Thomas Klingenstein, chair of the rightwing Claremont Institute, has cemented his place in the pantheon of Republican megadonors with a more than $10m spending spree so far in the 2024 election cycle, according to campaign contributions recorded by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Klingenstein has been one of Claremont’s largest donors for decades. As the institute has made its hard-right, pro-Trump drift in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe US politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a “cold civil war”, and has encouraged rightwingers to join the fight to defeat what he calls “the woke regime”.
His spending puts him at the forefront of a class of donors who are explicitly supporting more extreme and polarizing politics in Trump’s Republican party.
The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans, and has included seven-figure donations to at least four pro-Trump Pacs in recent months.
The Guardian emailed Klingenstein for comment on this reporting but received no reply.
Increased largesse
Federal Election Commission (FEC) data is a lagging indicator: currently available data only reflects contributions made before early July, so it is possible that Klingenstein’s spend has increased since the last available filings.
Nevertheless, Klingenstein’s almost $10.7m in contributions during this cycle is already more than his combined giving in the previous five cycles stretching back to 2013-2014.
The amount fits with a pattern of increasing giving to political causes in recent years.
Until 2017, Klingenstein was an intermittent and moderate donor: in the 2014 cycle Klingenstein made just 11 donations totaling $32,500, and in 2016 he scaled that back, contributing just $7,700 including $2,000 to Trump’s first campaign, according to records of his giving in previous cycles.
In the 2018 cycle there was a sudden uptick to almost $350,000 in contributions. The next two cycles saw six-figure spends: $4.23m in 2019-2020, and just over $4m in 2021-2022. It remains to be seen how much Klingenstein will add to his unprecedented spend this cycle.
Klingenstein’s contribution has also grown relative to other political donors.
The transparency organization Open Secrets maintains a ranked list of the top 100 political donors in each cycle.
Klingenstein first landed on the list at number 85 in 2020, according to Open Secrets. In 2022 he nudged up to 78. This year he is the 35th largest individual political donor in the country according to the rankings.
His contributions this year put him in a similar league as Republican donors such as the Walmart heiress Alice Walton – currently the world’s richest woman – who is the 32nd largest donor per Open Secrets, and Democratic donors such as James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn, the 28th largest political donors in the US.
Funding Super Pacs
Klingenstein has donated to individual congressional campaigns, but the recipients of his largest donations in this and other recent cycles have been Pacs, including several favored by the biggest Republican donors.
One favorite is Club for Growth Action (CFG Action), a Pac which is ostensibly committed to “small government”, and whose biggest funders are the billionaire megadonors including Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein and Virginia James.
Klingenstein has contributed almost $9m to CFG Action over several cycles, including $3m in 2020, $1.45m in 2022, and $4.45m this cycle. That figure included a single donation of $2.5m last December.
Other recipients of six-figure Klingenstein donations include the Sentinel Action Fund, a Pac launched in 2022 by Jessica Anderson, until then executive director of Heritage Action, a sister organization of the Heritage Foundation, which is the force behind Project 2025.
This cycle, Sentinel has positioned itself as the sole conservative pro-cryptocurrency Pac, and has spent in support of Republicans in crucial Senate races in states including Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada, according to FEC records and Facebook and Google advertising libraries.
Sentinel president Anderson also served in the Trump administration. Klingenstein gave Sentinel $1m in May.
Klingenstein has also been a rainmaker for prominent Maga-verse organizations this cycle, giving $1m to pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July, and $495,000 to Charlie Kirk-linked Turning Point Pac in February.
Not all of Klingenstein’s bets pay off. Last September, he handed $1m to American Exceptionalism Pac, a Super Pac supportive of failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Rightwing ties
The Guardian has previously reported on Klingenstein’s role as a financier and influencer in far-right circles.
Last March, it was revealed that he had funded Action Idaho, a far-right political website set up by Boise State political science professor and the Claremont Institute fellow Scott Yenor.
In documents pitching the idea of the site during late 2021, Yenor wrote that the site’s goal was to “translate anti-critical-race-theory (anti-CRT) movement and anti-lockdown movements into a durable political movement to radicalize political opinion in Idaho and shape the primaries to the advantage of conservatives”.
Yenor used the now defunct website and an associated account on Twitter/X to make rightwing attacks on Idaho politicians and activists, including Republicans.
Last August, the Guardian reported on Klingenstein’s growing largesse including his donations to his own Pac, American Firebrand, whose funds were spent in part on producing a series of videos that showcased Klingenstein’s apocalyptic vision of US politics.
Those videos portrayed liberals and the left as implacable internal enemies, and as “woke communists”.
In one, Klingenstein said: “We find ourselves in a cold civil war,” and defined the warring sides as “those who want to preserve the American way of life, and those who want to destroy is”, and adding: “These differences are too large to bridge. This is what makes it a war. In a war you must play to win.”
Klingenstein’s recent rhetoric has continued in much the same vein.
On X, he has portrayed disparate political developments as elements of “cold civil war” such as Trump’s New York felony convictions, the Colorado supreme court’s judgement that Trump was ineligible to be on the ballot due to the 14th amendment’s prohibition on elected officials who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same”, and former Republicans’ public support of that reading of the amendment.
He has also opened up his personal website to a rotating cast of rightwing writers, whose articles have claimed that the US is subject to “woke totalitarianism”, advocated for a total freeze on immigration, and claimed that Kamala Harris’s nomination is an outcome of “group quota regime – the paradigm of racial outcome-engineering”.
He has also been the leading financial supporter of the rightwing Claremont Institute, where he also serves as chair.
Available tax filings for his foundation, the Thomas D Klingenstein fund, indicate that he has directed at least $22m to Claremont since 2004.
That giving has stepped up significantly in the Trump era: in returns from 2004 to 2014, Klingenstein gifted an average of about $307,000 to Claremont, and even skipped a year in 2013. In returns from 2015 on he has given an average of $2.3m, and in 2021 his donation to Claremont was just shy of $3m.
His heightened giving has coincided with Claremont’s embrace of Trumpism, which writers including Laura Field have argued has transformed it from a respected conservative thinktank into a propaganda juggernaut that envisions a radical remaking of the US along far-right lines.
The Guardian has reported extensively on the Claremont Institute’s ties to radical far-right politics.
Claremont’s president is one of the senior figures there who are members of the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, men-only fraternal order which aims to replace the US government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”. Claremont has also provided direct funding for SACR. In turn, one of SACR’s leading lights, shampoo tycoon and would be “warlord” Charles Haywood, has made five-figure donations to Claremont.
