Thomas Klingenstein, president of the right-wing Claremont Institute, has cemented his place in the pantheon of Republican megadonors with more than $10 million in spending so far in the 2024 election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign contributions.
Klingenstein has been one of Claremont’s largest donors for decades. As the institution has become hard-right and pro-Trump in recent years, Klingenstein has continued to publicly describe American politics with extremist rhetoric, calling it a “cold civil war,” and has encouraged right-wing parties to join the struggle to defeat what he calls “the woke regime”.
His spending puts him at the forefront of a group of donors who explicitly support the more extreme and polarizing politics within Trump’s Republican party.
The largesse has already dwarfed his contributions in previous election seasons. The money has gone exclusively to Republicans and 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 response.
Greater generosity
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) data is a lagging indicator: the currently available data only reflects contributions before early July, so it is possible that Klingenstein’s spending has increased since the last available documents.
Still, Klingenstein’s nearly $10.7 million in contributions this cycle is already more than his combined giving in the previous five cycles, dating back to 2013-2014.
The amount fits in with a pattern of increasing donations to political causes in recent years.
Until 2017, Klingesntein 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 donations in previous cycles. .
In the 2018 cycle, there was a sudden increase to almost $350,000 in contributions. The next two cycles saw six-figure spending: $4.23 million in 2019-2020 and just over $4 million in 2021-2022. It remains to be seen how much Klingenstein will add to his unprecedented spending this cycle.
Klingenstein’s contribution has also grown compared to other political donors.
The transparency organization Open Secrets maintains a ranked list of the 100 largest political donors in each cycle.
Klingenstein first landed on the list in 2020 at number 85, according to Open Secrets. In 2022, he rose to 78. This year, he is the country’s 35th largest individual political donor, according to the rankings.
His contributions this year put him in a similar league to Republican donors such as Walmart heiress Alice Walton – currently the richest woman in the world – who is the 32nd largest donor according to Open Secrets, and Democratic donors such as James Murdoch and his wife Kathryn, the 28th . largest political donors in the US.
Financing 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 largest Republican donors.
One favorite is Club for Growth Action (CFG Action), a Pac ostensibly committed to “small government” and whose biggest backers are billionaire megadonors including Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein and Virginia James.
Klingenstein has contributed nearly $9 million to CFG Action across cycles, including $3 million in 2020, $1.45 million in 2022 and $4.45 million this cycle. That figure included a one-time donation of $2.5 million 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, the force behind Project 2025.
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This cycle, Sentinel has positioned itself as the only conservative pro-cryptocurrency Pac, spending it in support of Republicans in crucial Senate races in states like Montana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada, according to FEC data and ad libraries from Facebook and Google.
Sentinel President Anderson also served in the Trump administration. Klingenstein gave Sentinel $1 million in May.
Klingenstein has also been a rainmaker for prominent Maga-verse organizations this cycle, donating $1 million to the pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July, and $495,000 to the Charlie Kirk-linked Turning Point Pac in February .
Not all of Klingenstein’s bets are paying off. Last September, he handed over $1 million to American Exceptionalism Pac, a Super Pac that backed failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Right tires
The Guardian 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 Claremont Institute fellow Scott Yenor.
In documents pitching the idea of the site in late 2021, Yenor wrote that the site’s goal was to “translate the anti-critical race theory (anti-CRT) movement and anti-lockdown movements into a sustainable political movement to to radicalize opinion in Idaho and shape the primaries in favor of conservatives.”
Yenor used the now-defunct website and an associated account on Twitter/X to launch right-wing attacks on Idaho politicians and activists, including Republicans.
Last August, the Guardian reported on Klingenstein’s growing generosity, including his donations to his own Pac, American Firebrand, whose money was spent in part on producing a series of videos showcasing Klingenstein’s apocalyptic vision of American politics.
In those videos, liberals and the left were portrayed as irreconcilable internal enemies, and as “woke communists.”
In one, Klingenstein said, “We are in a cold civil war,” defining the warring parties as “those who want to preserve the American way of life, and those who want to destroy it,” adding, “These differences are too big to bridge. This makes it a war. In a war you have to play to win.”
Klingenstein’s recent rhetoric has continued in much the same vein.
On elected officials “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same,” and the public support of former Republicans for that reading of the amendment.
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He has also opened his personal website to a rotating cast of right-wing writers, whose articles claim that the US is subject to a “woke totalitarianism,” advocated a total immigration freeze, and claimed that the appointment of Kamala Harris is the result of “group quota regime – the paradigm of racial outcome engineering”.
He was also the chief financial backer of the right-wing Claremont Institute, of which he is also chairman.
Available tax returns for his foundation, the Thomas D Klingenstein Fund, indicate he has donated at least $22 million to Claremont since 2004.
That giving has increased significantly in the Trump era: From 2004 to 2014, Klingenstein gave an average of about $307,000 to Claremont, and in 2013 he even skipped a year. In the period since 2015, he has donated an average of $2.3 million. and in 2021, his donation to Claremont was just $3 million.
His increased donations have coincided with Claremont’s embrace of Trumpism, which writers such as Laura Field say has transformed it from a respected conservative think tank into a propaganda juggernaut that envisions a radical reshaping of the US along far-right lines.
The Guardian has reported extensively on the Claremont Institute’s ties to radical far-right politics.
The president of Claremont is one of several high-ranking figures there who are members of the shadowy Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR), an exclusive, male-only fraternal order that aims to replace the U.S. government with an authoritarian “aligned regime”. Claremont has also provided direct funding to SACR. In turn, one of SACR’s leading figures, shampoo magnate and future “warlord” Charles Haywood, has made five-figure donations to Claremont.
