Key GOP mega-donors network to meet with Trump and Haley Camps

A network of Republican megadonors has invited aides to both Donald J. Trump and Nikki Haley to make presentations at the group's winter meeting next week, as wealthy contributors assess the presidential race with just nine months until Election Day.

The network, known as the American Opportunity Alliance, is expected to hear from Ms. Haley's campaign manager, Betsy Ankney, and Mr. Trump's top adviser, Susie Wiles, at the meeting in Palm Beach, Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter. with the event.

The group's meeting was previously reported by Puck.

The network was founded a decade ago by a group of wealthy donors, including members of the Ricketts family, owner of the Chicago Cubs, and investors Paul Singer and Kenneth Griffin.

But donors in the American Opportunity Alliance are not moving in unison, and people who support Ms. Haley — and who had supported Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who dropped out of the race last Sunday — are part of the network. Some members of the group have been open about wanting a candidate other than Mr. Trump.

But even as officials representing Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis at the group's Dallas meeting in early October — when their campaigns were the only two to have advisers invited — some people working at the AOA were clear that the focus was more on the general election than during the primary cycle. At the time, a Republican strategist who worked with the group called Trump's path to the nomination “simple.”

Since then, Mr. Trump has won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire caucuses, beating Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Haley in the first contest and Ms. Haley in the second, despite having little major donor money. He also has some supporters who have worked with AOA in the past, such as Linda McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration under President Trump.

Ms. Haley has been aggressively raising money and is well-financed as the race heads toward the Feb. 24 primary in South Carolina, her home state but where Mr. Trump is also popular.

Trump has begun bringing in major donors as he and his team prepare for a general election in which they expect Democrats to be well-funded. Yet Mr. Trump has a complicated relationship with the party's major donors. He also faces four criminal charges and was ordered Friday by a federal jury in a civil case to pay writer E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of raping her decades ago, more than $83 million in damages .

Many of the donors are closely tied to the remnants of the pre-Trump Republican Party and tried to halt his rise in 2016. Trump has also repeatedly attacked major donors for being part of the “swamp” he mocks. He made such a threat this week on his social media platform Truth Social, when he vowed to expel any donors who supported Ms. Haley in the future.

Ms. Haley's campaign said the response to that threat was the opposite of what Mr. Trump had intended, saying it had a huge boost in fundraising in the 24 hours that followed.

This weekend, the political network Americans for Prosperity, founded by the industrialist Koch brothers, is holding its own meeting. The network supported Ms. Haley, but as The New York Times recently reported, some donors regretted the support.