Tom Steyer, the billionaire liberal donor spending millions to try to impeach President Donald Trump, blasted his Democratic critics in a Politico podcast on May 29.
Steyer said many things in the Off Message political podcast hosted by Isaac Dovere — including comparing Democratic pushback against his impeachment efforts to opposition to the civil rights movement, said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and others are “normalizing” Trump’s presidency and attempted to downplay his own huge political spending.
In the interview, Dovere also falsely claimed Steyer was the “only one” on the left spending “a lot of money” on political donations, unlike on the right, and wanted to know why more people aren’t doing what he’s doing.
Bringing up his impeachment efforts, Steyer said, “Impeaching the president of the United States is upsetting the status quo. Anytime in American history that there has been an attempt to upset the status quo, there have been people within the status quo — within the establishment — saying, ‘It may be true, it may be something we should deal with, it may be important, but not now.’”
“So, if you look at the civil rights movement, the pushback was not, ‘You’re not telling the truth,’ the pushback was, ‘We’re dealing with it in time. You know, stand down so we can deal with it in time,’” Steyer added. He argued that behavior was “normalizing” the situation.
Early in the podcast, Dovere pointed out that Steyer became a “major donor, one of the biggest,” prompting the billionaire to downplay his massive political spending.
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“I think that’s always so misleading when people say that. Because I think it implies that I’m writing checks to campaigns, and actually that’s not true,” Steyer claimed. “Actually, what we’re doing is — I’ve set up. I’ve started an organization that does a lot of grassroots organizing. So that any money that we spend is really spent on hiring, training, organizing people on the ground to speak to other American citizens.”
While the bulk of Steyer’s political spending has been run through his NextGen Climate (later rebranded to NextGen America) PAC, it’s also dishonest for Steyer to claim he was not writing checks to campaigns. Open Secrets listed almost $60,000 in direct donations to Democrats ($58,693) from Steyer between 2006 to 2018, including donations to Hillary Clinton and Rep. Maxine Waters. It also listed a $250,000 donation to the Latino Victory PAC in 2016.
Yet, Dovere accepted Steyer’s statement replying, “Why do it that way? Why not write checks to the DNC or to campaigns?”
Dovere also tried to portray the right as having far more political donors than liberals.
“You have a lot of wealthy people on the right, Republicans, conservatives, who invest a lot of money in political donations or their own groups like the Koch brothers. You don’t have that so much for people on the left. You’re really the only one. Why do you think that is?” Dovered asked.
Steyer laughed and affirmed Dovere’s statement as “right,” even though it was actually a convenient fiction.
There are many liberals giving to politics or personal agendas. Former mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent or pledged millions to destroy coal and limit guns. Warren Buffett has given more than $1.2 billion to pro-abortion groups and Pierre Omidyar also spent millions on his favorite liberal causes. Time.com reported in 2015 that 90 percent of the millions of dollars in Hollywood political donations were going to Clinton.
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Of course, there’s also George Soros who gives to a myriad of left-wing causes, groups and media entities on the left. Soros also gave at least $10.5 million to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. His son Jonathan spent millions through Friends of Democracy PAC to unseat conservatives in the 2014 election.
Even Dovere's employer wrote past articles on the subject. Politico published a story about “blue billionaires” in 2015 looking at the left-wing tilt of the top 100 political donors.
