Who is Miriam Adelson, pint-sized blonde billionaire who has Trump’s ear?

Staunch Israel supporter and widow of a casino boss has already pumped tens of millions of dollars into past campaigns

She is a pint-sized Israeli addiction doctor known for her poker-straight platinum blonde hair and rimless glasses, but the billionaire megadonor Miriam Adelson’s potential influence over a second Donald Trump administration’s Middle East policy is expected to be anything but small.
The staunch Israel supporter, who boasts a net worth of about $30 billion (£23 billion), is one of the Republican nominee’s biggest donors, having pumped $100 million into a Trump-supporting committee.
Her donations, which included $45 million in September alone, have eclipsed the $75 million given by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.
Since her late husband, the casino behemoth Sheldon Adelson, died in 2021, Dr Adelson has continued their legacy of donating to pro-Israel causes and politicians.
But it is thought Dr Adelson will want more in return than the presidential medal of freedom Trump bestowed upon her during his first administration.
It was reported that she and her late husband made a $20 million donation to Trump before the 2016 election with the expectation he would move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – a promise Trump fulfilled in 2018.
She and her husband were in the front row for the event, and one of the organisations run by Dr Adelsan ran a full-page advert in The New York Times showing Trump wearing a kippah while visiting the Western Wall that read: “President Trump: You Promised. You delivered.”
During his administration, Trump also signed a proclamation to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz suggested that Dr Adelson would want Israel to annex the West Bank and for the US recognise its sovereignty there in exchange for her donations.
Andy Abboud, her spokesman, denied the report to The New York Times, but her friend, Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi, said that he believed Dr Adelson supported annexation and considered so-called “land for peace” deals to actually be “land for war”.
“Do I believe that Miriam supports the creation of a Palestinian state? Absolutely not,” Mr Boteach told the US newspaper.
“Those of us who are part of her circle and share her values,” he continued, would oppose territorial concessions “if there was any doubt whatsoever that the creation of the Palestinian state would lead to murdered Jews.”
Dr Adelson reportedly made the pledge to funnel $100 million to a campaign committee supporting Trump earlier this year – and has steadily fulfilled her promise since July.
Her healthy donations are all the more essential given Trump’s meagre war chest in comparison with his political rival.
Between July and September, Ms Harris’s campaign and the affiliated groups raised $870 million compared with Trump’s $366 million.
The donation is also significantly more than the $90 million Dr Adelson and her husband gave to a pro-Trump super PAC in 2020.
After the Nevada caucuses, Dr Adelson told Trump to be less bombastic and address the economy more directly, according to The New York Times.
She also reportedly would not donate to him until her friend Nikki Haley had been knocked out of the contest.
Dr Adelson was born in Israel to a socialist father and conservative mother, and grew up speaking Hebrew.
She studied microbiology and genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She served in the military before going to medical school and marrying Ariel Ochshorn, a doctor, with whom she had two daughters.
She met her second husband, Adelson, the American former chief executive and chairman of the casino behemoth Las Vegas Sands, when she moved to New York for a research fellowship on methadone treatment.
Dr Adelson became a mother again in her 50s when she gave birth to their sons Adam and Matan.
Now the world’s eighth-richest woman, she and her family own more than half of the gambling empire and last year bought a majority stake in the Dallas Mavericks NBA team amid reports she is hoping to open a casino in Texas, where most gambling is currently illegal.
Dr Adelson opened an addiction treatment clinic in Las Vegas and reportedly still personally treats patients. She also dons her white coat to visit her clinic in Tel Aviv.
She and her husband, who were close to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, at the start of his career, donated generously to Trump’s first two campaigns.
They gave $25 million to Trump super-PACs in 2016 and $90 million in 2020.
They also donated $5 million to Trump’s inauguration. The couple seated a few rows behind Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, as Trump was sworn in.
In 2019, she praised Trump for dispensing with the “useless mould of the so-called peace process”.
Writing in Israel Hayom, an Israeli newspaper that she and her husband launched in 2007, she said: “Their administration has made clear that the Middle East must come to terms with an Israel that is proudly permanent in the land of Zion – an Israel whose Jewish roots run deepest and whose ancestral, sovereign claims are without equal.”
She also called for the Bible to add a “Book of Trump”.
During his presidency, Trump announced his plan for the Middle East, which Mr Netanyahu called “the deal of the century”.
Titled “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People”, it gave Israel the green light to annex about 30 per cent of the territory, which Israel captured in 1967 in the Six Day War.
On Nov 21 2023, she denounced the “ghastly gatherings of radical Muslim and BLM activists, ultra-progressives, and career agitators”.
She added:  “Indeed, we must disavow and shame them, deny them employment and public office, and defund their colleges and political parties. Doing all this will be easy, because the stakes in Israel’s war of survival have never been so clear … If you quibble about how many babies were beheaded, or how many women were violated, in the October 7 pogrom, you’re dead to us … We Israelis, we Jews love life. And we are done with meekly counting our dead.”
During his first administration, Dr Adelson praised Trump as being “a man of his word”.
She said: “On the campaign trail, he promised to protect Israel, to move the embassy to Jerusalem, to quit the Iran deal. And he has kept those promises.”
What promises has he made this time? We can only guess.