Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Jewish Mega-Donor Seth Klarman Compares Trump to Hitler

Seth Klarman Image by Getty Images

Jewish billionaire hedge fund magnate Seth Klarman compared President Donald Trump to Hitler at a private philanthropy conference this month, according to audio obtained by New York Magazine.

“The president is a threat to democracy,” said Klarman. “People don’t focus on this but Nazi Germany had a constitution before Hitler came to power and at the end of the war they had the exact same constitution. It lasted all the way through, but democracy didn’t.”

Klarman, a major funder of groups like The Israel Project and The Times of Israel, is among the largest donors in the country to Republican politicians, but has been a longtime critic of Trump, and recently gave $30,000 to help Democrats retake the House of Representatives.

Klarman also hold nearly $1 billion in Puerto Rican debt through his fund the Baupost Group, a fact he had sought to mask.

Barry Sternlicht, a Trump friend, also criticized the president at the private meeting, according to New York. “He’s amusing as my friend, but he’s not very amusing as president of the United States,” Sternlicht said.

Contact Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected] or on Twitter, @joshnathankazis.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.