A few bad trades—in tariff wars and in Luka Dončić—plus a gambling-plan meltdown have undercut the mega-donor’s ambitions.
One hundred days ago, Miriam Adelson was on top of the world. The billionaire and far-right mega-donor was in the Capitol Rotunda, dressed in an all-white version of a Sgt. Pepper’s coat and her signature round sunglasses, standing next to Laura Bush and Barack Obama, watching her chosen candidate, the man she had spent more than $100 million on, be sworn in as president. Her basketball team, the Dallas Mavericks, was fresh off of a run to the NBA finals, thanks to Luka Dončić, the league’s most talented young superstar. Las Vegas Sands, the gambling company founded by her late husband and fellow kingmaker Sheldon Adelson, was making slow progress toward its long-term goal of building a casino about 20 minutes’ drive from the squad’s home court. Perhaps most exciting, at least from a pure profit perspective, was the firm’s potential to land a license to operate a casino on Long Island, just outside of New York City, widely believed to be the one of the most lucrative untapped gambling markets on the planet. If Sands could secure it, the MAGA queen would have a cash register that would never stop ringing. Of course she was happy. But that was 100 days ago.
In the three months or so since, Trump’s approval rating has tanked as he declared a trade war on the entire world—even on Israel, where Adelson was born, and where she remains an influential figure. Under the leadership of Adelson’s son-in-law, Patrick Dumont, the Mavericks gave away their superstar in what was instantly panned as the worst trade in NBA history. The Adelsons’ family-controlled company, Las Vegas Sands, dropped its plans to build the Dallas-area gambling house for now. And now there’s New York, where Sands spent about $400 million and hired a squad of lawyers, lobbyists, architects, engineers, and image makers, all for a chance at that jackpot in Nassau County. On Wednesday, Sands president Dumont announced to investors that the Adeslon family was ending its East Coast pursuit, after more than a decade of trying. Miriam’s winning streak was over.
Dumont, in an investor call, blamed Sands’ change of heart on the rise of online gambling as a competitor to real-world action. (A company spokesperson declined to comment on the record for this story, and pointed to Sands’ statement on the topic.) Multiple sources familiar with the situation tell Vanity Fair that’s only a partial answer. Politics was one of several other factors. Adelson wasn’t the only Trump superfan trying to bid in this cobalt blue state. But she was the most visible. The president’s erratic, extreme first 100 days only made any highlighting of that connection more uncomfortable, pushing get-along moderates like Governor Kathy Hochul to reposition themselves as hell-no resistors. In that way, Adelson’s big bet on Trump may have helped spoil her even bigger bet on New York. “Not a fucking chance that Kathy Hochul lets a casino owned by Miriam Adelson into Nassau County, in the state of New York,” one casino industry insider says. “It’s like [liberal billionaire] George Soros opening a casino in Fort Worth. Ain’t happening.”
Technically, the state gaming commission will make the final decision on who gets three casino licenses in the New York City region later this year. “The governor isn’t getting involved in the process whatsoever, and anyone claiming otherwise is just lying,” says one senior Democrat in Albany, the state capital. Hochul’s office directed Vanity Fair to similar pledges by the governor to stay hands-off. But even getting the chance to bid requires getting approval from local politicians. Sands long ago hired former Democratic governor David Paterson to help the famously Republican Adelsons in their New York casino quest. (“There was a lot of chatter that we were Republicans, we were Trumpers, we were, you know, blah, blah, blah,” one source familiar with the matter says. “So Paterson softens some of that.”) Former Michael Bloomberg spokesperson Michael Levoff also became SVP of public affairs and strategy at Sands, which retained the services of a number of outside PR and lobbying gurus, including Stu Loeser, another Bloomberg alum and the former communications director for Chuck Schumer.
Sands needed the help. According to New York, it was competing against 10 other teams, made up of a who’s-who of political, cultural, and financial power players, including Mets owner Steve Cohen, the rapper Nas, his crosstown rival Jay-Z, new World Trade Center towers builder Larry Silverstein, former police commissioner Bill Bratton, and Joe Sitt, the king of Coney Island real estate. Each team pledged billions of dollars to their casino proposals. And each team came with its own phalanx of fixers, lobbyists, and publicists.
Of course, many of the bidders have current and former connections to the president, a onetime casino mogul himself. Wynn Resorts, the gambling company founded by Trump ally Steve Wynn, is teaming up with Trump donor Stephen Ross’s real estate behemoth for a massive casino project on the west side of Manhattan. Bally’s wants to build a casino on the site of the old Trump golf course in the Bronx; if it wins, according to The New York Times, the Trump Organization gets $115 million—a lot of money, but not nearly as much as the Adelsons have contributed to Republican campaigns like Trump’s over the years.
Sands scouted locations throughout the five boroughs. Eventually, in January of 2023, it landed on an enormous, 80-acre property just outside of it: the current site of Nassau Coliseum, the home arena of the New York Islanders hockey team for 43 seasons, until 2015, and the site of 32 Billy Joel concerts.
Perennial Republican candidate and freshly installed Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman quickly gravitated to the idea. The Adelsons and the Blakemans went back decades. Sheldon Adelson, Miriam’s late husband and fellow kingmaker, had financed a political group fronted by Bruce’s brother, according to Newsday.
Sands launched a multipronged campaign to promote the casino. It enlisted ordinarily left-leaning groups, such as the local AFL-CIO and the NAACP branches, with the promise of thousands of new jobs for residents. The company poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into local charities, and estimated that the casino would generate another billion or more to “county, town, police, and community organizations.” David Beckham flew in for a promotional event. Paterson posted photos of himself with Hillary Clinton to Sands’ Instagram. Sands released CGI renditions of the multibillion-dollar resort, promising that it would include a Canyon Ranch spa and high-end restaurants from Rao’s and Jean-Georges.
But the casino campaign wasn’t all celebrity endorsements and slick presentations. Sands’ union supporters packed local town halls. One local environmental activist was not only convinced to praise the casino project at those public events; she shouted down people bold enough to say otherwise. (“Keep a zipper on it!” she yelled in earshot of this reporter.) When nearby Hofstra University sued to block the county from leasing the site to Sands, Paterson turned around and accused his alma mater of discriminating against him and other nonprofits funded by the casino. Blakeman held a series of press conferences in which he claimed “smoking gun” proof that Hofstra was teaming up with Steve Cohen’s casino crew to somehow box out Sands. (The university denied both allegations.)
Blakeman had a knack for standing out in New York’s crowded political landscape: He attacked trans athletes before that became standard operating procedure in the Republican Party; he announced the recruitment of 75 armed “special deputies,” which looked to opponents like the making of a militia. Naturally, all of this made him a much-discussed potential candidate in the 2026 GOP primary to challenge Hochul. And why should Hochul want to give him—and Miriam Adelson—this big of a win? “You think the governor can allow an ATM machine for the Republican Party—in a place where the county executive might be running against her?” the casino industry insider asks.
The senior Albany Democrat calls that an “insane conspiracy theory,” while taking the opportunity to tie Blakeman to the collapse of the Sands bid in Nassau County. “Another massive failure on Bruce’s watch,” the Democrat says.
The Sands project encountered other obstacles. It was never clear whether the company would knock down the actual Coliseum, or refurbish it for casino purposes—a significant detail. Nor did the company have a great answer for how the hell all of an estimated 20,000 daily customers were supposed to get there without clogging Long Island’s already famously crowded highways. The Coliseum has no access to public transportation, which is one of the reasons why the Islanders now play a few towns over in Elmont, and why Billy Joel’s next tour includes a stop instead at Cohen’s team’s ballpark, Citi Field, in Queens. At least Trump managed a rally at the Coliseum last September.
If these sound like insurmountable obstacles to you, the Nassau County legislature felt otherwise, approving the Sands lease and authorizing in its Rules Committee an additional $3 million to fight off legal challenges to the casino. “We had multiple members of the Democratic legislature vote in favor of this,” the source with direct knowledge of the matter says. “Now, granted, it was before Trump came back.”
About that. Adelson was absolutely thrilled about the election results. (After all, the two were so close that Trump had given her the Medal of Freedom in his last term and appointed one of her allies as US antisemitism envoy in this one.) How thrilled? When the votes were counted, the ordinarily publicity-shy Miriam told her daughter in a rare podcast appearance (with captions translated from Hebrew to English by YouTube) that she had walked up to a nearly life-size picture she kept of Sheldon and asked, “Are you proud of me? Aren’t you proud of me?” Miriam Adelson added to her daughter, the investor Yasmin Lukatz, that she was then filled with a sense of love, a sense that Sheldon was “smiling at me.”
It would be wrong to say it’s the end of her lucky run. Even though Adelson fell out of the Forbes 50, she’s still worth around $30 billion. And Trump was the first Republican to win Nassau County since 1988. But Trump’s 15 points underwater in the latest local polling, while Hochul is in positive territory for the first time in 15 months, after making a hard pivot against the president. “Trump’s acting a fool,” says the casino industry insider. “Miriam Adelson didn’t want to get dragged through the mud repeatedly, and they didn’t want to put in a bid and lose for that reason.”
Among Adelson’s executives, there were active discussions about whether it made sense to operate a casino anywhere in the United States at the moment. Despite the name, Las Vegas Sands has no current holdings in America; all of its gambling properties are in Singapore or Chinese-controlled Macao. The thinking went something like this: Better to sell the Coliseum lease to another company. Let the next guy deal with the political hassles that put question marks around our multibillion-dollar resorts, and the union contracts that eat into our margins. We’ll work in Macao, where we’ve got none of those concerns. Making America great again? That’s a hand someone else can play.