This week, the biotech billionaire who had bought the paper in 2018 for $500 million acted on those plans with scant internal or public explanation, abruptly vetoing the planned endorsement, informing the board through an intermediary that The Los Angeles Times would make no recommendation in the presidential race.

For days, readers in overwhelmingly liberal Southern California speculated angrily about a decision that was widely regarded as a favor to Mr. Trump and a vote of no confidence in Ms. Harris.

Thousands of readers canceled subscriptions. Three members of the editorial board resigned. Nearly 200 staff members signed an open letter to management demanding an explanation, complaining that the decision this close to the election had undermined the news organization’s trust with readers. The Times’s News Guild, the newsroom’s union, lodged a protest. In social media posts and subsequent interviews with his own news organization, Dr. Soon-Shiong framed the choice as an attempt at neutrality.

But in a statement on Saturday that was swiftly challenged by the paper, his daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, 31, a progressive political activist who has frequently been accused of trying to meddle in the paper’s news coverage, said the decision was motivated by Ms. Harris’s continued support for Israel in its war in Gaza.

“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has no formal role at the paper, said in a statement to The New York Times. “As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”

In a statement, Dr. Soon-Shiong said the daughter did not speak for the paper.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” the owner said, according to a spokeswoman. “She does not have any role at The L.A. Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.”

The editor of editorials, who was among those who have resigned, said she was taken aback by the daughter’s assertion.

“If that was the reason that Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was not communicated to me or the editorial writers,” Mariel Garza, who resigned on Tuesday, said in a statement. “If the family’s goal was to ‘repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,’ remaining silent did not accomplish that.”

Over the past six years, writers and editors have increasingly chafed at interference by Dr. Soon-Shiong, 72, and his family in the newsroom, where owners are generally regarded less as proprietors with the right to impose their personal views than as guardians of a public trust.

In January, Kevin Merida stepped down as executive editor after clashing with Dr. Soon-Shiong over an unpublished article about an acquaintance of the newspaper owner, as well as other conflicts in the newsroom. Just a few weeks later, the publication carried out its most widespread layoffs in more than a decade, cutting 115 journalists in a move that slashed the newsroom by more than 20 percent.

But the dispute over the endorsement — echoed two days later when The Washington Post announced that it would also not make an endorsement in the race — prompted urgent new questions about what had motivated the decision.

Speaking this week on the cable news outlet Spectrum, which regularly carries Los Angeles Times content, Dr. Soon-Shiong was asked about a possible political motivation. “I want us desperately to air all the voices on the opinion side, on the op-ed side,” he said. He said he did not know whether readers viewed him or his family as ultra-progressive or not. “But I’m an independent.”

In an interview with one of his own reporters on Friday, Dr. Soon-Shiong said that his stand was not based on any single issue, nor did he intend by withholding an endorsement to favor either Ms. Harris or Mr. Trump. “We should be an organization that stands up and says the facts,” presenting views across the political spectrum, he said. “I think that the country needs that desperately.”

Several senior editors at The Times said they were not briefed on the reasons for Dr. Soon-Shiong’s decision, but they noted that he had often been critical of the Biden administration, had boasted of having dinner with Mr. Trump after he won the presidency in 2016 and often has approvals pending with the federal Food and Drug Administration. They speculated that he may have been hedging his bets over a range of issues.

One person potentially in a position to know was the publication’s current executive editor, Terry Tang, who replaced Mr. Merida. In a departure from the practice at most major news organizations, which have a clear organizational separation between news and opinion, Ms. Tang, who had been the publication’s editorial page editor, took on oversight of both departments when she became the executive editor. Ms. Tang previously served as an editor at The New York Times for 20 years.

Ms. Tang did not respond to requests for comment and did not appear to have addressed the staff over the issue.

Mariel Garza, the editorials editor who resigned, said that she had been caught completely off guard. Dr. Soon-Shiong, she said, had been told in late September that the board planned to endorse Ms. Harris, an unsurprising choice given The Times’s past criticism of Mr. Trump and its generally liberal editorial stances. Ms. Harris, who is originally from the Bay Area, has been married for more than a decade to a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, Doug Emhoff, and has kept a home in the upscale West Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood.

Ms. Garza said she became increasingly concerned as weeks passed without approval of the endorsement from the owner. Two weeks ago, she said, she learned from Ms. Tang that Dr. Soon-Shiong had decided against issuing an endorsement. She said Ms. Tang told her that he had not given a clear rationale for the decision.

Ms. Garza, who was the first to resign on the editorial board, said she felt no choice but to leave.

“This is our duty,” she said in an interview on Friday. “It is. This is a scary time, and we all need to be brave, and not be cowed.”

By the end of the week, two more editorial board members, Karin Klein and Robert Greene, a 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner, had also resigned. All vigorously contested Dr. Soon-Shiong’s assertion that they had chosen to remain silent.

“This is not about disagreeing with the owner,” said Ms. Klein, an author and specialist in education who has been with The Times for 35 years, 22 of them as an editorial writer. “To do this a couple weeks before the election is truly doing an editorial — a make-believe, invisible editorial that sends a message that we have doubts about Kamala.”

The confrontation over the endorsement comes after years of uneasy relations between the owner and the newsroom.

Reporters and editors have chafed at phone calls, emails and social media postings offering questions and suggestions about news coverage both from Dr. Soon-Shiong and his daughter. In the past, she has been critical of the publication’s coverage of crime, policing and Israel’s war in Gaza, among other things.

Several reporters interviewed described Ms. Soon-Shiong contacting them directly with critiques of their coverage, or publicly posting her negative opinions about their stories on social media. A former editor recalled reporters worrying about whether her comments were actually coming from her father.

“You never know how much Nika is speaking for herself and how much Nika is speaking for her whole family,” the editor said.

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Soon-Shiong wanted medical reporters to investigate connections between Covid-19 and cancer, which many perceived as a story that, if published, would further his business interests, two people with knowledge of the situation said.

Late last year, he tried to dissuade the former executive editor, Mr. Merida from publishing a story about a doctor who was an acquaintance of his. After clashing with Dr. Soon-Shiong over staffing levels and newsroom management, Mr. Merida left the paper in January.

Several sources told The New York Times at the time that Dr. Soon-Shiong had stepped in to make inquiries about the newspaper’s reporting on the doctor, who was embroiled in dueling lawsuits with a woman who claimed to have been bitten by his dog.

At one point, Dr. Soon-Shiong contacted Mr. Merida demanding to see a copy of the story and suggesting that it should not be published, the New York Times reporting showed. Dr. Soon-Shiong also told Mr. Merida on a call that he would fire journalists if he learned they were concealing the completed article from him. A story was finally published in April.

A Los Angeles Times spokeswoman said in a statement this year that Dr. Soon-Shiong had not wanted the newspaper to be used as a “source of exploitation” in the legal dispute. “He simply urged the editors to ensure that an investigation was done before any story was published.”

Ms. Soon-Shiong had telegraphed the concerns over Ms. Harris’s Israel policy in a post on social media earlier this week about the publication’s decision not to endorse.

“This is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children. I’m proud of the LA Times’ decision,” she posted on X.

But until her statement to The New York Times on Saturday, she had remained silent about how to interpret the posting.

“For the sake of the living and in the name of the dead, for the sake of our collective humanity — we must raise the moral floor,” she said in the statement.

In his own social media post this week, Dr. Soon-Shiong had pushed back on Ms. Garza’s version of events surrounding the endorsement decision. He wrote on X that he had directed the editorial board to compare the policies of each candidate, and let readers decide whom to choose. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision,” he said.

In Southern California, civic leaders have expressed outrage at what many have viewed as an abdication of responsibility by a major news outlet in the most populous state in the nation.

“Newspapers serve as the civic conscience for communities around the country. In that role, they have the ability to speak truth to power,” said Austin Beutner, a local financier who has served in a number of high-profile leadership positions in Los Angeles, including a brief stint a decade ago as publisher and chief executive of The Los Angeles Times. “It’s a terrible loss for society when they abdicate that responsibility.”

But it is inside the Times newsroom where most of the alarm has spread.

“We endorsed every other race on the ballot this year — it doesn’t make sense to pull your punch with the most consequential office in the most consequential election that any of us can remember,” said Robin Abcarian, a columnist who has worked there for more than three decades. “And this is what’s puzzling to everybody: It’s this lingering feeling that something isn’t being expressed, and we don’t know what.”

Some were urging a more public explanation of the politics behind the endorsement decision, if there was any.

“If there’s an explanation, he should say so,” said Ms. Klein, the former editorial board member. “When you have a gap in information like this, the tendency among readers is to fill it in. Is this his daughter expressing opposition on Gaza? Is he hoping Trump will lower his taxes? Does he have pharmaceuticals pending before the F.D.A. and he’s worried about approval from a Trump administration? He should tell people.”

Jim Newton, a former editorial page editor of the paper who is now a historian and lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, shared an email exchange he had with Ms. Tang, after the news broke, in which he urged Ms. Tang to reconsider. The decision not to endorse, he told her, set back years of effort to restore the paper “to a place of civic responsibility and candor with readers” and “unravels a lot of hard, important work, and at a particularly unwise time.”

Ms. Tang responded with a brief thank you, and later told him that she did not believe Mr. Newton understood the situation.

“Seems like maybe you don’t either,” he replied. “You assured me a few months ago that the editorial board controlled endorsements. You sure about that?”

Dan Morain, a former Los Angeles Times staff writer who went on to become the editorial page editor of The Sacramento Bee, said that a paper can justify not endorsing in a presidential campaign because people usually have enough information.

“The blunder here is that the decision was announced almost on the eve of the election, so it becomes fodder for one of the candidates,” he said. “If The Times wasn’t going to endorse in this presidential race, where a hometown candidate was running, they should have announced this six months ago. But they didn’t. So it plays into Trump’s hands, which is just terrible. And it raises so many questions about the owners and whether their financial interests are trumping their journalistic obligations.”

Ms. Abcarian, the Times columnist, said she remained grateful that Dr. Soon-Shiong saved the publication when he did, and continues to invest in it during a difficult time for the news business. But she said that his explanations for pulling the endorsement felt inadequate.

She has been heartbroken by the public response to the endorsement debacle, she added. One of her closest friends, who had subscribed to the paper for 40 years, canceled this week.

“The staff is demoralized on a number of fronts, and this just kind of pours salt in the wound,” she said.

Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson contributed reporting.

Here are five reasons:

He will get to see his name in lights.

Mr. Trump was a performer and reality TV star before he was a political candidate and president. (It is worth recalling that at the Republican National Convention this summer in Milwaukee, Mr. Trump appeared onstage with a Broadway-style light display spelling out T-R-U-M-P.)

For years, Mr. Trump has measured the significance of his rally venues in part by who had appeared there before. And his yardsticks were usually not other politicians, but singers and other celebrities.

“Do you know how many arenas I’ve beaten Elton John’s record?” Mr. Trump once asked Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, as he prepared to hold an event during his presidency at the Fargodome at North Dakota State University.

And when he appeared at a rally last month at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island, Mr. Trump noted proudly that Elvis Presley had played there.

Mr. Trump has wanted to hold a rally at the Garden for a very long time. It styles itself as “the World’s Most Famous Arena” and has presented some of his favorite artists, including Elton John, Frank Sinatra and the Village People, whose song “Y.M.C.A.” is a staple at his events. (As president, he took in an Ultimate Fighting Championship match there, entering the arena to a mix of boos and cheers, and in 2013, before he was a candidate, he was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame there.)

Still, Mr. Trump’s team, led by his top advisers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, is facilitating his desire to return as the headliner, and they see upsides.

It will generate a blitz of coverage.

Where Mr. Trump goes, television cameras follow. And by coming to one of the media capitals of the United States, the Trump team is aware that he will acquire mountains of coverage in the campaign’s final stretch that will be broadcast and streamed to voters in the crucial battleground states and the rest of the country.

That was also true in California, where Mr. Trump held a rally in Coachella, a city that shares a name with a famous music festival that attracts stars.

That rally drew lots of attention. And the Trump campaign’s expectation is that his rally at the Garden will draw even more.

That type of focused media attention in the final days of a tightly fought contest, when both campaigns are battling to win the support of voters who may not follow politics or political news closely, is significant.

It’s a giant trolling exercise

Last spring, when Mr. Trump was on trial on criminal charges of falsifying business records to cover up a 2016 hush-money payment to a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with him, he held a rally in the Bronx. He also visited a bodega in Harlem.

Mr. Trump was determined to show up at various spots in New York, and at the time, his advisers were hoping to plan a summer rally at the Garden.

That scheduling did not work out. But Mr. Trump and his team liked the idea of planting a flag in the middle of a Democratic-leaning city. It is a defiant gesture in a city that overwhelmingly voted against him twice, where he was convicted of 34 felony counts in the business records case, ordered to pay several hundred million dollars in penalties in a civil fraud case and found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.

Mr. Trump will now get his opportunity.

It could help Republicans in down-ballot races.

With Republicans fighting to keep control of the House through a series of closely fought races, Mr. Trump’s presence could have an effect on turnout.

In New York in particular, several House races on Long Island and in Westchester and the Hudson Valley are seen as competitive this year, making the state one of the most important battlegrounds in the race for control of the House. Concerns about immigration, crime and rising living costs — issues Mr. Trump has made central to his campaign — have emerged as factors in several of the tightest contests.

Mr. Trump’s advisers believe his presence in areas with competitive House races can help Republicans, even in overwhelmingly Democratic states like New York and California. What’s more, if Mr. Trump is able to perform better in blue states, even if he loses them, it will help him drive up his popular vote.

It’s still his preferred city.

Mr. Trump may have rebuffed New York in 2019 to re-register as a voter in Florida — primarily for tax purposes, according to people close to him — but he has never stopped wanting to spend time at Trump Tower in his longtime hometown.

As it turns out, he has been able to spend a sizable amount of time there this year, in part because of his various trials. Now, he will spend part of the second to last weekend of his campaign there, as he continues to chase his dream of winning the state, which polls suggest is a long shot at best.

Within hours, Mr. Trump had posted about his allegiances to the embattled e-cigarette sector. “I saved Flavored Vaping in 2019,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “I’ll save Vaping again!”

The head of the Vapor Technology Association, Tony Abboud, who was also in the meeting, quickly declared he was “pleased” that Mr. Trump was “continuing to fight for vapers.” The vaping industry has not been a significant contributor in the presidential race, but the Vapor Technology Association has been quietly sending versions of those mailers to voters in battleground states warning that Democrats want “to steal vapes from freedom-loving Americans.”

As Mr. Trump seeks a return to the White House, he has come a long way from his 2016 campaign pitch that he was so rich he was incorruptible. Back then, he mocked the G.O.P.’s donor-lobbyist class and boasted in his announcement speech, “I don’t need anybody’s money.” Today, Mr. Trump is looking everywhere for cash: asking small donors online, pressing fellow billionaires over private meals in Trump Tower and lobbying for donations from industries regulated by the government.

As he does so, he is sometimes making overt promises about what he will do once he’s in office, a level of explicitness toward individual industries and a handful of billionaires that has rarely been seen in modern presidential politics.

In some cases, Mr. Trump has sought to shake loose cash from industries like oil and energy that have long aligned with his deregulation agenda. In others, Mr. Trump has flipped his positions, such as on crypto.

Not long ago, he was warning that cryptocurrencies seemed “like a scam” that could facilitate crimes, and he supported stiff regulation. Now, he is aggressively courting the industry, promising to make America “the crypto capital of the planet” and to fire its most hated regulator on Day 1.

Millions of dollars in crypto-industry contributions have followed.

“Former President Trump has a ‘For Sale’ sign around his neck and appears to be willing to sell basically any policy in exchange for campaign contributions,” said Dennis Kelleher, president of Better Markets, a nonprofit that seeks stronger regulations.

The Trump operation had feared being outspent when it was competing against President Biden. But the matter of raising money became especially urgent once he was running against Vice President Kamala Harris, who raised twice as much as him over the summer.

In a statement, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said the former president had proposed policies to help people “struggling from the weak and terrible policies” of the current administration.

“President Trump only takes his cues on policy from one group of people: the American people,” Ms. Leavitt said. She said he was supported by “people who share his vision of American energy dominance” as well as “crypto innovators and others in the technology sector” who are “under attack.”

In 2016, Mr. Trump vowed to “drain the swamp,” though he was not initially enamored with the phrase. “A little hokey,” he called it. But crowds roared, and he kept repeating it.

As president, he did no such thing. Far from it: He hired top executives from Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs and from the fossil fuel and pharmaceutical industries. He ended the practice of making public White House visitor logs. His family operated a for-profit hotel blocks from the White House that became a den of lobbying activity and a must-stay place for those looking to curry favor. People who paid pricey membership dues to join his private club at Mar-a-Lago had easy access to Mr. Trump as he dined on the patio, often taking the opportunity to pitch their pet interests.

“Trump was the first transactional president,” said Scott Reed, a longtime Republican consultant and former top political strategist for the United States Chamber of Commerce. “He’s now taken it to a new level.”

Crypto

There are few industries Mr. Trump has done more to court than the crypto world. And there is no industry for which his policy reversal has been more headturning.

Five months after leaving office, in June 2021, Mr. Trump said cryptocurrencies should be regulated into near oblivion. “I don’t think we should have all of the Bitcoins of the world out there,” Mr. Trump said. “I think they should regulate them very, very high.”

Three years and plenty of campaign cash later, the former president sounds a lot like a budding cryptocurrency entrepreneur. That’s because he is one.

Mr. Trump’s sons have embarked on a cryptocurrency endeavor that his advisers anticipate could prove lucrative.

In June, Mr. Trump met at Mar-a-Lago with a group of Bitcoin miners. Within hours, he posted about Bitcoin mining and how he wanted “all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!!” He stopped by a different crypto event at Mar-a-Lago the month before and shook hands with one crypto executive, Ryan Selkis, who posted a photo with the caption: “$100 million+ from the crypto community. Consider it done, Mr. President.” Mr. Selkis soon gave $50,000.

The $100 million figure overstates the disclosed crypto-industry investment in Mr. Trump. But industry leaders have given him significant support amid concerns they have about the Biden administration’s strict regulation attempts. Mr. Trump’s main fund-raising committee has reported receiving more than $8.2 million in cryptocurrency donations through September, his campaign said. Millions and millions more have been given in actual dollars.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, co-founders of the crypto platform Gemini, each gave more than $1.25 million to Mr. Trump and supportive super PACs after attending a fund-raising dinner for him in San Francisco. The dinner was hosted by David Sacks, who is an outspoken crypto booster.

Mr. Trump dramatically trimmed the Republican Party’s official platform in 2024, but the revised version still made space for “the right to mine Bitcoin,” “the right to self-custody of digital assets” and opposition to a central bank digital currency.

In July, Mr. Trump appeared at a crypto industry conference and promised to fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, on his first day — a top crypto priority. It is unclear whether the president would have that authority, but Mr. Trump has made it clear he intends to try to bring independent agencies under direct presidential control.

Ms. Harris has taken some steps to woo the deep-pocketed crypto community, including inserting a line in an economic speech about the importance of “blockchain.” And she has some crypto megadonors, such as Chris Larsen, who has contributed more than $12 million to her super PAC and her campaign.

Mr. Trump is also promising to free from prison Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online illicit marketplace Silk Road, by commuting his sentence. Mr. Ulbricht has become a cause célèbre of the crypto community. Jesse Powell, the founder of the crypto exchange Kraken, posted in June on X about his $1 million donation to Mr. Trump with the hashtag #freeross and a thumbs-up picture of his meeting with Mr. Trump.

“If crypto had no money to give, Trump would still be the crypto president,” said Trevor Traina, who served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Austria, is now in the crypto business and has given more than $400,000 this year. “But fortunately for Trump, crypto does have money to give.”

Big Tobacco and Marijuana

Mr. Trump has personally long opposed smoking. The tobacco industry, however, is wagering heavily on him in 2024.

A subsidiary of the tobacco giant Reynolds American is the largest corporate contributor to Mr. Trump’s main super PAC. The business, RAI Services Company, has contributed $8.5 million so far.

The donations come as cigarette makers are seeking to fight off a proposed ban on menthol cigarettes that has been advanced — and then paused — by the Biden administration.

Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and fund-raiser for Mr. Trump who himself has given $260,000 this year, heads a lobbying firm that has represented Reynolds for years. Executives for Reynolds American and Mr. Ballard have met several times with Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with the meetings, which were first reported by The Washington Post. They discussed policies in a second potential Trump term.

Mr. Ballard declined to comment. Reynolds American did not respond to a request for comment.

Another group, Americans for Consumer Protection, is spending $10 million in five battleground states targeting Black voters with a message blaming “Harris and Democrats” for the proposed menthol ban. The group does not disclose its donors.

Mr. Trump has not yet staked out a public position on the menthol ban. He has, however, taken a proactive and new position on marijuana.

In 2015, he said that legalizing it was “bad” and that “I feel strongly about that.” But this year, there is a major legalization measure on the ballot in Florida, and Mr. Trump has been lobbied to support it.

Over the summer, Mr. Trump met privately with Kim Rivers, the chief executive of Trulieve, the cannabis company behind the Florida measure, according to people briefed on the meeting, including State Senator Joe Gruters, who is also supporting the Florida measure and had his own meeting with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Gruters called Mr. Trump the “King Kong” of the Republican Party and said his support was important. “I would say it was a collective effort to try to educate him and encourage him to come out on the positive on this,” he said.

Mr. Trump did just that in two posts at the end of August and in early September. “It is time to end needless arrests and incarcerations of adults for small amounts of marijuana for personal use,” he wrote in a social media statement, announcing he would vote for the Florida measure.

Ms. Rivers’s company has poured more than $100 million into the Florida ballot measure but has not made any disclosed donations to the former president. She told Mr. Trump in the meeting that she “wants to be helpful,” according to a person with knowledge of her remark.

“We don’t talk about our contributions to anyone,” Ms. Rivers said on Wednesday at an event in a Trulieve dispensary near Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “And we contribute widely and broadly.”

Elon Musk and Jeff Yass

In April 2023, when Elon Musk was considering supporting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the former president sharply criticized the world’s richest man for seeking favors from the federal government.

“Elon is just trying to make friends with the absolutely horrible Biden Administration because of all the government subsidies he gets, and all the permits he needs,” Mr. Trump posted on his social media website, Truth Social.

A year and a half later, Mr. Musk is leading an effort to elect Mr. Trump that has no parallel in American history.

He is steering a super PAC that he has seeded with $118 million of his own money. He is relentlessly promoting Mr. Trump’s candidacy on X, the platform he owns. And he has campaigned for Mr. Trump in Pennsylvania, offering $1 million payouts to voters who sign his petitions.

Mr. Trump has responded in kind. Far from being concerned that Mr. Musk is seeking favors as a major contractor with the federal government, Mr. Trump has promised that if he’s elected, he will appoint Mr. Musk to run an audit of the government to root out waste, fraud and abuse. The move would create conflicts of interest on a scale unseen in recent memory, with Mr. Musk potentially exercising power over parts of the government that pour billions of dollars into his businesses.

Mr. Trump has recently praised Mr. Musk’s space business, which receives government funding. And while he still opposes electric vehicle mandates, Mr. Trump no longer bashes them like he used to.

“I’m for electric cars — I have to be, because Elon endorsed me very strongly,” Mr. Trump declared at a rally in August.

Mr. Musk is not the only billionaire former critic Mr. Trump has courted.

In early 2024, Mr. Trump met briefly backstage at an event with Jeff Yass, the billionaire investor whose firm owns a significant stake in the Chinese company that owns TikTok. The two men did not speak about TikTok, people familiar with the encounter said, but rather Mr. Yass’s animating cause of school choice.

Still, Mr. Trump soon opposed a bill in Congress that demanded the sale of TikTok and eventually joined the platform himself.

At a recent event in Erie in Mr. Yass’s home state of Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump, reading from the teleprompter, gave an unusually detailed shout-out to state-level legislation that Mr. Yass has lobbied aggressively for on school choice.

“The lifeline scholarship bill would be a great start for those students trapped in the worst-performing schools in Pennsylvania,” Mr. Trump said in Erie. The former president seemed surprised as the crowd cheered. “Oh, you do know that? Good,” he said.

Mr. Yass has made more than $90 million in federal donations since 2023 but has not given any disclosed funds to Mr. Trump. Mr. Yass is a major financier of Republican politics in Pennsylvania, which is seen as 2024’s most consequential presidential battleground.

Mr. Yass has given more than $6 million to two groups called Win PA and Keystone Renewal PAC, focused on down-ballot races. Mr. Yass has also previously given money to a group that in 2022 transferred $1.2 million to Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania, which is leading a 2024 get-out-the-vote drive that could help Republicans up and down the ticket.

Cliff Maloney, the lead organizer, said they had raised $3 million to hire 120 staff members to chase ballots. Mr. Maloney declined to comment on his financial supporters but said, “Jeff Yass is a patriot.”

Oil and Gas

Mr. Trump began October with a fund-raising trip to Texas, with stops in energy-rich Midland and Houston.

Among the co-hosts on the Texas trip were Jeff Hildebrand, the billionaire founder of Hilcorp Energy Company, and his wife. The couple have donated $1.2 million to Mr. Trump and the Republican National Committee in 2024.

In contrast to the crypto industry, Mr. Trump has for a long time been aligned with much of the oil, gas and energy industry. He has derided climate change as a “hoax,” and since 2016, Mr. Trump has aggressively opposed Democrats’ environmental regulations, promoting a deregulatory agenda as president that delighted many fossil fuel executives.

Mr. Trump has received millions of dollars in donations from top energy executives, including $10 million across two pro-Trump super PACs from Kelcy Warren, the chief executive of Energy Transfer. Joseph Craft III, who leads a major coal company, and his wife, Kelly, a former Trump ambassador, have given nearly $3 million to Mr. Trump, the party and a super PAC.

One evening in April, Mr. Trump hosted an “energy round table” at Mar-a-Lago of industry executives and lobbyists, including the oil billionaire Harold Hamm, executives from major companies like Exxon Mobil and a representative from the industry lobby group, the American Petroleum Institute.

At the dinner, Mr. Trump repeated his public pledge to eliminate new Biden administration climate rules designed to speed up the transition to electric vehicles. And he told the executives that as president he would open up more public lands for oil and gas exploration.

He also made an audacious request. The oil and gas industries would do so well under a Trump president that the people in the room should donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign.

“It’s enticement and coercion — the carrot and the stick,” said Walter Shaub, a former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics. “He has been making clear through his actions that any industries that support him stand to be rewarded and any that oppose him stand to be punished.”

Patricia Mazzei contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

At one point Mr. Rogan tried to lead Mr. Trump, who has described his meandering, digression-laden speaking style as “the weave,” back to the point. “Your weave is getting wide,” Mr. Rogan said. “You’re getting wide with this weave.”

Here are six takeaways from the podcast.

Trump saw the podcast as well worth a detour.

That Mr. Trump opted to step off the campaign trail and spend hours in Mr. Rogan’s studio in Austin — a detour that delayed the start of his remarks at a rally on Friday evening in Michigan by several hours — was a mark of Mr. Rogan’s reach and the importance of the audience he draws.

Just two years ago, Mr. Rogan said he had declined to have Mr. Trump on his show, calling the former president “an existential threat to democracy.” But in their interview, Mr. Rogan was a receptive if occasionally challenging interlocutor.

Mr. Rogan acknowledged that he had rethought his position on interviewing Mr. Trump after he survived an assassination attempt in July at a rally in Pennsylvania.

“Once they shot you, I was like, ‘He’s got to come in here,’” Mr. Rogan said. “It’s all about timing.”

Rogan invited Trump to talk about his debunked claims of widespread election fraud.

“I want to talk about 2020 because you said over and over again that you were robbed in 2020,” Mr. Rogan said, offering Mr. Trump a platform to repeat his debunked claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election and the lie that he won that year. “How do you think you were robbed? Everybody always cuts you off.”

Mr. Trump lamented that “the judges didn’t have what it took to turn over an election” and repeated a few false claims, suggested that mail-in ballots were not secure and said that Democrats had “used Covid to cheat” in 2020.

Mr. Rogan seemed to back Mr. Trump’s questioning of election processes, at one point likening those who raised concerns over elections to those who questioned coronavirus vaccines.

“You get labeled an election denier,” Mr. Rogan said. “It’s like being labeled an anti-vaxxer if you question some of the health consequences that people have from the Covid-19 shots.”

In 2022 Mr. Rogan was criticized for spreading what was widely seen as misinformation about the coronavirus; his stance led Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to remove their music from Spotify to protest the platform’s support of the podcaster.

Trump floated eliminating the income tax.

Mr. Trump voiced casual support for the idea of eliminating the federal income tax, suggesting a return to economic policies that existed before the early 20th century.

“Did you just float out the idea of getting rid of income taxes and replacing it with tariffs?” Mr. Rogan asked Mr. Trump, who had mentioned the notion on Monday in a Fox News segment. “Were we serious about that?”

“Yeah, sure,” Mr. Trump said. “But why not?” He again offered praise for William McKinley, the 25th president, a Republican whose views on tariffs Mr. Trump frequently commends.

Even before Mr. Trump began talking about eliminating the income tax, an analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that his other economic proposals could add as much as $15 trillion to the nation’s debt over 10 years.

Is there life on Mars?

Mr. Rogan pressed Mr. Trump for government secrets on whether there is life beyond Earth.

The former president initially said he had “never been a believer” in extraterrestrial life. But then he seemed to pivot, recalling that he had interviewed “solid” jet pilots who claimed to have seen “very strange” things in the sky.

“There’s no reason not to think that Mars and all these planets don’t have life,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Rogan corrected him.

“Well, Mars — we’ve had probes there, and rovers, and I don’t think there’s any life there,” Mr. Rogan said. (Mars is the most widely explored planet in the solar system other than Earth.)

“Maybe it’s life that we don’t know about,” replied Mr. Trump, who has vowed in stump speeches to get an American astronaut to Mars.

Scientists have not found life on Mars, though they are on the hunt for evidence of fossilized organisms.

Trump does not trust polls — or pollsters.

Mr. Trump told Mr. Rogan he had little regard for political polls, explaining that he believed there was “probably a lot of fraud” in them, even as he at times positively cited polls that showed him doing well with voters.

“You know how polls are done?” Mr. Trump asked. “Oh, I’m going to get myself in trouble. So I really don’t believe too much in them.”

Polls have consistently shown a tight race between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Polls were notably inaccurate during the last two presidential elections, and many pollsters have taken steps to try to improve their accuracy. But Mr. Trump suggested, without evidence, that they were not just mistaken but might be fraudulent. “I don’t think they interview in many cases,” he said.

Lots of praise, but a challenge on the environment.

Mr. Rogan was a friendly interviewer, often praising Mr. Trump. He rarely interrupted the former president, and they seemed to bond over their shared love of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, a mixed martial arts league whose matches Mr. Trump attends.

And Mr. Rogan, a standup comedian, praised Mr. Trump for “comedic instincts” on the trail.

But their worldviews were not always a neat fit. At one point, Mr. Rogan asked Mr. Trump to elaborate on why he thought people opposed increasing oil and gas production or fracking, “outside of the environmental concerns, which are legitimate, of course.”

Mr. Trump started to object to that point, but Mr. Rogan continued on with his question. And he turned stern as he pressed Mr. Trump over his claim that environmental regulations were used only to enrich consultants who stymie development.

“They use it as a weapon,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Rogan pushed back with a series of questions. “But there are legitimate concerns about environmental impact, correct?” he asked, citing environmental disasters. “You want to mitigate that as much as possible.”

“Sure,” Mr. Trump conceded. But he shifted to his standard insistence that he was focused on clean water and clean air before moving to a discussion about China and complaints about California.

Mr. Trump has made a sometimes uneasy alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmental activist and former presidential candidate, who has endorsed him. Mr. Kennedy, whom Mr. Rogan favors, has advanced a number of environmental proposals that clash with some of Mr. Trump’s deregulation pledges and plans to increase fracking.

The rally in Houston was not only her campaign’s largest but also its most emotionally charged event since she became the Democratic nominee. Beyoncé offered a speech focused on a more optimistic future, and the wrenching stories of Texas women who suffered life-threatening health complications as a result of being denied proper care for pregnancy complications were center stage.

Ms. Harris and many of the speakers laid the blame solely on Mr. Trump, who frequently boasts of appointing three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

While Mr. Trump has promised to leave abortion laws to individual states, and says he would veto a national ban, allies of the former president and officials who served in his administration are planning ways to restrict abortion rights that would go beyond the laws enacted in conservative states across the country.

Ms. Harris warned that, if elected to another term, Mr. Trump would move to ban abortion nationally — regardless of his campaign promises.

“Though we are in Texas tonight, for anyone watching from another state, if you think you are protected from Trump abortion bans because you live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, California or any state where voters or legislators have protected reproductive freedom, please know: No one is protected,” she said. “Because a Donald Trump national ban will outlaw abortion in every single state.”

By pairing dire warnings with the reach of a celebrity of Beyoncé’s stratosphere, the Harris campaign hoped to break through a crowded and diffuse news environment to get voters in formation before Election Day. The aim was to create a moment that resonated with disengaged voters and the Republican-leaning women who Ms. Harris’s team believes are key to the vice president’s potential success.

Beyoncé’s appearance was notable for the pop star, who is a frequent supporter of Democratic candidates but rarely delivers extended remarks about her political beliefs. Her song “Freedom” has become the anthem of the Harris campaign, used to introduce the vice president at nearly every appearance. After Mr. Trump used a clip of the song in a video, her lawyers reportedly threatened to send a cease-and-desist letter.

“I’m not here as a celebrity,” Beyoncé told Friday’s crowd, which the Harris campaign put at 30,000. “I’m not here as a politician. I’m here as a mother, a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in.”

She continued: “Imagine our daughters growing up seeing what’s possible with no ceilings, no limitations. Imagine our grandmothers, imagine what they feel right now.”

Other speakers included Beyoncé’s mother, the singer’s longtime friend and former bandmate Kelly Rowland, the Texas country music legend Willie Nelson and Representative Colin Allred, the Democratic challenger to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Several women who have sought abortion care since the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe and the mother of Amber Thurman, the Georgia woman who died after delays in her medical care connected to Georgia’s abortion ban, also spoke. The rally also featured a group of obstetricians who said they were no longer able to practice medicine as they saw fit in Texas since the state banned most abortion care.

The fall of Roe v. Wade energized a new coalition of moderate Republican, independent and Democrat voters who have powered Democratic wins up and down the ticket in the two years since the Supreme Court’s ruling. Ms. Harris has made blaming Mr. Trump for the ending of a constitutional right to an abortion a central focus of her campaign, hoping to use the issue to energize voters behind her candidacy.

On the outdoor stadium’s video boards, Ms. Harris played clips of Mr. Trump bragging about his role in doing away with abortion rights in between testimonials from women who have suffered as a result of strict bans that prevented them from getting care.

In a race in which polling shows a substantial gender gap, with women favoring Ms. Harris and men backing Mr. Trump, the vice president made an explicit abortion-rights appeal to men, almost pleading with them to vote for women’s rights.

“Men across America do not want to see their daughters and wives and sisters and mothers put at risk,” she said. “The men of America don’t want this.”

Yet, even as abortion rights remain one of Ms. Harris’s strongest issues, some abortion rights activists and political strategists believe the cause may not maintain the same level of political resonance in a presidential year. In battleground states, one in five voters wrongly blame President Biden for ending the constitutional right to an abortion, even though Mr. Trump was the one who appointed three of the justices who voted to overturn Roe.

The Harris campaign sees the personal stories of women as one of its most powerful political tools, a way to highlight the real-life impacts of the abortion restrictions that have swept conservative states and to reach less politically engaged voters.

A woman named Ondrea, whose story of failing to receive proper medical treatment after a miscarriage because of the Texas abortion ban was recently featured in a Harris campaign ad, recounted how she was denied an abortion after discovering her baby would not survive delivery.

Her voice breaking, she described developing sepsis, a life-threatening pregnancy complication, facing a partial lung collapse, hours of surgery and months of difficult recovery.

“Texas abortion bans unleashed by Donald Trump almost cost me my life and have left me with physical and emotional scars,” she told the crowd of cheering supporters. “This election, I proudly cast my vote for Kamala Harris because lives depend on it.”

As the race enters its final stretch, the Harris campaign is going to great lengths to make its rallies feel like events that transcend politics. Bruce Springsteen and former President Barack Obama both appeared before a Harris campaign crowd of more than 20,000 on Thursday night in Georgia, and Mr. Obama’s wife, the more-popular Michelle Obama, is scheduled to rally supporters with Ms. Harris in Michigan on Saturday. John Legend is set to perform at a rally Sunday in Philadelphia, and the band Mumford & Sons is scheduled to play next week at a Harris rally in Madison, Wis.

On Friday in Houston, the disc jockey warming up the crowd in the hours before Ms. Harris and Beyoncé took the stage repeatedly called the rally “the biggest political event ever” (not quite) and urged people to cheer for “the first Black woman president” — which would be true if Ms. Harris wins but not a point she or her campaign has emphasized.

DeMarkus Phipps, 33, a city worker, said that he had seen Beyoncé in concert several times but that he had come to the event for Ms. Harris.

“I just don’t care for Trump,” he said, adding that he would not mind seeing a few songs from Beyoncé, too. “Maybe ‘Freedom.’”

“This is a once in a lifetime event,” his cousin, Courtney Jones, 36, said. “I wanted to be part of it.”

Both she and Mr. Phipps said they had already voted early for Ms. Harris. So, too, had one of their nieces, Asia Phipps, 20, her first time voting for president.

“I felt special,” she said. Asked if she had come more for Ms. Harris or for Beyoncé, she smiled. “Both!”

Erica L. Green contributed reporting.

An article published on Tuesday in The Atlantic magazine said Mr. Trump had expressed sticker shock when he asked an aide if his administration had received a bill for the funeral expenses for Specialist Guillén. While hosting her family at the White House in April 2020, Mr. Trump had offered to help cover any expenses not picked up by the military.

“It doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!” the article quoted Mr. Trump saying.

On Friday, the former president said Specialist Guillén’s family had stepped forward to help vindicate him.

“You know, I have these people saying all this bad stuff,” Mr. Trump said. “Then, all of a sudden, the family that they’re talking about comes out of nowhere and says, ‘President Trump was perfect. What he did was so great. He got us the money.’”

When Mr. Trump met with the family at the White House in 2020, he told them, “And if I can help you out with the funeral, I’ll help, I’ll help you out — financially, I’ll help you.” A lawyer for the family of Specialist Guillén told The Atlantic that she had sent the bill to the White House but that no money was ever received by the family from Mr. Trump. According to the magazine, the lawyer, Natalie Khawam, said that some of the funeral costs were covered by the Army and some were covered by donations.

Mr. Trump repeatedly assailed the magazine and its editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the article and who also reported two months before the 2020 election that Mr. Trump had privately referred to American soldiers killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.”

In a statement, Mr. Goldberg defended his reporting. He described how Mr. Trump made his remark about the cost of the funeral at a national security meeting on Dec. 4, 2020, which members of the Guillén family did not attend, and he attributed his reporting to two people present and to contemporaneous notes of the meeting taken by a participant.

“I understand why the Guillén family would be upset to read this story,” Mr. Goldberg said in the statement. “I stand by my reporting, including the undisputed detail that Trump never provided the family with any financial assistance.”

Mr. Goldberg also defended his 2020 report on Mr. Trump’s comments disparaging fallen American soldiers, by saying that John F. Kelly, Mr. Trump’s former White House chief of staff, told him Mr. Trump used these terms. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Kelly confirmed The Atlantic reporting that Mr. Trump had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers.”

The magazine’s 2020 report has continued to chafe at Mr. Trump, who has frequently cast himself as a champion for the U.S. military, combat veterans and fallen service members.

On Friday, Mr. Trump said that it was preposterous to accuse him of calling soldiers who died during World War I “suckers” and “losers” while standing over their graves.

“Can you imagine anybody doing it?” Mr. Trump said. “I may be the president, but I think somebody would start a fistfight, and probably I would say, ‘You were right.’ Who would do this? They make up stories.”

Calling Mr. Goldberg a “sleazebag,” Mr. Trump said that Tuesday’s story was timed to persuade voters in the final days of an election, just like in 2020.

“The problem I have, Ted, is that five, 10, 20 percent of people when they read that, they’re going to believe it,” said Mr. Trump, speaking to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who joined him at the event.

Mr. Trump thanked the relatives of Specialist Guillén who were in attendance — her mother Gloria and her sister Mayra, who wrote on social media after The Atlantic article was published that she had voted early for Mr. Trump.

“They are an incredible, brave and beautiful family,” Mr. Trump said.

Ms. Khawam, the family’s lawyer, said they were invited by Mr. Trump to join him on his plane before his speech, and they met him there.

“We truly appreciate his ongoing kindness and his steadfast support for our military and their families,” Ms. Khawam said in a statement.

Mr. Trump’s remarks on Friday echoed his attacks on The Atlantic a day earlier during a campaign stop in Las Vegas, where he was asked about the headline on Tuesday’s report in the magazine. It read: “Trump: ‘I Need the Kind of Generals That Hitler Had’”

“No, I never said that,” Mr. Trump said. “I would never say that. It’s a rag that he made up stories. He’s done it before. It’s a failing magazine. Right before the election.”

Mr. Trump’s speech in Texas largely focused on immigration, but he also again criticized Vice President Kamala Harris’s appearance on a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper. During the event, she called Mr. Trump a “fascist.”

“The town hall with Cooper was just unbelievable — Alison Cooper got so angry,” Mr. Trump said. It was likely a purposeful misnaming of Mr. Cooper that caused laughs in the crowd.

Mr. Trump has called Mr. Cooper “Alison Cooper” before. He used the name in a Memorial Day post on social media that mentioned an interview Mr. Cooper did with the writer E. Jean Carroll, who won a civil case against Mr. Trump in which he was found liable for sexual abuse.