Top Trump Donors in DuPage as of August 2019

Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro kicked a hornets’ nest yesterday by Tweeting a list of the top Trump donors in his hometown of San Antonio. Not surprisingly, a lot of the people collaborating with Donald Trump aren’t in a hurry to talk about it. Thing is, it’s public information, right down to the addresses and employment data.

Sad to see so many San Antonians as 2019 maximum donors to Donald Trump — the owner of ⁦@BillMillerBarBQ⁩, owner of the ⁦@HistoricPearl, realtor Phyllis Browning, etc⁩.

Their contributions are fueling a campaign of hate that labels Hispanic immigrants as ‘invaders.’ pic.twitter.com/YT85IBF19u

— Joaquin Castro (@Castro4Congress) August 6, 2019

It makes sense that Trump donors would be concerned about their politics becoming public. We’ve never lived under a more utterly repugnant regime. People who are still giving Donald Trump money after the Mueller Report, the border concentration camps, the indictments and convictions of his handlers, and daily barrage of divisive and destructive behavior should have no cover. If they’re going to use their money to undermine our way of life, they can at least do it in the open.

You can find data on campaign donors at the Federal Election Commission’s data portal. This search narrows that data to the major towns in DuPage, for donors to Trump’s central campaign fund.

There was some good news in this search. There were 44 people in San Antonio who’ve already donated the annual maximum to the Trump campaign. In DuPage, there were only two. Interestingly, only a handful of the county’s major Republican donors have given anything to Trump.

Trump lost the 2016 Republican Primary here and was trounced in the ’16 General Election. He’s more unpopular in DuPage now than he was three years ago, even among Republicans. His list of largest donors here quickly dips into relatively small numbers.

A few of the donors stand out. Trump’s two largest donors from DuPage are Paul Pearson, Chief of Cardiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Sehkar Sompalli, an orthopedic surgeon. The owner of Dundee Ford is a big Trump donor, as is Ben Devee, who owns Front Street Cantina in Lemont.

Here are Trump’s 25 largest donors from DuPage County to date:

Some have raised concerns about the potential impact of publicizing individual contributions. Think of it this way. The last time a western nation experienced a regime like this, its remaining enablers had to change their names and flee to Argentina. No Trump supporters (apart from the indicted ones) are facing any consequences on that scale. At least not yet. But all of us should have the freedom to make social and especially commercial choices based on this information.