President Donald Trump praised multi-billionaire Miriam Adelson during his speech in Tel Aviv last Monday, thanking her and her late husband Sheldon Adelson for their contributions to his two presidential administrations over the last decade.
“Miriam and Sheldon would come into the office,” Trump said. “They had more trips to the White House than anybody else I can think of.”
Miriam Adelson, an honorary trustee at USC, has donated $170 million to Trump over his three campaigns, remaining one of his top donors throughout.
In a November 2024 op-ed written in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Adelson wrote, “There is simply no alternative to the courage, protectiveness and clear-sightedness that Trump evinces with such peerless energy.”
In 2016, in the middle of Trump’s first campaign, Adelson became a voting member of USC’s Board of Trustees. Trump awarded her with the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2018.
In 2022, Adelson moved into an honorary trustee position. Adelson has publicly donated around $9 million directly to the university for medical research over her time with the board.
The other USC trustees have collectively donated a little over $45 million to political causes for both Democrats and Republicans over the past 40 years. Including Adelson’s donations, that number jumps tenfold to $475 million.
Adelson’s contributions alone — which went almost entirely to Republicans — mean that collectively, more than 90% of the trustees’ overall contributions have gone toward right-leaning causes. More than a third went to Trump, an Annenberg Media analysis of federal campaign finance records found.
Adelson’s top four contributions of all time, ranging from $20 million to $25 million each, went to the Preserve America Political Action Committee in 2024. The PAC spent more than $110 million on advertising attacking then-Vice President Kamala Harris on Trump’s behalf. Her donations are widely believed to have helped Trump capture the White House and full congressional control for Republicans.
Miriam Adelson's donations across the years
Adelson's political donations more than tripled from the 2016 to 2024 election year.
The range of Adelson’s influence at USC is unclear. Neither she nor her late husband are alumni of the university. Prior to joining the board, the Adelsons’ only recorded relationship to the university is a donation of $300,000 to support ovarian cancer research at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.
She progressed to an honorary member position on the Board of Trustees after serving as a voting member for six years. Current rules in the USC Bylaws state that honorary members elected after July 1, 2022, can only attend meetings by invitation. The university has not answered direct questions about when Adelson first became an honorary member, whether she attended meetings without invitation or what kind of influence she holds over the board at large. Adelson was first recorded as an honorary trustee July 7, 2022, less than one week after the cutoff date.
To date, no new honorary members have been elected since Adelson’s induction in July 2022.
USC bylaws also outline that — upon being elected as an honorary trustee — members “shall continue to hold such title for his/her lifetime unless such title is removed, with or without cause, by a majority of the Trustees then in office.”
Adelson is now worth over $40 billion. She is currently the 25th richest person in the United States — according to Forbes — and is the publisher of Israel Hayom, the most widely circulated newspaper in Israel. She and her family own the Las Vegas Review-Journal in swing-state Nevada.
Adelson is also the primary owner of the Dallas Mavericks and the president of the Maccabee Task Force, an organization founded to “fight back against the rising tide of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism on America’s college campuses,” according to the organization’s website.
Adelson wrote a column in Forbes Israel in late 2023, responding to western support for the Palestinian people following the Oct. 7 attacks.
“Those ghastly gatherings of radical Muslim and Black Lives Matter activists, ultra-progressives and career agitators were nothing short of street parties,” Adelson wrote. “These people are not our critics. They are our enemies, the ideological enablers in the West of those who would go to any length to eradicate us from the Middle East. And, as such, they should be dead to us.”
Born in 1945 in British Palestine, Adelson served as a medical officer in the Israeli Defense Forces, later working as a physician in a Tel Aviv hospital.
In 1991, she married Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas business magnate and then-millionaire. Sheldon Adelson died in 2021.
Both Miriam Adelson and her late husband were prominent donors to Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign for Prime Minister of Israel, representing the nationalist right-wing Likud party.
In 2012, Adelson was the top female donor in the United States, sending $46 million to Republican campaigns and conservative PACs.
Adelson and her late husband have been the biggest contributors to Birthright Israel, a group that fully funds trips to Israel for young Jewish adults. The Adelsons, also honorary members of Birthright Israel’s board, have donated more than half a billion dollars as of 2025.
The Adelson-funded MTF has been outspoken about campus policy at USC. In 2024, the organization posted a statement to its Facebook page condemning what were believed to be Valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s pro-Palestinian views and praising the university’s decision to cancel her commencement speech.
“The University of Southern California denied valedictorian Asna Tabassum the chance to give a commencement speech due to her hateful views,” MTF wrote.
In 2020, Adelson was sued by 13 Palestinian and American activists for aiding and abetting “the commission of numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity.” Her co-defendants included Netanyahu, Trump and the American Israel Political Action Committee.
In his speech last week, Trump also thanked the Adelsons for their involvement in White House policy, saying they were “responsible for so much.”
The Board of Trustees did not respond to requests for comment.
Attempts to reach Miriam Adelson for comment via her foundation and newspaper were unsuccessful.
Additional reporting by Malik Gamble