He's on your TV, asking for your help impeaching Donald Trump. But who is Tom Steyer? | The Sacramento Bee

If you have a TV, you’ve probably seen the ad.

Identified only as an “American Citizen,” a man named Tom Steyer is asking for you to sign a petition demanding the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Trump is a “clear and present danger,” Steyer says, adding that the president is “mentally unstable.”

“Like you, I’m a citizen who knows it’s up to us to do something. It’s why I’m funding this effort to raise our voices together and demand that elected officials take a stand on impeachment,” Steyer says in the ad. “A Republican Congress once impeached a president for far less, yet today, people in Congress and his own administration know that this president is a clear and present danger who is mentally unstable and armed with nuclear weapons — and they do nothing.”

Steyer says that around two million people have already signed the petition, and that he’s put about $20 million of his own money into the ad campaign, according to NBC2.

Trump has taken notice, calling Steyer “wacky & totally unhinged” on Twitter.

But just who is Steyer?

He is a former hedge fund manager with a net worth around $1.6 billion, according to Forbes. He both ran and founded Farallon Capital, a San Francisco hedge fund, for over twenty years.

In 2012, Steyer left Farallon Capital, instead devoting his time to political causes — and especially environmental issues, Forbes wrote.

Steyer, a Democratic mega-donor, spent over $70 million in the 2014 midterms to help elect candidates with progressive environmental policies, and put $88 million dollars into his super PAC during the 2016 election, according to The Washington Times.

That makes him the individual funder who spent the most on the 2016 election. His PAC, called NextGen Climate Action Committee, supported Hillary Clinton, Roy Cooper and six Democrats running for the Senate in 2016, as reported by the Times.

Since the election, Steyer has continued to pour money into progressive causes, including $2.3 million from his NextGen Pac to eight organizations, including the University of California Immigrant Legal Services Center and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, according to the LA Times.

And now Steyer has committed another $10 million to air a second ad, this one taking aim at the Republican tax plan currently being considered in Congress, CNN first reported.

"It turned out that the system that had benefited people like me, who are well off, was in fact stacked against everyone else,” he says in that ad. “It's why I left my investment firm and resolved to use my savings for the public good. But here we are, nine years later, and this President and a Republican Congress are making a bad situation even worse.”

“It's up to all of us to stand up to this President, not just for impeachable offenses, but also to demand a country where everyone has a real chance to succeed.”

There seems to be growing support for impeaching Trump, as a Public Policy Polling survey found that an all-time high of 49 percent of people support impeaching the president.

Steyer might also run in California for a seat in the U.S. Senate next year, according to The Sacramento Bee.