The $130 Million Man: How Timothy Mellon Is Buying the Pentagon One Check at a Time

The reclusive heir who called welfare "slavery" and funds anti-LGBTQ politicians just wrote a personal check to pay America's troops—and nobody seems to care about the price of his patriotism.

It is defininately a what the fuck kind of moment when a hermitic descendant of Andrew Mellon—that prince of avarice who once commanded ninety-nine banks like some Gilded Age Midas—simply scribbles out $130 million to fund the American military apparatus during what our theatrical President calls a “Democrat shutdown.” The donor, Timothy Mellon, age eighty-two, occupies a Wyoming hideout from which he occasionally emerges to reshape the Republic through the ancient art of check-writing.

The particulars are squalid. Here sits an heir who has devoted his dotage to explaining why government assistance transforms citizens into chattel—”Slavery Redux,” he termed it in his vanished memoir—while he himself subsists entirely upon inherited lucre. The irony appears lost on him, though perhaps irony requires a certain self-awareness that generations of compound interest tend to erode.

In that same autobiography—hastily withdrawn from circulation after journalists discovered its contents, then mysteriously reissued with endorsements from Robert Kennedy’s peculiar son—our Timothy reveals his deepest anxieties. Black Americans, he informs us, grew “belligerent” after the civil rights movement. Academic departments devoted to gender studies represent a “mishmash of meaningless tripe.” The poor, with their food stamps and cellular telephones, have become serfs to “Uncle Sam.” All this wisdom from a gentleman who was ferried to preparatory school aboard the family aircraft.

Consider the baroque nature of his generosity. Having devoted millions to politicians who regard homosexuals as biblical abominations, having funded that Heritage Foundation scheme to transform the Republic into something resembling Calvin’s Geneva, having bankrolled Texas’s quixotic wall against Mexico, Mellon now presents himself as the savior of our enlisted men. That some of these soldiers might themselves be homosexual, or Black, or recipients of the very social programs he abhors, appears not to trouble his conscience—assuming, of course, that such exists.

The Pentagon accepted this tribute with unseemly haste. I pictures the generals, those erstwhile defenders of democratic principle, genuflecting before private capital like suppliants at Delphi. “We are grateful,” they announced, as if the United States military had been reduced to passing the collection plate. No mention, naturally, of the constitutional impropriety of permitting plutocrats to purchase the loyalty of armed forces. Think about that. A private person who fuel’s Trump’s goals just paid the US military. Chilling.

But here we are and sadly it is not a first is it? Timothy Mellon has now joined that select club of billionaires who exercise governmental power without the tedious formalities of democratic process. No Senate confirmation for Mellon. No security clearance investigation into his peculiar obsessions. No oath of office, no vetting of his finances—though that would prove amusing, given that his finances are vetting him. He has achieved what Elon Musk required a presidential proximity to accomplish, and with even fewer constraints. Musk at least must pretend to answer to someone. Mellon answers to no one save his own inherited prejudices.

This represents a new evolution in oligarchic control. Why bother with the messy business of appointment when one can simply purchase governmental function directly? No congressional hearings where embarrassing questions about one’s racial theories might arise. No FBI background checks that might uncover one’s funding of extremist organizations. No tedious ethics agreements. Just pure, unmediated plutocracy.

Our Donald—for he has become ours in the way that hemorrhoids become ours—could not resist the melodrama. “A patriot,” he proclaimed of his benefactor, maintaining the tissue-thin pretense of anonymity while practically spelling out Timothy’s monogram in the air. The performance possessed all the subtlety of a stripshow at noon.

But let’s penetrate deeper into this transaction. What does one get for $130 million in today’s democracy? Not merely the gratitude of soldiers who will receive approximately one hundred dollars each—barely sufficient for a tank of petroleum in this economy. No, Mellon is acquiring something far more valuable: the precedent. If private citizens can fund the military during budgetary theatrics, what prevents them from funding it during actual conflicts? What stops a billionaire from financing a particular regiment, a specific operation, a preferred war?

Here I must pause to contemplate that enduring mystery of our age: why do Republicans harbor such consuming fixations upon poor and LGBTQ people? I think of medieval monks flagellating themselves while contemplating sin—except our billionaires flagellate others while contemplating their own virtue. Timothy Mellon, ensconced in Wyoming splendor, loses sleep over food stamp recipients? Peter Thiel, himself homosexual, finances politicians who would gladly criminalize his own existence? The Koch brothers, before one mercifully expired, devoted their inheritance to ensuring that other people’s inheritances—Social Security, Medicare, public education—disappeared? Strange.

The psychological archaeology here proves irresistible. What terror grips a man who inherited everything when he sees others receive anything? What primal scene plays out in Mellon’s unconscious when he contemplates two men kissing or a Black mother purchasing groceries with governmental assistance? The poor and the queer represent something intolerable to these men—perhaps the possibility that human worth might exist independent of net worth, that dignity might flourish outside their careful hierarchies.

Or perhaps the explanation is simpler and more sordid. The poor remind them of what they might have been without grandfather’s trust fund. The homosexual suggests that desire itself might escape the rigid categories they’ve spent lifetimes constructing. Both represent disorder in a universe where inherited wealth is supposed to confer natural superiority. Both must be punished for disturbing the fiction that billionaires deserve their billions.

The man himself remains fascinating in his contradictions. Having attempted to resurrect Pan American Airways—that venture collapsed spectacularly—he understands failure. Having pursued Amelia Earhart’s remains with the fervor of Ahab seeking his whale, then litigating against his fellow seekers, he comprehends obsession. Having been deposed in legal proceedings some twenty times by his own count, he knows the weight of testimony. Yet nowhere in his experience does he appear to have encountered the central paradox of his existence: that he embodies precisely the dependence he claims to despise, only his dependence flows from ancestral coffers rather than federal ones.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that bartender-turned-congresswoman who so terrifies the established order, received $2,700 from Mellon—an attempt, apparently, to sow discord among progressives. She returned it. She, who actually worked for her position, who underwent vetting, who swore an oath, who faces voters every two years, rejected his money. The Pentagon, guardian of our democratic experiment, exhibits no such fastidiousness. They took the cash.

We are witnessing the logical conclusion of our national mythology: that private enterprise invariably surpasses public administration. Why shouldn’t military pay arrive via billionaire largesse? Why shouldn’t inherited wealth determine which citizens deserve protection, which programs merit funding, which Americans qualify as fully human? Mellon merely follows this logic to its natural terminus, unburdened by the democratic impediments that constrain elected officials or appointed ones.

The French aristocracy, before their appointment with Madame Guillotine, at least understood noblesse oblige—that privilege demanded certain reciprocal obligations. Our American aristocrats, insulated by generations of accumulated capital, recognize no such duty. They inherit their mountains of gold, denounce others for accepting modest assistance, fund politicians who would criminalize difference, then pose as patriots when they purchase influence over the military apparatus—all while bypassing every mechanism designed to prevent precisely such capture.

In his Wyoming isolation, Mellon perhaps contemplates his next acquisition. Having purchased a border wall, a presidential campaign, and now military payroll, what remains? The judiciary? The Federal Reserve? Or perhaps he’ll simply continue his war against the existence of Americans who trouble his peace—the impoverished who dare survive, the homosexuals who dare love, the scholars who dare document how men like himself for exactly who they are - warped, bitter and paranoid.

This is our new form of government: billionaire ex machina. When democracy falters, when Congress deadlocks, when the ordinary mechanisms of state sputter, a plutocrat descends from Wyoming to scatter gold coins and prejudices in equal measure. No election required. No confirmation necessary. No security clearance needed. Just wealth, will, and the peculiar American belief that money launders everything, including fascism with a philanthropic face.

The Pentagon has his money. The troops will receive their pittance. The precedent has been established. And Timothy Mellon, from his fortress in the American wilderness, has demonstrated that in our remarkable republic, you can buy anything—including the privilege of deciding which Americans deserve to exist, which citizens merit assistance, and whether the world’s most powerful military should function as a subscription service for billionaires with opinions about everybody else’s morality but none about their own.

God, I think we need to recognize the obvious: we have arrived at our Moscow moment. Trump’s billionaires—Musk commandeering space policy while posting inanities, Thiel manipulating our surveillance apparatus, now Mellon purchasing military loyalty—have transformed American governance into something indistinguishable from Putin’s arrangement with his oligarchs. Except our version proves more insidious because it arrives wrapped in the flag and bearing tax-deductible receipts.

Consider the roster: billionaires who answer to no one now determine our foreign policy, our military funding, our social legislation. They operate without oversight, without expertise, without the slightest gesture toward democratic accountability. At least Russia’s oligarchs emerged from the chaos of Soviet collapse with some pretense of earning their fortunes through cunning, however criminal. Ours simply inherited theirs and now deploy them to ensure no one else inherits anything—not rights, not dignity, not democracy itself.

The danger cannot be overstated, though it will be, endlessly, by those paid to understate it. When private wealth commands public force, when billionaires fund the mechanisms of state violence, when inherited fortunes determine military policy, we have ceased to be a republic and become something else—a plutocratic protection racket where citizenship means nothing and net worth means everything.

Timothy Mellon represents not an aberration but an apotheosis. He is what happens when democratic safeguards erode, when wealth concentrates beyond comprehension, when a nation forgets that oligarchy and democracy cannot coexist. Every check his pen produces weakens the architecture Madison and Hamilton constructed to prevent precisely this capture. Every million he deploys to punish the poor or criminalize the different brings us closer to that moment when American democracy becomes purely ceremonial, a passion play performed while billionaires exercise actual power.

The Romans had a word for when private citizens commanded military force: civil war. We Americans, ever optimistic, call it philanthropy. But Timothy Mellon and his fellow plutocrats are not philanthropists. They are sovereigns without subjects, exercising power without legitimacy, governing without consent. They have achieved what no foreign enemy could: the purchase of American democracy at wholesale prices.

The Mellons have been purchasing America since the nineteenth century. Timothy merely continues the family business, with the crucial innovation that he no longer pretends otherwise. He has achieved what even Musk must envy: power without portfolio, influence without accountability, governance without the governed’s consent.

I suspects that Mellon and his fellow plutocrats will continue their strange crusade against the poor and the different until someone, somewhere, finally asks the obvious question: if wealth creates virtue, why do these men seem so perpetually afraid of everyone else’s existence? But that would require the kind of clarity our age seems determined to avoid, preferring instead to accept our oligarchs’ charity while they systematically purchase the machinery designed to constrain them.

The Caesars, at least, had to cross the Rubicon. Our billionaires simply write a check. And unlike Caesar, who faced the Senate’s daggers, our oligarchs face only gratitude from a military they’ve reduced to a charity case and a government they’ve transformed into a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Let me sum it up. We are watching our country bleed out. The wealthiest country in world cut off food benefits for children, the old and the poor effective next week - people will go hungry. Our public health apparatus is being killed in front of us. We are engage in extra-judicial killing. Our military is marching on our own streets. We are distrumpting the world order. Our president is treatenting war. Soy bean and now beef agriculture is being destroyed. Canada and Mexico are pulling away from us with their tourist money. American’s are leaving.

And the solution to paying those who protect us, who we’ve already given the money (our taxes) is being denied to them and instead a billionaire is paying them. It begs the most terrifying question imaginable: who does the United States armed forces work for? Usually this question is answered by who is signing the paycheck. That changed today.