RE: https://c.im/@cdarwin/117021215493505628 In September 2024, billionaire hedge-fund owner John Paulson — an adviser to the president and one of his biggest fundraisers — gave an interview supporting Trump’s tariff proposals on CNBC. “What you see is a hollowed-out American manufacturing base. And we need to protect American jobs and protect American manufacturing,” Paulson said. “We can’t have Americans — American producers closing American factories and offshoring.” Paulson is a legendary figure in the world of New York finance. He made much of his money through a prescient bet against the U.S. housing market before its collapse in 2007, personally netting $4 billion. But through his investment firm, Paulson had other holdings that extended beyond the credit default swaps that so enriched him at the onset of the Great Recession. Over the years they included stakes in a mining company, a commercial forest interest and a media conglomerate.​ And they included Conn Selmer, whose parent company, Steinway Musical Instruments, had been acquired in 2013 by Paulson’s investment business. Conn Selmer’s 61-year-old Eastlake factory, a low-slung building between a frontage road and a field overgrown with wild grass and goldenrod, 👉 was now opening for its last shift making instruments in the United States