Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is throwing his financial support behind a long-term primary challenge to President Biden less than a day after calling on the incumbent to drop out of the 2024 race.
The founder of Pershing Square Capital Management announced in a X long post Saturday that he donated $1 million to a political action committee supporting Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), who launched a largely symbolic primary bid against the 81-year-old incumbent in October.
“This is the largest investment I have ever made in a candidate for office, and I made this investment at a high-risk, but very important moment for his campaign,” Ackman wrote in his nearly 2,200-word post.
The announcement came the same day Ackman said Biden was too old to run again during an appearance he made on CNBC’s “Squawkbox” to talk about his ongoing feud with Harvard University, his alma mater.
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman announced he will donate $1 million to a PAC supporting Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips’ primary bid against President Biden. Reuters
“Just in age, past his major issues, I think a good part of the reason why we have what’s going on in the world geopolitically is that he’s considered a weak president. And he’s going to get weaker,” Ackman told CNBC.
In his X post, Ackman made the case for Phillips’ presidency, detailing the 54-year-old’s background and business acumen, calling him “a first-class man of character.”
Ackman also dismissed polls showing the three-term congressman trailing Biden by 67% in the primary, insisting Phillips has “a credible path to winning the nomination despite what the oddsmakers might think.
“Biden voted badly [former President Donald Trump]and his numbers are only going to get worse as he gets older, and he doesn’t look as good as he already is,” Ackman wrote.
“There is also a reasonable chance that Biden will have to withdraw for health reasons,” he surmised.
The billionaire touted Phillips’ rise in the New Hampshire primary, saying he had gone “from zero to 26%” in a matter of weeks. This vote of confidence came despite Phillips holding an embarrassing outdoor campaign event on January 9th in Manchester, NH that was attended by no one.
Ackman has increased his political support in the days following the ouster of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, who resigned on Jan. 2 amid mounting criticism of her handling of rising incidents of antisemitism on the Ivy League campus and an onslaught of alleged plagiarism.
Dean Phillips, a three-term congressman from Minnesota, announced his candidacy in late October. AP
He has been a vocal supporter of efforts to remove Gay from his position, and continues to be a fierce critic of the university for not doing more to protect Jewish students in the wake of Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack on Israel.
In a separate CNBC interview on Friday, the 57-year-old, a former “Bill Clinton Democrat”, said he no longer wanted to be associated with the Democratic Party, which he criticized for its “racist” support for diversity. , the pursuit of equality and inclusion.
He also announced plans to form a think tank, complete with a CEO and board of directors, to investigate higher education’s compliance with the DEI initiative, which he argued stifled meritocracy.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
