John Damgard wasn’t letting U.S. politics bring him down as he got ready for golf at Huka Lodge on Wednesday morning in New Zealand.

Ted Cruz and Donald Trump have been crushing the moderate Republicans he prefers, hurling insults at bankers and hedge fund managers and flying high as the first primaries near in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But Damgard, a former head of the Futures Industry Association, is one of the many Republican donors from the financial industry who aren’t rattled.

“Not a bit,” said Damgard, a top defender of derivatives in Washington until he retired in 2012. “Doesn’t bug me. In the middle of the campaign a lot of people say things that they think are going to help them get elected.”

As the candidates that Wall Street backed with millions of dollars have stumbled and banks have become punchlines and punching bags, financiers are wrapping their heads around what life with the New York billionaire or Texas senator in the Oval Office might look like for them. And some don’t mind what they see.

One reason is the toughness that Democrats have promised, with Bernie Sanders planning to take apart the mightiest firms and Hillary Clinton pledging new fees and rules. Another is that Cruz and Trump have enjoyed longstanding ties to business and finance.

‘Cockeyed Optimist’

“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” billionaire investor Ken Langone said this week when asked if the success of the Republican front-runners upset him.

For one thing, according to Langone, a Home Depot Inc. co-founder who’s given New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s super PAC at least $250,000, anything can change before the primaries. Life goes on even under President Trump, Langone said, before getting even sunnier.

“The cockeyed optimist that I am, maybe, just maybe, he might turn out to be one of the greatest surprises America ever had,” he said. “You got to be optimistic.”

Even so, the race has been doubly embarrassing for the industry’s deep-pocketed Republicans. Nominees have showered insults instead of love on big business, with Cruz ridiculing Manhattan money and suggesting he’d let big banks go bankrupt, while Trump has said hedge fund managers get away with murder. Trump also mocked Cruz this week for failing to disclose loans from Citigroup Inc. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., where the senator’s wife is on an unpaid leave from her job as head of its Houston wealth-management unit.

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