Super-Rich Power Couple Who Flipped From Hillary Stans to MAGA-Heads Gets Wild NYT Profile

From the annals of the super-wealthy this Monday morning: The New York Times profiled Bill White and Bryan Eure, a married couple who were among Manhattan’s Hillary Clinton-loving liberal elite—until they cast their lot in with Donald Trump, another rich guy, but one who takes their calls.

The profile makes a convincing case that the duo are among the absolute worst people on an island where ultra-rich, evil people are known to congregate. Let’s examine the evidence, shall we? (emphasis mine throughout):

They are throwing a $5 million fund-raiser for President Trump this winter, and are quick to make it known that they have the president’s sons’ cellphone numbers on speed dial. They have poured more than $50,000 of their own money into supporting the president, who smiles in photos on the bookshelves of their home.

But Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, are not red state evangelicals or die-hard right-wingers. In fact, for years, they were key players among a cohort that Mr. Trump loathes: Manhattan’s liberal elite.

So they’re happily spendy in the name of Trump! But how seriously should we take their betrayal of liberal values? Per the Times, they’ve lost political friends over the move:

The couple say they have been condemned not just for hypocrisy, but for what has been seen as a betrayal of their own community, by backing a man who has scaled back L.G.B.T. protections.

They dismiss such concerns. “I don’t like identity politics,” Mr. Eure said.

“They ran to the other end of the spectrum and then walked off the ledge,” Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton, said. “This president is degrading our institutions. He is racist, he has no respect for women, he has no respect for minorities or for any community, including the L.G.B.T. community — it makes you wonder.”

Makes you wonder, indeed! The story also contains this juicy anecdote about how the couple pushing their MAGA politics on a top city politician ruined an otherwise perfectly nice dinner party:

At a dinner the couple hosted early this year in their Chelsea apartment, Corey Johnson, a Democrat and the openly gay speaker of the New York City Council, became irate when the couple suggested he meet Mr. Trump to discuss the city’s infrastructure needs, Mr. White said.

“It was like a food fight,” Mr. White said. “It was in our home, him calling us complete political idiots.”

Mr. Johnson declined to comment. The former friends have not spoken since, the couple said.

On the other side, there are few complaints about Mr. White and Mr. Eure’s switch.

“It happens whether you begin on the left or begin on the right, there’s always movement,” the former TV host Bill O’Reilly, a friend of the couple, said in an interview. “It represents considerable health in the country, not a disturbance or perturbation. It turns out they made a very smart decision.”

The couple’s 180—which has also led the couple to splitting time between New York and a home in Georgia, where they can apparently wear their pro-Trump garb in peace—dates back to Election Night 2016, when White told the paper he drove straight from Clinton’s bleak un-victory party to the New York Hilton, where Trump’s party was celebrating their surprise win in earnest. Really, imagine having so little shame as to recount this out loud:

The genesis of the couple’s reversal can be timed to about midnight on Nov. 8, 2016. Inside the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, at Ms. Clinton’s election night event, Mr. White stood watching the returns in an increasingly funereal atmosphere.

He got in his Chevrolet Suburban and drove to the New York Hilton in Midtown, where Mr. Trump was celebrating his win.

“I didn’t want to be part of that misery pie; I’m not a wallower in self-pity,” said Mr. White, who now runs Constellations Group, a strategic consultancy firm. “I really believe that once that decision is made, you have to get behind your president.”

Oh, and Chelsea Clinton snubbed them once, or something:

There was the time, earlier this year, at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar in Midtown Manhattan, when Mr. White spotted Chelsea Clinton across the dining room.

Offended that she failed to acknowledge him, Mr. White said, he whipped out his phone and dialed Donald Trump Jr. “He said, ‘Do you want me to come over? I’m at the office, do you want me to?’”

Can you imagine!!! They called Don Jr. for bitchy backup!! (Sadly this makes some logical sense, given the Times also reported the couple feted Jr.’s dating Kimberley Guilfoyle with a dinner party over the summer.)

Although White and Eure were almost certainly spotlit because they aren’t what you picture as Trump’s typical supporters—former liberals, very wealthy, gay—they do provide an interesting Rosetta Stone for how the president’s fans think about him. Both quickly wrote off Trump’s propensity for lying as “embellishing” and “exaggerations”—underscoring yet again that this administration won’t be effectively combatted by fact-checking. When prompted to respond to Trump’s racist policies, White countered as the president himself does, by citing “improved black employment numbers.” (Trump loves to trumpet declining unemployment rates for black Americans, but the picture—and who deserves credit for that one number—is far more complicated.) Eure also countered Trump’s championing of anti-LGBTQ policies by citing his appointment of Richard Grenell, who’s openly gay, as the U.S. ambassador to Germany.

Merrill, Clinton’s spokesman, lands a number of good disses to balance out the story, including pointing out the obvious that they were clearly turncoat liberals if one night made them throw it all away. What he doesn’t say is that Trump has been a great president if you’re a rich American (even if you’re also gay, or black, or a member of any other historically marginalized group), because the very rich will always stick together to the detriment of everyone else, no matter what.