For the Koch brothers, everything comes down to control. The Kochs use their money and their network’s resources to get what they want, backing candidates who agree to support their self-interested, profit-maximizing agenda.
But what happens when the Kochs don’t have any leverage?
That brings us to the Koch brothers’ worst nightmare: GOP front-runner Donald Trump. As Politico reported today, the Kochs are “freezing out” the loud-mouthed, xenophobic force of nature who’s dominating his Republican opponents — and whose rise in the polls is keeping the Koch brothers up at night.
Other candidates know the deal: Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker — they’re all making ideological concessions as quickly as they can to show the Koch brothers they’re worthwhile investments. And it’s working: they’ve been “summoned” to an exclusive Koch network conference this weekend.
But Trump is different.
So he overstated his net-worth — $2.9 billion isn’t the “TEN BILLION DOLLARS” he claimed. But, as Politico rightly notes: with that kind of money, Trump “doesn’t need [the Koch network’s] cash in the same way that his rivals do.”
The Kochs know they can’t control him and re-calibrate his policy agenda to match their own, so they’re resorting to any means necessary to try to slow his meteoric rise. According to Politico:
[T]he network of Koch-backed policy and political outfits is using behind-the-scenes influence to challenge Trump more forcefully than the Republican Party establishment — by limiting his access to the support and data that would help him translate his lead in the polls into a sustainable White House campaign.
The Koch operation has spurned entreaties from the Trump campaign to purchase state-of-the-art data and analytics services from a Koch-backed political tech firm called i360, and also turned down a request to allow Trump to speak at an annual grass-roots summit next month in Columbus, Ohio, sponsored by the Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, POLITICO has learned.
The Kochs have a problem in Donald Trump: they can’t control him, so they’re trying to freeze him out.