The Mellon Legacy
By 
This morning, I put up my long-awaited grave post on Andrew Mellon. In comments, people mentioned his loathsome descendant Richard Mellon Scaife. Good point. There’s a grave that needs visiting. Now let’s check in to see what another descendant, Timothy Mellon, is up to these days.
Timothy Mellon, the 77-year-old founder of a rail and freight company, who poured $30 million into three GOP super PACs in five months, wrote that black people were “even more belligerent” after the expansion of social programs in the 1960s and 1970s and that Americans who rely on government assistance were “slaves of a new Master, Uncle Sam.”
In a self-published 2015 autobiography, Mellon called social safety net programs “Slavery Redux,” adding: “For delivering their votes in the Federal Elections, they are awarded with yet more and more freebies: food stamps, cell phones, WIC payments, Obamacare, and on, and on, and on. The largess is funded by the hardworking folks, fewer and fewer in number, who are too honest or too proud to allow themselves to sink into this morass.”
Mellon declined to comment.
The Wyoming-based donor, whose family fortune dates to the Gilded Age, gave his first major pro-Trump donation in April, with a $10 million check to America First Action, the main super PAC supporting the president’s reelection. His donations are the biggest known contributions to the group by far, and he is also a top donor to GOP congressional super PACs, according to campaign finance records.
America First Action, a super PAC chaired by Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration, declined to comment on Mellon’s contribution.
Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree! Gilded Age, meet New Gilded Age.