Gloria Gaynor "I Will Survive" Have Been Bankrolling Trump Will Get Kennedy Reward From Him

Gaynor Quietly Bankrolling The Republicans and Trump

 

BY SAMANTHA RIEDEL

"Them"

Disco icon Gloria Gaynor, best known for her 1978 hit “I WIll Survive,” appears to have donated thousands of dollars to Republican candidates over the past several years, according to newly uncovered Federal Election Commission (FEC) data.

Gaynor, 81, re-entered the news cycle in mid-August when she was tapped for a Kennedy Center award by President Donald Trump, along with other honorees including Sylvester Stallone and KISS. Many, including The View cohost Ana Navarro, urged the singer to reject the award for its association with Trump, who took over the Center earlier this year. But if her donation history is anything to go on, Gaynor may not view being associated with the Republican party as a downside.

According to FEC donation records reviewed by Them and first shared by Meidas Touch News (MTN), Gaynor made at least 65 separate donations to GOP candidates and political action committees (PACs) under her legal name, Gloria Fowles, from March 2016 to June 2025. Most of those donations were made to the Republican National Committee-endorsed fundraising platform WinRed, with some others made directly to the campaigns of House Speaker Mike Johnson, Alaska Rep. Nick Begich, and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. The most recent donation was made to WinRed on June 23, 2025, in the amount of $50. 

Them also separately identified 12 more donations to conservatives made by a Gloria Gaynor from the same New Jersey ZIP code (the singer makes her home in Englewood). Those donations were also made predominantly to WinRed, with some direct donations to House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, and the 2024 presidential campaign of Vivek Ramaswamy, among others.

However, we were unable to fully verify reporting by MTN, which alleged that Gaynor had donated a total of $22,000 to WinRed and various campaigns over the past decade. The FEC data linked in MTN’s original story showed a rough total of $2,985 in donations under the name Gloria Fowles; the additional donations reviewed by Them, under the name Gloria Gaynor, and one under a variant of that name, total approximately $1,228 for a grand sum of $4,213. 

Them reached out to both MTN and Gaynor for comment, but did not receive a reply from either at time of writing. Comments on Gaynor’s Instagram account were limited as of Thursday afternoon.

 

Though “I Will Survive” became an accidental hit and a gay cultural touchstone (not to mention a CPR banger), Gaynor herself has never fully embraced that legacy, in part due to her Christianity. In 2007, during a BBC Radio 4 interview, Gaynor said that she felt her “purpose” as an artist was to “bring the love of Christ to all of my fans,” and specifically to “lead” her LGBTQ+ fans “to Christ and what he has for them [...] I want to lead them to truth.” Years later, Gaynor told NPR that she had many LGBTQ+ friends and family members, and that she would “go to [her] grave loving them,” but that none of them “have any misgivings or any misunderstanding about” her views on homosexuality.

“I’m really not a political person, so I’m not about to become political. But I’d say it’s a safe bet that a lot needs to change,” Gaynor said in 2017, during a speech at the Library of Congress. If the modern GOP is what she had in mind, we’ll be over here changing our (stupid) locks.

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Samantha Riedel is a writer and editor whose work on transgender culture and politics has previously appeared in VICE, Bitch Magazine, and The Establishment. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is presently at work on her first manuscript.