyer said, pointing at the heckler, forefinger wagging twice. “I think it is true that my ability to be heard is disproportionate based on the amount of money I have.” The man tried unsuccessfully to interrupt. “Look, I think we have a great system,” Steyer continued. “But we have very far from a perfect system.”
He was getting worked up. “If there was no money on the side of progressivism,” he said, “then, actually, we wouldn’t be able to organize against the people who are—”
He kept on speaking, but it was hard to hear him over the applause.
Bloomberg, LP
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