‘Greatest comeback since 1892’: Gina Rinehart on Trump’s second Presidency

Billionaires

Australia’s richest person joined Trump and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida on election night. Rinehart calls the US border a ‘nightmare’ and says Trump will make the country safer.
Jenny and Scott Morrisson join Gina Rinehart and Donald and Melania Trump at the White House in 2019. Image: Hancock Prospecting

Grover Cleveland, the 22nd U.S. President, lost his re-election bid in 1888 but made a historic comeback four years later, becoming the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

It has taken 132 years to replicate that turn of events. Second-term US President Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office in January 2025 after an absence of four years, the first Republican to achieve that feat.

Australia’s richest woman, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, joined President Trump and his family in Florida’s Mar-a-Lago compound as history unfolded.

“Looks like the greatest comeback since 1892. He certainly gave it his all, and the people of the USA responded,” Rinehart tells Forbes Australia.

70-year-old Rinehart says she sees great things ahead for the American people under the boomerang ‘Make America Great Again’ administration.

“Assuming the President wins both houses, I’d say his presidency will bring more prosperity to the USA than before, and he’ll be able to accomplish even more than last time. Including making Americans safer when he fixes the border nightmare,” says Rinehart.

Australia’s richest woman Gina Rinehart reacts during an official ceremony for the members of the Australian Paralympic swimming team at the Australian Swimming Trials in June 2024. (Photo by DAVID GRAY/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)
The alignment of Trump and Hancock’s perspectives

The executive chair of Hancock Prospecting is a proponent of many of the same policies as Trump. In August, Rinehart wrote an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph noting that primary industry in Australia is under attack.

“Government tape must stop growing and be significantly cut if we are serious about wanting to cut costs,” Rinehart writes. She calls the ‘size, expense and invasive reach of the government’ a core problem that Australia needs to address.

Rinehart oversees the enormously successful private company Hancock Prospecting from its headquarters in Perth. The company has interests in iron ore, coal, mineral exploration, beef, and dairy. Hancock’s father, Lang Hancock, discovered iron ore in 1952 in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

“Our mining industry has made extraordinary contributions,” Rinehart states. “Over the past decade, mining has provided more than $252b in wages, on average, the highest wages in Australia, and very high by international standards, and $357b in taxes and royalties.”

Gina Rinehart. Image: Getty

Rinehart is also Australia’s second-largest producer of beef via Hancock Agriculture, a division of Hancock Prospecting. The agricultural arm of the business has 25 properties across the country and the total beef herd capacity is now more than 340,000, according to Hancock. There are 12,000 head of wagyu cattle on stations in Queensland and New South Wales.

“Our agricultural industry feeds not only ourselves but tens of millions of people around the world,” Rinehart says in the editorial, which posits that primary industry workers should have access to better medical facilities.

Growing up on Hamersley Station in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, Rinehart is outspoken on issues that impact rural Australian voters, aligning her with the politics that elected Trump.

In the lead up to the election she referred to the President as ‘incredibly patriotic and courageous.’

While at Mar-a-Lago on election eve, Rinehart says she asked Trump insiders how the 78-year-old keeps up the momentum.

“I asked a security man accompanying him ‘When does the President sleep?’ and he replied: ‘in the last few weeks, almost not at all.’”

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