They’re thinking about it
The media breathlessly reported this week that the Koch Network, specifically their Americans for Prosperity Action fund, had finally decided who they would be backing for the GOP presidential nomination, former S. Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. This was reported as if it was a very significant moment signaling the final blow to the campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis whom Haley has been overtaking in some polls in the early states.
There’s only one problem. Both Haley and DeSantis are trailing the front runner, former president Donald Trump, by 50 points nationally which means all this hoopla over the Koch endorsement is about who is going to finish a very distant second place. This has to be the saddest example of horse race journalism in history.
The Koch network does have a lot of money, of course, and according to AFP, they’ve already been running negative ads against Trump since last winter when they announced that they were going to participate in the 2024 election, specifically against Trump. But it took them this long to decide to back a specific candidate, perhaps because the one considered most likely to beat Trump, Ron DeSantis, isn’t their cup of tea.
They come out of the libertarian wing of the party which favors immigration and international trade and doesn’t care for the idea of using state power to strong arm business. DeSantis is MAGA, the successor to the Tea Party which the Kochs bankrolled and astroturfed to victories during the Obama years. He hates everything they stand for (except tax cuts, of course.)
Haley, on the other hand, is a Koch Brothers dream. I’m sure she had them at “going to go after Social Security and Medicare.”
And here everyone thought that the cacophonous eruption of denials at the State of the Union address last year when President Biden said that’s exactly what they planned meant that the GOP had dropped their longstanding determination to end those programs.
As the NY Times Paul Krugman pointed out in his column on Tuesday, she’s a clever shape-shifting politician on the stump but when you look at her policies, she’s a standard issue corporate right winger. And that, of course, means she doesn’t stand a chance of winning the nomination even if she stands the best chance of beating Joe Biden. To paraphrase a famous Republican defense secretary, you go to war with the Republican base you have not the one you might wish to have and the base today has no interest in standard issue establishment Republicans. Her “lane” is the same lane that they all have: hoping for something to happen to Donald Trump.
The Kochs have a dubious record of choosing presidential candidates anyway. Recall that they had groomed Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for years to be their own personal president and were ready to formally endorse him when he suddenly declared that he wanted to curtail legal immigration and then flamed out completely, leaving the race before it even started. Their network stayed on the sidelines from that point on. And you can be sure when the primary is over and Trump is the nominee they won’t be spending any of their loot to defeat him in the general. Like so many others of their ilk, they’ll pout and sulk a bit and then slink off to count all the money he saved them with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy.
But with all the talk about the Koch Network stepping into the arena on behalf of Nikki Haley, there’s been hardly a mention of another big bucks right wing family coming off of the sidelines for Donald Trump. CNBC reported last week that according to “people familiar with the matter” Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah are considering getting back in the game after laying out since 2018. And they’ve got $88 million sitting in their private nonprofit, the Mercer Family Foundation, just waiting to be spent.
Just as the Koch Network is more ideologically aligned with Nikki Haley, the Mercers came out heavily for Trump in 2016, way ahead of most of the rich guys, pumping tens of millions into the campaign. According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman they were originally motivated by their burning hatred of Hillary Clinton whom they believe is a murderer but once they got involved, their influence on the Trump campaign was huge.
Former Trump adviser and podcaster Steve Bannon said, “the Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump Revolution” and that is absolutely correct. They bankrolled Bannon’s publication Breitbart News which served as Trump’s online propaganda arm during the 2016 campaign and spent millions on Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer’s data firm, which was reportedly involved in all sort of chicanery in that election. They were personally responsible for putting Bannon and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway in the campaign.
But their high profile involvement also brought them under intense scrutiny which they apparently didn’t like. They are very eccentric people and they soured on Trump for vague reasons and stepped out of the public eye after 2017. But they never stopped donating millions to their pet causes and other far right politicians. And as Salon’s Igor Derysh pointed out in this tour de force examination of the Mercers tentacles in all aspects of right wing politics, their influence and money was essential to the forces that brought the MAGA movement to its peak moment on January 6th.
And they have continued to help fund organizations and individuals that helped perpetuate the Big Lie. He quotes Mobashra Tazamal, a senior research fellow at Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative which issued a report on the Mercers involvement back in 2021:
“By strategically funneling millions into known hate groups, platforms amplifying racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia, and politicians who pushed forth outright lies of a stolen election, Rebekah Mercer played a role in inciting the violence by providing material support,” she said. “The billionaire family has used their extraordinary wealth to bankroll the rise of violent white nationalism in this country.”
This is what they believe in. This is what they care about. It’s no surprise that they have now decided it may be time to come out of the shadows and once again support Donald Trump. All his recent talk of mass deportations, detention camps, “poisoning the blood of our country” and expelling the “vermin” has to be music to their ears. They figure they may finally be about to get their money’s worth.