How Citizens United, an 'Israel First' megadonor, and a transactional president put the U.S. on the path to war with Iran

Donald Trump opened up the path to war with Iran in May 2018 when he withdrew the U.S. from the Iran nuclear deal that had been negotiated by the Obama administration. That agreement, which was finalized in July 2015 put limits on Iran's nuclear program in return for sanctions relief.

Iran was complying with the deal, according to the International Atomic Energy Association, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency. Trump acted unilaterally and reimposed economic sanctions on Iran, ignoring the advice of leaders of France, Germany and the U.K., who were signatories to the accord.

That same month, on the 70th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, the U.S. officially relocated its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, upending decades of U.S.policy under Democratic and Republican administrations.

The embassy move undermined efforts to establish an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. In Gaza, Israeli forces killed 58 Palestinians and wounded more than 2,700 injured who were protesting against the embassy relocation along the border with Israel.

Sitting in the front row at the Jerusalem ceremony were casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his Israeli-born wife Miriam. the biggest donors to Trump's 2016 campaign. (The couple can be seen at the 1-minute mark of this video.)

In 2020, Sheldon Adelson reportedly purchased the U.S. ambassador’s official residence near Tel Aviv for about $67 million. The move was seen as an effort to block the embassy from relocating back to Tel Aviv.

 In June 2018, The New Yorker published what proved to be a prescient analysis by Adam Entous who described Trump's more hawkish Mideast policy in a story headlined "Donald Trump's New World Order: How the President, Israel, and the Gulf states plan to fight Iran—and leave the Palestinians and the Obama years behind."

Entous wrote:

The contours of the new, more truculent and hawkish Middle East strategy revealed themselves in May, with the transfer of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear pact. In both cases, the Administration chose to gamble, despite repeated warnings about the threat of unrest and dangerous countermeasures by Iran. ...

Sheldon and Miriam Adelson sat in the front row with Netanyahu and his wife, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, underscoring the roles they played behind the scenes in making the Embassy move happen.

From 2010-2020, the Adelsons gave more than half a billion dollars to Republican campaigns and causes. And they got what they wanted from a transactional president..

In January 2021, shortly after Sheldon Adelson's death, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a foreign policy think tank, published an analysis in its online magazine by Eli Clifton about "Adelson's legacy of underwriting American militarism."

Clifton wrote:

His lasting impact on U.S. foreign policy — particularly U.S. relations with Israel, Iran, and China — and the emergence of far-right figureheads Donald Trump in the United States and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel places Adelson as one of the most influential and impactful political donors in U.S. history.

Adelson, the son of a Boston cab driver, built a globe-spanning casino empire. His share of that business was worth $34.9 billion at the time of his death, a fortune Adelson and his political beneficiaries applied toward his self-avowed priorities of gaining influence over politicians and steering U.S. foreign policy toward war with Iran and unconditional support for Israel.

Since 1992, four years before the start of his first term as prime minister, Netanyahu had been arguing that military action, not diplomacy was the only way to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

U.S. and Iranian officials held secret face-to-face talks in Oman about a nuclear deal back in mid-2012. In September 2013, President Barack Obama had a 15-minute phone conversation with Iran's new moderate President Hassan Rouhani, who was attending the U.N. General Assembly session in New York – the first communication between leaders of the two countries since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The following month, an outraged Adelson told an audience at New York's Yeshiva University that Obama should drop a nuclear weapon on Iran rather than negotiate.

Adelson said:

What are we going to negotiate about? I would say ‘Listen, you see that desert out there, I want to show you something.’ … You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say, ‘OK let it go.’ And so there’s an atomic weapon, goes over ballistic missiles, the middle of the desert, that doesn’t hurt a soul. Maybe a couple of rattlesnakes, and scorpions, or whatever. Then you say, ‘See! The next one is in the middle of Tehran. So, we mean business. You want to be wiped out? Go ahead and take a tough position and continue with your nuclear development. You want to be peaceful? Just reverse it all,  and we will guarantee you that you can have a nuclear power plant for electricity purposes, energy purposes.’

The Adelsons were the biggest donors to Trump's first two presidential campaigns, donating $25 million to pro-Trump Super Pacs in 2016 and $75 million in 2020, Newsweek reported. The couple also gave $5 million to the committee that organized Trump's 2017 inauguration, and $500,000 to a pro-Trump legal fund set up to help aides caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe.

Sheldon Adelson died in January 2021, His widow donated $100 million to a pro-Trump Super Pac in the 2024 campaign,

The Adelsons would not have been able to play such an influential role were it not for the Supreme Court's pernicious 2010 Citizens United ruling that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions and enabled wealthy donors, corporations and special interest groups to spend unlimited money on elections.

What we've seen now with the Adelsons and Elon Musk is just how dangerous it can be when the ultra-wealthy are able to pour obscene amounts of money into political campaigns.

Unlike Trump whose casinos went bankrupt, Sheldon Adelson made billions as his Las Vegas Sands Corp. expanded to open casinos in Chinese-governed Macau and Singapore. Adelson focused on using his fortune to pursue an "Israel First" agenda, reflecting Netanyahu's hard-line policies.

in a 2018 ProPublica report headlined “Trump’s Patron-in-Chief,” Adelson was quoted as saying, “I’m a one-issue person. That issue is Israel.” 

Adelson, who served in the U.S. Army, made his sentiments clear at a 2010 public event when he said: "The uniform that I wore in the military unfortunately was not an Israeli uniform, it was an American uniform."

Adelson became a strong supporter of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party after his second marriage in 1991 to Miriam Farbstein. She was born in Tel Aviv in 1945 in British Mandatory Palestine after her parents fled Poland in the 1930s. She served as a medical officer in the Israel Defense Forces and later trained as a physician, specializing in treating drug addiction.

Adelson shared Netanyahu's vehement opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state. In 2014, speaking at a Washington, D.C. event, Adelson said, “The Palestinians are an invented people,” adding that “the purpose of the existence of Palestinians is to destroy Israel.”

In Israel, Adelson played a key role in efforts to oust Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (2006-2009), a former Likud member.

In a 2008 article for The New Yorker, Connie Bruck wrote:

Olmert declared that a two-state solution was the only way of preserving Israel as a democratic state with a Jewish majority, and he said that he was ready to negotiate with the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. Adelson saw Olmert’s actions as a betrayal of principle. He had long wanted to see the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu returned as Prime Minister, but a revived peace process gave that goal new urgency.

In 2007, Adelson launched Israel Haryom, a free daily which soon became the country's most widely circulated newspaper. Adelson stated his purpose in starting the publication "was to have a fair and balanced paper," Critics called it "Bibiton," a combination of Netanyahu's name and the Hebrew word for newspaper.

The newspaper provided a powerful megaphone for Netanyahu, who returned to power as prime minister after the February 2009 legislative elections. Netanyahu has headed the government since then, except for a brief interlude in 2021-22.

In an interview with The New Yorker's Entous, Olmert said, “Sheldon didn’t work for Bibi. Bibi worked for Sheldon.”

Adelson became a major player in U.S. politics after Citizens United opened the campaign finance spigots.

Adelson became furious with President Barack Obama for supporting negotiations leading to a two-state solution and opposing expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The Adelsons first cut a $5 million check to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's super PAC that kept his primary campaign against Mitt Romney alive. But they soon came round to donating millions of dollars to a pro-Romney Super PAC.

Entous wrote :

Adelson considered Obama an enemy of Israel, and, in the 2012 election, he and his wife, Miriam, contributed at least ninety-three million dollars to groups supporting the G.O.P. Officials in the U.S. and Israel said that they learned from American Jewish leaders that Adelson had vowed to spend “whatever it takes” to prevent Obama from securing a peace agreement while in office.

Newsweek wrote that at the time their 2012 contribution made the Adelsons "the biggest individual donors in American history."

Three years later, in the early stages of the Republican presidential primary campaign, Trump thought that Adelson would support Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. In Oct. 2015, Trump put out this social media post.

Trump claimed in a Fox News interview that same month that he would self-fund his campaign so he would not be beholden to billionaire donors like Adelson or the Koch brothers. “Nobody controls me but the American public,” Trump said.

Trump ran as an "America First" noninterventionist. A Trump confidant told Entous that Trump "had very little interest in meddling in the Middle East in general" and was not going to "add to the already outrageous investment of trillions of dollars in a region that breeds and funds terrorists against America while we starve our infrastructure investments at home!’ ”

In February 2016, ahead of the Nevada Republican caucuses, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which had recently been purchased by Adelson, endorsed Rubio.

But Adelson himself did not endorse a candidate until May 2016. After it became apparent that Trump would win the nomination, Adelson endorsed him in a Washington Post op-ed, praising him as "a CEO success story."

But Adelson held off on opening his wallet for Trump's campaign. Adelson wanted a commitment from Trump that he would move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Jared Kushner, whose family foundation funded projects in West Bank settlements considered illegal under international law, helped bring Adelson and his father-in-law together.

With Trump slipping in the polls after the Democratic and Republican conventions, Adelson met Trump. Kushner and campaign manager Steve Bannon in mid-August in New York.

Entous wrote:

Later, Adelson told associates that he had received a commitment that Trump would, if elected, announce the Embassy move on his first day in office. Soon after the meeting, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson started writing checks to back the campaign.

But Trump didn't act on day one. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis reportedly both opposed moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem due to security concerns. The two Cabinet secretaries also urged Trump not to immediately scrap the Iran nuclear deal, arguing that it was in the national security interests of the U.S. to keep the accord's constraints on Tehran's nuclear program.

The Zionist Organization of America, to which the Adelsons were major donors, issued a statement demanding that Trump fire White House National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster, accusing him of supporting the Iran nuclear deal and being "hostile to Israel."

In March 2018, at Adelson's urging, Trump replaced McMaster with Iran hawk John Bolton, who supported regime change in Iran and a harder line toward the Palestinians.

In the Epstein files, Bannon, in a 2018 text exchange, wrote that "Bolton only doing what Sheldon Adelson tells him to do – I got John the job but he will not cross Sheldon."

Trump proceeded to check off nearly all the boxes on the Adelsons' and Netanyahu's wish list.

In November 2018, Trump presented Miriam Adelson with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. She was even more effusive in her praise of Trump, writing in the family-owned Las Vegas Review-Journal that she prayed for the day "when the Bible gets a `Book of Trump,' much like it has a 'Book of Esther' celebrating the deliverance of the Jews from ancient Persia."

Clifton wrote in Responsible Statecraft:

Even as Trump’s support from the alt-right grew, and evidence of strong support from neo-Nazis and anti-Semites posed challenges during Trump’s presidency, the Adelsons remained staunch supporters of his administration as it checked off the list of policies they cared about most: renouncing U.S. participation in the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and initiating a "maximum pressure" campaign against Tehran, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, slashing aid to Palestinian refugees, appointing Adelson-favored John Bolton as national security adviser, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and acquiescing in the construction of more Jewish settlements on the West Bank, among other measures long sought by Netanyahu, another major beneficiary of the couple's largesse.

Miriam Adelson praised Trump for keeping all his promises to her and her husband at a campaign event in August 2024.

After Trump withdraw from the nuclear deal. Iran resumed enriching uranium at higher levels than allowed under the accord, and had more nuclear material than ever before, according to IranDiplomacyWorks, a project of J Street, the political home for pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans. 

The Biden administration pursued a diplomatic approach to revive a deal to restrict Iran's nuclear program, but those efforts were sidelined after Hamas' October 2023 attack and the ensuing Israeli retaliation on Gaza.

In March 2023, Council on Foreign Relations experts Julien Barnes Dacey and Ellie Geranmayeh wrote in the Foreign Policy website about the dangers of war with Iran:

“Military confrontation would be catastrophic. War would have significant and counterproductive consequences for the West, Israel, Iran’s neighbors and the Iranian people.”

And now that prediction is coming true as Trump and Netanyahu launched a disastrous war with Iran.

During the 2024 campaign, in a New York magazine profile, Miriam Adelson suggested that she might want to push for the annexation of the occupied West Bank in a second Trump term.

Trump has vowed that he would not allow Israel to annex the West Bank, a move that Arab leaders strongly oppose. The Saudis and Emiratis have invested billions in businesses run by members of Trump's family.

But Trump has not acted to curb the construction of more Jewish settlements in the West Bank or condemn violent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian residents. A day after his inauguration, Trump issued an executive order lifting sanctions imposed by the Biden administration against violent right-wing Israeli settlers in the West Bank.

And now with Israeli forces invading South Lebanon, displacing more than a million residents, far-right members of Israel's government are calling for annexation.

An op-ed piece by pro-Likud journalist Amit Segal in the Adelson-owned Israel Haryom called for the annexing South Lebanon:

Trump, a man with no sentimentality for old borders, already shook the Middle East when he agreed in principle to recognize Israeli sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria in the framework of the Peace to Prosperity plan, and when he supported mass emigration from Gaza. The mass migration from southern Lebanon has already happened. The only question is whether he will give Israel merely de facto approval of its new northern border or de jure approval as well.

Trump acknowledged the Adelsons' influence last Octoberwhen he was invited to speak to the Knesset in Jerusalem. He gave a special shout-out to Miriam Adelsone balcony (2:40-mark of the video).

Trump boasted:

Miriam and Sheldon would come into the office. They'd call me, he'd call me. ... I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else I can think of. ... she loves Israel. ... And they would come in, and her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him. He was a very aggressive, very supportive of me. And, uh, he'd call up, uh, "Can I come over and see you?" I'd say, "Sheldon, I'm the President of the United States, it doesn't work that way." He'd come in ...

I actually asked her once, I said, "So, Miriam, I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?" She refused to answer. That means, that might mean Israel .