Sheldon and Miriam Adelson

On October 13, 2025, the President of the United States addressed the Israeli Knesset. Miriam Adelson, the largest political donor of the 2024 American election cycle, was sitting in the gallery. From the podium, Donald Trump credited her and her late husband with shaping the decisions that had defined his Israel policy: the 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital, the embassy move in 2018, the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights in 2019.

Then he told the chamber a story about her.

“I’m going to get her in trouble with this, but I once asked her, ‘Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That might mean Israel.”

The room laughed and applauded. It is a remarkable thing to be said out loud, by a President, about one of his own largest financial backers, in a foreign parliament, while thanking her for the direction of American foreign policy. It is also on video, and it was reported by Reuters and every major outlet covering the speech.

What the money was

Sheldon Adelson built a casino fortune through the Las Vegas Sands Corporation, with operations in Las Vegas, Singapore and Macau, and for roughly a decade he was the single largest political donor in the United States.

The figures are a matter of public record. He and Miriam spent more than $100 million on Republican candidates and causes in the 2012 cycle, the largest of that election. He was the biggest single donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign at $25 million. In 2012 the couple put $10 million into a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich, run by Gingrich’s former aides, leaving one presidential candidate visibly dependent on one family’s fortune.

The Citizens United environment made the scale possible. Fred Wertheimer of the watchdog group Democracy 21 described what that meant: it “creates that potential for one person to have far more influence than any one person should have.”

The candidates did not pretend to misunderstand the arrangement. Gingrich, asked by Ted Koppel why Adelson was funding him, said: “He knows I’m very pro-Israel. That’s the central value of his life.”

In his own words

What makes this case unusual is that none of it requires inferring a motive from a pattern of giving. Sheldon Adelson stated his motive himself, repeatedly, in public.

“I’m a one-issue person,” he said in 2017. “That issue is Israel.”

In a 2010 speech to an Israeli group, reported at the time by NBC’s Michael Isikoff, he went further, and the passage is worth quoting rather than summarizing:

“I am not Israeli. The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform. It was an American uniform, although my wife was in the IDF and one of my daughters was in the IDF… our two little boys, one of whom will be bar mitzvahed tomorrow, hopefully he’ll come back, his hobby is shooting, and he’ll come back and be a sniper for the IDF.”

In the same speech: “All we care about is being good Zionists, being good citizens of Israel, because even though I am not Israeli-born, Israel is in my heart.”

These are not the characterizations of critics. They are the words of the largest political donor in the country, said on the record and reported contemporaneously.

There is a further detail that says something about the ceiling of his commitment. Adelson gave to AIPAC until 2007, then moved his money to the Israeli-American Council, which he described as more committed to supporting Israel, unhindered by political correctness, than AIPAC was. He found the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United States insufficiently dedicated and funded something he considered better.

The newspaper

The influence ran in both directions. Adelson owned Israel Hayom, a newspaper distributed free inside Israel that became the highest-circulation paper in the country and was widely understood as an instrument of support for Benjamin Netanyahu. An American donor’s fortune, deployed to shape the domestic politics of a foreign state, while the same fortune shaped the American policy toward it.

Miriam

Sheldon Adelson died in January 2021. His widow took over the fortune and the political operation, and expanded it.

Miriam Adelson was born Miriam Farbstein in Tel Aviv in 1945, to parents who had fled Poland before the Holocaust. She served in the IDF, trained as a physician, and holds both Israeli and American citizenship. In 2024 she put $106 million into Preserve America, her pro-Trump super PAC, making her the dominant donor of the cycle. Writing about her husband after his death, she said he had “crafted the course of nations.”

That combination is the part of this case that draws the sharpest reaction in both directions, and it is worth being precise about.

Holding two citizenships is lawful, ordinary, and shared by millions of Americans. It carries no legal restriction on political donation and implies nothing about anyone’s loyalty. Representative Thomas Massie, whose Kentucky primary was then the target of Adelson-linked spending, put it far more pointedly, posting the Knesset video and describing her as an “Israeli citizen first.” He was widely accused, including by other Republicans, of reaching for an antisemitic trope, and the objection is a serious one. His characterization is his, and this archive does not adopt it.

What remains after setting that aside is narrower and harder. The largest single funder of an American presidential campaign was a citizen of the foreign state whose treatment was the organizing purpose of the giving, and the President she funded said from that state’s parliament that she might love it more than this one. None of that requires questioning her loyalty. She and her husband described the priority themselves.

The other side of it

The Adelsons have consistently described their political activity as what it is on its face: American citizens exercising First Amendment rights in support of an allied democracy. Supporting Israel is a mainstream position in American politics, held by millions of voters and most members of Congress. Large donors across the spectrum fund candidates who share their priorities, and doing so is entirely legal. Nothing documented here is a crime, and nothing here alleges one.

The objection is about scale and about subject. A single family became the decisive funder of a major party’s presidential politics while its patriarch described himself publicly as a one-issue donor whose issue was another country. Campaign finance rules are built to prevent concentrations of exactly that size. They did not.

Why it matters

Most arguments about donor influence are arguments about inference. Someone gives a great deal of money, a policy follows, and the connection has to be argued.

Here nobody has to argue it. The donor said what he wanted and why. The policies he wanted were enacted. And the President who enacted them stood in the Israeli parliament, pointed to the donor’s widow in the gallery, credited her family with the decisions, and then joked that she might love Israel more than the United States.

That is not a theory about hidden influence. It is influence described by the people doing it and confirmed by the official who acted on it, in public, on camera.

Sources

• Reuters (Howard Goller), “Trump Salutes Mega Donor Miriam Adelson for Help Shaping US Decisions on Israel,” October 13, 2025
• RealClearPolitics, video and transcript of President Trump’s Knesset remarks, October 13, 2025; Times of Israel, live coverage of the same speech
• NBC News, Michael Isikoff, reporting on Adelson’s July 2010 speech to an Israeli group (the original source for the “Israeli uniform” and IDF remarks)
• Associated Press, “Gingrich’s Biggest Donor Is Casino Mogul, Hardliner on Israel,” 2012 (the Gingrich and Koppel exchange)
• Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Sheldon Adelson, Megadonor to Israel and Republicans, Is Dead at 87,” January 12, 2021
• Newsweek, “How Miriam Adelson Shaped Donald Trump’s Israel Strategy,” October 14, 2025
• Federal Election Commission records and contemporaneous campaign finance reporting for the donation figures
• Responsible Statecraft (Quincy Institute), January 2021 — source for the 2017 “one-issue person” quote
• Contemporaneous reporting on Representative Thomas Massie’s posts and the response to them, November 2025, which describes Adelson as a dual U.S.-Israeli citizen and quotes the accusations of antisemitism made against Massie by fellow Republicans