CHARLOTTE—New York Jets owner Woody Johnson now supports Donald Trump for president after previously backing Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the race.
The owner, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, boasts a net worth of about $3.5 billion. He endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012 and raised massive amounts of money for John McCain in 2008. After meeting with Trump on Monday, Johnson endorsed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. He plans to raise money for Trump, as he has done for past GOP nominees. And this irks some sports writers.
“When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet . . . until your candidate gets bounced,” The New York Daily News said of this west-side story. “Then you sell out.”
Even Keith Olbermann took a shot:
Dom Cosentino, the Jets beat-writer for NJ.com (the Newark Star-Ledger website), blogged this week about Johnson again supporting the Republican nominee.
“Johnson had been mum on whether he’d back Trump, whose insurgent run toward the nomination has fractured the Republican Party and even threatened its existence,” wrote Cosentino.
Fractured the Republican Party?
Perhaps the Republican Establishment fractured the party by ignoring their constituents, who delivered them a congressional majority at the ballot box but have little to show for it. This most certainly contributed to Trump’s rise.
“During the primary campaign, Trump had mocked Johnson’s fund-raising prowess as emblematic of the back-channel power-broking he was fighting against,” wrote Cosentino. “But now Trump is lining up wealthy donors to raise an estimated $1 billion for his and other campaigns down the Republican ticket.”
“This, in modern American political parlance,” he claims, “is what’s known as principled plutocracy.”