Sheldon Adelson influential Jewish Republican is dead

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Sheldon Adelson, the chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands and a major donor to Republican politicians, died late Monday following complications related to his cancer treatment, his company said. He was 87.

Adelson took a leave of absence from Sands last week to resume treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which his aides first disclosed in late February 2019.
He rose from a hardscrabble childhood in Boston to become one of the world's richest men as founder and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS) He was Sands' first employee, which has since grown to 50,000 employees.

Adelson spent his fortune -- pegged at $35 billion by Forbes -- to become an influential behind-the-scenes-player in Washington, working to shape US policy toward Israel, help guide Republican Party strategy and lobby against threats posed to his business interests.

He donated hundreds of millions of dollars to medical research and Jewish causes. He owned Israel's largest daily newspaper by circulation; donated to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem; and helped underwrite Birthright Israel, which pays for educational trips to Israel for young Jewish adults.

But he was perhaps best known in the United States as a Republican mega-donor whose millions helped shape the course of presidential and congressional elections in the post-Citizens United era.

Adelson and his wife, Miriam, donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Republican-aligned super PACs. They plowed more than $215 million into federal super PACs in the last two years, making them largest publicly disclosed donors of the 2020 elections, according to a tally by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Adelson did not always support the front-runner in GOP intraparty fights.

In the 2012 Republican presidential primary, for instance, Adelson invested heavily in a super PAC that helped extend former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's presidential run.
Gingrich eventually lost the nomination to Mitt Romney, but Adelson's spending underscored his loyalty to Gingrich, with whom he shared a hawkish stance on Israel.

In 2016, Adelson emerged as a powerful voice backing then-candidate Donald Trump at a time when many GOP traditional donors were reluctant to support the brash real estate developer.
In May 2016, as Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, Adelson penned a Washington Post opinion piece, urging the party's financial benefactors to unite behind Trump after a bruising primary.
Adelson called Trump a "CEO success story."
"You may not like Trump's style or what he says on Twitter, but this country needs strong executive leadership more today than at almost any point in its history," Adelson wrote.
Later that year, the Adelsons donated $20 million to a super PAC supporting Trump's candidacy. Adelson became the largest individual contributor to the President's inaugural committee, donating $5 million.

The Adelsons were rewarded for their generosity.

They attended Trump's inauguration, dined at the White House and had front-row seats in 2018 as US officials opened a US Embassy in Jerusalem -- a long-standing Adelson objective.

In a White House ceremony in 2018, Trump awarded Israeli-born Miriam Adelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The White House cited her work to support medical research and Jewish causes.

His family's 2015 purchase of one of his hometown newspapers, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was cloaked in secrecy, forcing journalists at the paper to do their own digging to determine the identity of their new bosses.

The Jewish community lost a very good leader. He will be greatly missed by the Jews and the rest of the world. RIP

I seriously doubt he'll be missed by the rest of the world.  I say good riddance to the warmonger.