During his speech in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, on Monday, Donald Trump drew attention to his largest financial backer, Israeli-American casino magnate Miriam Adelson – and simultaneously revealed a sensitive question he had asked her.
— Look at her sitting there so innocently,” he said. “I’m going to get her in trouble with this — but I actually asked her once, ‘So Miriam: I know you love Israel. What do you love more, the United States or Israel?’ She refused to answer. That means that might be an issue, I must say, Trump said to muted laughter in the parliament.
Adelson, who was sitting in the gallery, received a standing ovation when Trump praised her support for Israel and noted that she had made “more trips to the White House than anybody else”.
The 80-year-old invested $106 million in her pro-Trump super PAC Preserve America ahead of the 2024 election. Together with her late husband Sheldon, the Adelson family has donated over $600 million to Trump’s three presidential campaigns and other Republican candidates since 2015.
After her husband’s death in 2021, Miriam took over majority control of Las Vegas Sands, which operates major casinos in Singapore and Macau. She also owns one of Israel’s most widely read newspapers, Israel Hayom, and the basketball team Dallas Mavericks. Her fortune is estimated at over $60 billion.
Trump asked dual citizen Miriam Adelson, a billionaire running nasty ads against me in Kentucky, “what do you love more, the United States or Israel?” She refused to answer him. He says that might mean she loves Israel more.
This isn’t AI, it’s real video… pic.twitter.com/pAPbvcfyS1
— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) October 14, 2025
Committed Zionist
Born in Tel Aviv in 1945 to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Adelson trained as a physician before becoming one of the Republican Party’s most important financiers. As a committed Zionist, she has long used her economic influence to shape US policy toward Israel.
The Adelson family was instrumental in getting Trump to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and to recognize Israeli control over the Golan Heights, and Trump awarded Miriam the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018.
Her rhetoric hardened further after the attack on October 7, 2023.
“Foreign fans of Hamas are our enemies, the ideological enablers in the West of those who would go to any length to eradicate us from the Middle East. And, as such, they should be dead to us”, she wrote in her own newspaper.
At a campaign event in September, she urged Jewish voters to support Trump “in gratitude for everything he has done and trust in everything he will yet do”.