Koch network has had enough Trumpism
“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” former President Donald Trump said in a video statement in January. Is it possible that that statement (plus a few insults) are connected to the Koch funds working against Trump in 2024?
The network of donors and activist groups led by conservative billionaire Charles Koch will oppose Donald Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, mounting a direct challenge to the former president’s campaign to win back the White House.
“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s flagship group, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), wrote in a memo released publicly on Sunday. The three-page missive repeatedly suggests that AFP is taking on the responsibility of stopping Trump, with Seidel writing: “Lots of people are frustrated. But very few people are in a position to do something about it. AFP is. Now is the time to rise to the occasion.”
The Koch network has remained on the sidelines of presidential primaries since 2015 when five candidates it favored lost to Trump. Were the Trump tax cuts were not enough? Apparently not:
Trump’s brand of economic nationalism has clashed with the free-trade inclinations of the Koch network. “The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade,” Trump wrote on Twitter in 2018, referring to Charles and his brother David, who died in 2019. Trump and the Koch network have been more aligned on opposing foreign interventions and reducing nonviolent criminal sentences.
The AFP memo itself indicates that the Koch network plans to engage earlier in federal and state races where AFP claims its candidates won over 80 percent of their races in 2022:
This was a test for whether our grassroots and data capabilities can make a significant difference in primaries. We learned that they can. So, in 2024, AFP and AFP Action will get engaged in more primaries at every level of office.
AFP believes “the loudest voice in each political party sets the tone for the entire election.” The Koch network doesn’t want that tone set by Trump.
“The American people have shown that they’re ready to move on, and so AFP will help them do that,” the memo continues. If AFP wants “to turn the page on the past several years,” it likely will oppose Ron DeSantis as well, although both go unmentioned by name.
AFP plans to bring its data capapbilities “at i360” and LIBRE, its Latino outreach operation, to bear on electing candidates more to its liking. Presumably, candidates less crazy than the MAGA embarassments now in Congress and more capable of dismantling Social Security and Medicare than Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
But they’ll keep their tax cuts.