During his first term, President-elect Donald Trump took to calling Mar-a-Lago—the 62,500-square-foot, Spanish Revival-style mansion that doubles as a private club and Trump’s private residence—the Winter White House or the Southern White House.
That Mar-a-Lago is again the Winter White House probably makes Marjorie Merriweather Post, the breakfast cereal heiress who built it in the 1920s, smile from beyond the grave. Upon her death in 1973, Post donated the residence to the National Park Service, hoping one day that the compound would be used as precisely that.
As Trump has been the center of gravity of American politics for nearly the past decade, the right’s most politically connected are frequently seen orbiting Mar-a-Lago and, more broadly, Palm Beach, Florida.
Washington creatures aren’t the only ones seen on the club grounds these days, however.
Over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump brought anti-woke entrepreneurs and financiers into the fold. Mar-a-Lago’s clientele reflects as much. Not only is Trump’s club the Winter White House, it might also be called Winter Wall Street.
But Mar-a-Lago’s business-oriented guests aren’t the establishment types—the likes of Roger Altman or Reid Hoffman. They’re often young and ambitious. They’re plugged into crypto and artificial intelligence. They’re embracing the values of Trump’s America First movement and now they’re looking to capitalize on it for themselves and their investors.
Take James Fishback, for example. The 29-year-old hosted a breakfast Dec. 5 at Mar-a-Lago to announce the launch of Azoria U.S. Meritocracy, an exchange-traded fund.
Azoria ETF, co-founded by Fishback and Asaf Abramovich, friends who met in college, will refuse to put its investors’ dollars into the hands of corporations that implement quota-hiring systems in the name of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.
In other words, Azoria ETF has been described as “an S&P 500 fund without the woke s–t.”
“We’re here today for one simple reason,” Fishback said in his remarks at Tuesday’s Mar-a-Lago event. “America’s greatest companies have long thrived on a straightforward yet powerful principle: Hire the best person possible for the job.”
“That’s how these companies became engines of innovation that have delivered windfall profits to shareholders and changed the world in the process,” he said.
“In recent years, however, many of these companies have been captured, infected by a new orthodoxy that rejects the time-tested principle of meritocracy,” Fishback continued. “They’ve instead embraced something new and toxic: hiring on race and gender.”
“These companies that end up earning subpar returns by running their businesses like a Model U.N. tournament as opposed to a profitable enterprise,” he told the crowd.
Azoria has identified three dozen companies in the S&P 500 index that have publicly admitted to racial and gender hiring quotas.
“These three dozen companies,” Fishback said, “span different industries, from tech, health care, financials, consumer goods, and more. They employ over 3 million people and have a combined market cap of nearly $3 trillion.”
Despite their differences, they all “share one critical flaw,” Fishback said: “They reject meritocracy in favor of forced diversity, and their returns are suffering as a result. Year to date, a portfolio of these anti-meritocratic companies has returned just 12% compared to the S&P’s 30[%].”
Expand the time span to the past three years, and the chasm only gets wider.
“Over the past three years, the anti-meritocratic bunch has returned 17[%] compared to the S&P’s 60[%],” Fishback said at Mar-a-Lago. “And this isn’t just one or two stocks holding down the index. It is the fact that this is a widespread, systemic issue. Over the past three years, 70% of these anti-meritocratic companies have underperformed the plain old S&P 500.”
Fishback’s Azoria not only will seek to secure higher returns for investors by refusing to invest in corporations with hiring quotas. It also will frequently lobby companies and corporations to abstain from or abandon woke hiring practices.
Azoria’s first target for change: Starbucks.
The Daily Signal had the opportunity to speak to Fishback more about Azoria’s potential impact.
“We’re going back and forth with Starbucks as we speak right now,” Fishback said. “The fact that they are engaging with us at this level means that we have the facts on our side.”
“We’re not trying to micromanage [these corporations]. We’re drawing a line in the sand, and that line is if you hire on skill or ability, you’re in; if you hire on race and gender or anything else, you’re out,” he told The Daily Signal. “And so that means the 500 companies in the S&P 500 get reduced down to about 465 as a result.”
“The premise is really simple,” Fishback continued. “Companies that hire on skill will outperform those that hire on race. For folks who want to purge their portfolio of those anti-meritocratic underperformers, they should see a better performance than simply investing in an S&P index fund from the likes of BlackRock.”
While Azoria aims to ensure great returns for its investors, for Fishback and Azoria’s supporters, it’s about more than just money. It’s about a broader restoration of American principles to the nation’s private and financial sector.
Hiring quotas are “a rejection of the values that made America great and a perversion of sound business practices in America,” Fishback explained at the Mar-a-Lago event. “The color of your skin and the body you were born into have absolutely nothing to do with what you can bring to the table.”
The work Azoria will do is a foil of what Trump’s movement, Make America Great Again, has done for American politics, he suggested.
“President Trump won a historic landslide [because] … Americans of all walks of life sent a resounding message. And the message was also one of rejecting the toxic divisiveness, the toxic politics of saying that one race needs special treatment over another,” Fishback told the crowd.
“We’re going to deliver on this mandate in the private sector,” he said. “We’re going to look to President Trump’s leadership and what he’s doing in the public sector. Both of us are going to be, I think, successful—just a question of who gets there first.”
Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, also featured at the Mar-a-Lago event, said Trump’s victory and the emergence of enterprises such as Azoria are a testament to the fact that Americans “have far more similarities than differences.”
“It seems that that’s really the operating thesis for Azoria,” Roberts said. “That from Starbucks to whatever the next company you’ll be involved in may be, that you’re simply trying to restore this balance to the American investment marketplace.”
In recent years, the American Right has become hyperfixated on the need to create alternative institutions. It’s no surprise this effort has coincided with Trump’s time on the political scene, given how institutions—business, media, finance, or governmental—have organized and attacked not only Trump but his supporters writ large.
The Right’s creation of these parallel institutions already has paid dividends, especially in the media space.
But creating an alternative media institution is one thing; the barriers to entry are relatively low. Creating an alternative financial institution is another thing entirely. Fishback and other innovators in this space face their own unique challenges.
Nate Fischer, founder and CEO of the investment company New Founding, told The Daily Signal that one such challenge is inherent in the financial industry’s current structure.
“I’ve argued that DEI is in many ways a natural ideology for managerial organizations,” such as financial institutions, Fischer said. “If you’re just touching something narrow like DEI, you may be offering a product that’s not sufficiently differentiated.”
Fischer wasn’t implying this was specifically the case with Azoria, but a challenge that any alternative financial institution faces given the current structure of the finance industry.
“And if the evolution toward ESG, DEI, etc., is a natural outgrowth of the model of business and finance that we have embraced, it’s very difficult to go against that tide,” he said.
“The general challenge to building alternatives is you need to reinvent,” Fischer said. “You need to invent something new, and that’s hard. It needs to be new and it needs to have an actually differentiated risk profile. There needs to be something doctrinal, from an investment perspective, about the difference and I think that’s crucially important.”
Julius Krein, editor of American Affairs, told The Daily Signal that these challenges are especially pronounced in exchange-traded funds.
“ETFs are a very scaled game because the fees have to be low,” Krein said. “So you got to have a lot of assets, and it’s tough to get high AUMs [assets under management] when you’re a new fund without a track record and without a lot of the big infrastructure.”
Meanwhile, he said, other big financial and consulting firms will petition the same companies to stay the course on their nonmeritocratic hiring practices.
“There are a ton of statistics out there that show more diversity leads to greater returns. It seems a little dubious that it would just be so perfectly aligned like that,” Krein said of the statistics peddled by these big corporations. “The issue is that why are they going to listen to you when you have, you know, $100 billion in your ETF, versus BlackRock and the others that have trillions of dollars in their ETF? Your statistics better be really good.”
Fischer said he believes the barriers for alternative financial institutions to break through are twofold.
“One is, it’s a risk-laden space,” Fischer said. “You create a financial product, and you’re asking people to trust their money with you. That is a high stakes decision that generally is dependent on long-standing social capital, long-standing trust.”
Because it’s a risk-laden space, “regulation massively compounds” those barriers, he said, citing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“It makes it much harder for finance,” Fischer said. “Whether that be SEC regulation, which has often been a restriction on, say, spaces like crypto where there has been real innovation or at least alternatives that tend to have different cultures developing.”
The other barrier Fischer points out is much more pernicious.
“Increasingly, the vast majority of capital is allocated by bureaucratic allocators like pension funds hiring investment consultants,” Fischer said. “They tend to use sets of rules that make it very difficult for new entrants to play in that space, especially not new entrants who essentially are cultivated and credentialed not inside the club.”
The nature of this bureaucratization makes challenging these industry titans all the more difficult, he said.
“If you’re actually challenging the dominant values of that club,” Fischer said, “you’re going to have a hard time getting the initial traction, getting the early adopters, getting the early allocators, who help you get past that hurdle that allows you to compete in the space of pension funds.”
It’s this “downside-focused, sort of follow-the-herd mindset of bureaucratic operators versus entrepreneurial ones” that can prove a tough nut to crack, he said.
“And so the dominance of bureaucrats in capital allocation means that anyone who departs from the bureaucratic hierarchies and the bureaucratic norms is going to be at a severe disadvantage,” Fischer said.
Fishback and his colleagues have become well acquainted with those barriers in starting Azoria.
“Obviously, there’s a lot of investment that goes into building out the infrastructure, finding the right partners, the right counterparties, making sure we have the right exchange,” Fishback told The Daily Signal. “So you’re right. It’s not as simple as throwing up a podcast on X as an alternative to, say, The New York Times. It’s definitely a heavier lift.”
“But the reason why we’re willing to bear this cost at Azoria is because there’s literally no one else doing this,” he said. “There is no other ETF, no other publicly traded investment fund that excludes companies that are anti-meritocratic and, as a result, are underperforming.”
“There’s a lot of alternative financial managers out there,” Fishback continued. “I have a lot of respect for them, and some of them are pitching themselves as a patriotic fund or a MAGA fund. But for Americans, there needs to be a publicly traded alternative to the BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, plain old traditional S&P fund.”
The moral hazard, however, is that as Fishback and Azoria are more successful, the exchange-traded fund will become less differentiated from other investment product competitors.
But, Fishback told The Daily Signal, “there’s still going to be a role to play.”
“Just as this ideology came and infected these companies practically overnight, it could happen again. And so the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” he said. “If these companies like Starbucks abandon these policies tomorrow, it doesn’t mean that they can’t reinstate them two, three, four years down the line and harm shareholders and employees again.”
As the coalition that Trump built over the course of the 2024 presidential campaign aims to shake up Washington, its members with a more entrepreneurial and industry-focused mindset are looking to seize this unique political moment in the marketplace.
Although the broadness of this Trump coalition offers great opportunities, there’s plenty of work to do in the public and private spheres to channel its efforts into effecting real change.
“The coalition right now is basically just everybody who objects to the kind of left-progressive orthodoxy, establishment, whatever you want to call it,” Krein said. “It’s this array of forces against this sort of dominant liberal-progressive consensus that has been dominant for 30-plus years.”
Before Jan. 20, when Trump will be sworn in for a second term, it’s no surprise that Mar-a-Lago is serving as this coalition’s meeting place.
The challenge for members of the Trump coalition in the private sector, New Founding’s Fischer said, is to build not only alternative institutions but truly innovative ones.
“I think we need not just alternatives, but alternatives that really reflect a different way of allocating capital, one that’s more driven by skin in the game, by human judgment,” Fischer said of these alternatives.
“The disparate coalition probably can hold together,” American Affairs’ Krein said. “But I don’t know that it can succeed in the sense of actually implementing a successful agenda, building a new consensus, and making itself a new establishment.”
“The new consensus is the true goal of success in politics, in my view,” he said. “So I think it can hold together just as a purely oppositional force, but I don’t know if it can win in creating a new positive agenda for itself.”
What’s taking place at Mar-a-Lago during this period of transition “proves that President Trump is the great unifier, and there’s nothing more unifying than aspiring for success,” Fishback told The Daily Signal.
“There were folks in that room who aren’t traditional Trump supporters, who may have just come around to supporting him in this recent election,” Fishback said of the Azoria event Dec. 5. “They recognize what he brings to the table is a transformative, first principles view of government.”
“This is a merging of the public sector led by Donald Trump, the private sector led by firms like Azoria, to bring the whole country together,” Fishback added.
“There’s only so much that government can do. President Trump is going to be a transformative president, but the private sector, we’ve got to be involved,” he said. “We’ve got to listen to the mandate that voters gave him on Nov. 5. And that’s why we did this on Dec. 5. We wanted to reveal our plan to deliver that from the private sector and to the private sector.”
