Congressional reporter offers an interesting tweet
With the inaugural presidential lunch coming to a close Friday afternoon, US Congressional reporter Paul Kane offered an interesting tweet, noting:
“It’s my 5th inaugural luncheon – I don’t ever recall a mega donor being in this lunch. But there’s Sheldon Adelson at Table 23 with (former House Speaker) Boehner.”
Interesting, because Adelson is the arch-opponent of online gambling in the United States who has funded the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling; supports the Restoration of America’s Wire Act; is a major Republican Party donor; reportedly gave a Trump political action committee $5 million during the election; and made a hefty contribution to the $100 million Trump inauguration celebrations.
Adelson, in short, is a man accustomed to extending his political influence through the deployment of part of his reportedly $30 billion fortune.
Whether that will translate into good news or bad for online gambling in the United States is currently the subject of much industry speculation, spanning the gamut of opinion from hopeful to pessimistic.
Trump’s reputation for being unpredictable makes it difficult to guess whether Adelson’s political largesse will finally triumph after years of attempts to kill off the US industry, or whether Trump’s support for the Tenth Amendment will prevail and continue to open the doors for online gambling legalisation attempts at state level.