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In that same autobiography—hastily withdrawn from circulation after journalists discovered its contents, then mys…