Insane racist heir to multi-billion-dollar fortune really really likes Donald Trump

This guy is Andrew Mellon’s grandson, so you know those bootstraps were made for walking:

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. Mellon, a wealthy banking heir and railroad magnate, is a longtime backer of Mr. Trump and gave tens of millions of dollars to groups supporting the president’s campaign. Last year, he made a $50 million donation to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump, which was one of the largest single contributions ever disclosed.

A grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, Mr. Mellon was not a prominent Republican donor until Mr. Trump was elected. But in recent years, he has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

Mr. Mellon, who lives primarily in Wyoming, keeps a low profile despite his prolific political spending. He is also a significant supporter of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also ran for president last year. Mr. Mellon donated millions to Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and has also given money to his anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense.

The Pentagon said it accepted the donation under the “general gift acceptance authority.”

“The donation was made on the condition that it be used to offset the cost of service members’ salaries and benefits,” Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement.

You’ll be shocked to hear that this is all flagrantly illegal, although the Times phrases the matter in the prissy way for which it is so justly famous:

Still, 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.

Yeah I’d say that “appears” to violate the explicit terms of a federal statute. Don’t hold your breath for ‘Ol Balls & Strikes to jump in here, although this is actually a situation where the shadow docket ought to be employed for once.

How’s the math work here anyway?

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.

It’s interesting that this Mellon seems to have been largely uninterested in funneling his ill-gotten gains to the GOP until Donald Trump let the party’s freak flag fly. As Scott has pointed out many times, the modern Republican party, of which Trumpism is the final full flowering, would be much less dangerous if it were made up exclusively of venal grifters, as opposed to the generous dollop of insane plutocrats and religious lunatics who enliven its membership.

You will also be surprised to learn that Timothy Mellon, heir to billions, is very upset about the laziness-inducing characteristics of an at this point almost wholly imaginary American welfare system for poor people (The welfare systems for rich people are very much not imaginary, hence Timothy Mellon’s obscene and utterly unearned wealth):

Mellon’s self-published 2015 autobiography describes his political views.  Notably, it calls social safety net programs “Slavery Redux”, asserting that its beneficiaries are beholden to “a new master, Uncle Sam”. Mellon writes:

For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cellphones, WIC [the U.S. Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children] payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass. Something had obviously gone dreadfully wrong with the Great Society and the Liberal onslaught. Poor people had become no less poor. 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. … Drugs rose to the level of epidemic. Single parent families became more and more prevalent. The likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton pandered endlessly to fan the flames