• Trump makes brief visit to Orange County for fundraiser.
NEWP ORT BEACH
President Donald Trump slipped into Orange County for less than three hours on Sunday to raise money for his cash-strapped campaign. His high-dollar fundraiser on exclusive Lido Isle off Newport Beach took place just over two weeks before Election Day and as the president is trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the polls.
“Everyone assumes he’s going to go to battleground states. No one really thinks about how Orange County, California, is an ATM machine,” said Jon Fleischman, a former state GOP official.
Trump told attendees that Republicans are going to win and take back the House, according to former Rep. Darrell Issa.
Issa, a Republican who is running against Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar in the 50th Congressional District, said after the event that Trump’s message, “which is hard to understand in California,” was that in the swing states, his “momentum is starting to take him into the positive.”
Trump was at “the top of his game,” Issa said, and joked around with host Palmer Luckey at the 28-yearold multimillionaire tech savant’s Lido Isle mansion. The Beach Boys performed, and former Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and Skunk Baxter of the Doobie Brothers played guitar.
“It was a good party, lots of oldies,” Issa said.
The scene unfolded in one of the wealthiest communities in Orange County — a longtime conservative citadel that nurtured Ronald Reagan’s politics and is Richard Nixon’s resting place but voted Democratic in the 2016 presidential election for the first time since the Great Depression. Last year, the number of registered Democrats outpaced the number of registered Republicans. But the county remains home to a cadre of deep-pocketed GOP donors.
Tickets to the Newport Beach fundraiser started at $2,800 per person and peaked at $150,000 per couple for cochair status. In all, it was expected to raise $12 million. Trump appeared alongside Richard Grenell, his former ambassador to Germany, at a lunchtime roundtable and reception.
Luckey, a tech mogul who is believed to be the inspiration for the Keenan Feldspar character on HBO’s “Silicon Valley,” is among California’s top GOP donors. He contributed $2.5 million to GOP candidates and causes between June 2017 and Sept. 30, according to fundraising disclosures filed with the Federal Election Commission. His top donations included $450,000 to Take Back the House 2020, $400,000 to the Trump Victory fund and $392,900 to the Republican National Committee.
He sold his virtual reality company to Facebook for $3 billion at the age of 21 and remained an executive at the company. He later claimed to have been forced out because of his conservative views; Facebook executives have denied that his politics played a role in their decision to part ways with Luckey.
He is currently working on a defense startup whose projects include using technology to detect immigrants crossing illegally over the border.
Luckey’s mansion overlooks Newport Bay and sits at the tip of the manmade island that is home to about 800 residences and connected to Newport Beach by a two-lane bridge. One narrow road loops around the island; parking was forbidden on the road Sunday, as well as on Saturday, as workers erected metal security fence along the sidewalks.
Reporters, including the press pool that travels with the president everywhere he goes, were not allowed into the fundraiser.