Billionaire activist investor Nelson Petlz plans to vote for Donald Trump, citing concerns that President Biden’s “mental condition is really scary,” according to a report Tuesday.
Peltz, who like Biden is 81, said worries over President Biden’s mental fitness outweighed his worries over Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attacks on the US Capitol.
“It will probably be Trump and I’m not happy about that,” he told the Financial Times in an interview in Palm Beach, Florida, when speaking of the 77-year-old GOP frontrunner.
The founder of $10 billion investment firm Trian Partners also cited his concerns over rising US immigration under Biden, noting that the country was “degrading”
While Peltz may be voting for Trump, he hasn’t yet decided whether to financially support him.
He also told the outlet that he hasn’t spoken to Trump, who is his neighbor in Palm Beach, “in quite a while.”
According to Federal Election Commission filings, the billionaire gave more than $300,000 to Republican candidates and groups in 2023, and more than $600,000 to Republican candidates and conservative causes in 2022.
At the same time, Peltz also voted for Democrats Bill Clinton in 1996 and Al Gore in 2000 and funded Democrats in 2022.
“I’m not one of these crazies who’s Republican or nothing,” Peltz said.
A former Trump critic, Peltz, is returning to the ex-president’s fold after he trounced his Republican adversaries in the party’s presidential primary race and called on GOP donors to unite behind him.
Peltz, who is currently embroiled in a proxy fight with Disney, said his Trump about-face stemmed, in part, from concerns about Biden’s fitness for office.
“I don’t know what he knows and I don’t know what he doesn’t know,” said Peltz, of Biden. “I don’t know who’s speaking for him and that’s troubling.”
Peltz told the FT that the “litany of criminal charges against the former president — including cases relating to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election” — was a “miscarriage of justice,” which helped him become a likely Trump voter in November.
Peltz supported Trump in 2020, but told CNBC a day after the US Capitol riot that he was “sorry” for having backed the ex-president.
Trump’s role in inciting the violence of the riot and trying to overturn the election result had “irrevocably damaged his legacy,” Peltz said at the time.
“I said I did regret voting for him because for me the Capitol is one of the sacred grounds, and the last time anybody attacked the White House it was the Brits in 1812,” Peltz told the FT. “And I thought that was pretty bad. I was convinced at that time that Trump might have incited it.”
Peltz had back Tim Scott’s presidential primary bid last year, before the South Carolina senator dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.
He also considered backing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president before he dropped out.
Peltz also cited immigration concerns as a reason why he’s backing Trump.
Republicans have for months attacked the president over a surge in crossings at the US-Mexico border, with Trump saying in his recent speeches that immigration was “poisoning the blood” of the country.
“We can’t go on letting everyone into this country . . . We have an immigration problem — it’s not a Republican or Democrat problem,” said Peltz.
The US should not halt immigration, he told the FT, “but I want some boundaries put on it so we know at least who we’re bringing in”.
The US remained strong but was “degrading”, he added.