What's known about the reclusive donor offering to help pay troops amid shutdown

Last week, President Trump announced an anonymous "patriot" had given a donation of $130 million — money the president said was to be used to help pay troops during the government shutdown.

There are questions about the legality of a donation of this sort (the Anti-Deficiency Act prohibits federal agencies from exceeding congressional appropriations or accepting voluntary services). Over the weekend, The New York Times identified the anonymous donor as Timothy Mellon, a reclusive railroad magnate and heir to the Gilded Age Mellon family fortune.

Mellon, 83, emerged as one of the top Republican donors only in the past few years, giving far less in the decades before 2017.

Anna Massoglia, a campaign finance researcher, told CBS News, "Timothy Mellon was a relatively unknown political donor but his contributions have surged in recent years, putting him in the very top ranks of political contributors."

Early in his adult life, he held liberal views on race, the problem of income inequality and the environment. As Mellon's business career evolved, he began to express a strong antipathy for what he viewed as intrusive government regulations on business. One turning point seems to be when he ran afoul of environmental regulators in Connecticut in the late 1990s over an airport he bought.

He's written a memoir and penned some opinion pieces that offer some insight into his political views. Mellon wrote that a favorite quote of his came from Winston Churchill: "Show me a young Conservative and I'll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I'll show you someone with no brains."

Mellon did not respond to a request for comment.

Here are some numbers associated with Mellon:

Mellon may be an obscure figure to the wider public, but he's well known in political circles for giving more than virtually any other donor to Mr. Trump and other Republican committees during the 2024 election cycle — at least $197 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. The only person who gave more was SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

He emerged on the political scene as a megadonor relatively late in life. Over two decades, from 1996 to 2017, he gave a total of $350,000 in donations to political candidates. But in the four years between January 2020 and June 2024 he gave $227 million to federal candidates and political committees.

Last year, Mellon made a $50 million donation to a Trump-affiliated super PAC, one of the largest individual contributions ever made public. That was one of several donations to the super PAC during the 2024 election cycle, totaling around $150 million. He also contributed $13 million to the Sentinel Action Fund, a voter turnout super PAC that used to be affiliated with Heritage Action, the sister organization of the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Mellon also gave $25 million to support Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 2024 presidential campaign. Some speculated that Mellon was trying to be a spoiler to help Mr. Trump, whom he was also backing financially.

But last August, he wrote an article in the American Spectator explaining his support for Kennedy. Mellon, it turns out, is a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic. "I could not fathom how a 'vaccine' could be foisted on the general public with so little (if any) adequate testing."

He began giving to Kennedy's Children's Health Defense, which promotes false information about vaccines, and later to the Super PAC supporting Kennedy's campaign.

Timothy Mellon, the grandson of banker and industrialist Andrew Mellon, was estimated by Forbes to be worth about $1 billion last year, though he told Forbes in an email at the time that he was not a billionaire, writing, "never have been, never will be." The estimated wealth of his family, including other branches, was estimated in 2024 by Forbes to be $14.1 billion.

One defining episode for Mellon occurred after he purchased an airport in Connecticut in the late 1990s. He cut down 340 trees, arguing that they posed a danger to pilots landing their planes. But state environmental regulators ultimately sued him and won. He was ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

In 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would build its own border wall and started his own private fund to build it. He made little progress — the Texas Tribune said his effort had slowed after raising a little over $1 million, and then Mellon chipped in $53 million. The private and public effort was quietly dropped earlier this year, as the GOP-led legislature defunded construction in June, and the crowdfunding link disappeared in late May, the Tribune reported. The state built about 65 miles of wall out of the 805 miles that Abbott planned, and it's riddled with gaps because many landowners do not want the border wall on their land.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this article said that Mellon contributed $13 million to the Sentinel Action Fund, a super PAC affiliated with the conservative Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025. But the group was founded as part of its sister organization, Heritage Action for America in 2022. In 2023, the Sentinel Action Fund relaunched as a separate super PAC. The story has been updated.