Tag: David Koch

Trump launches extraordinary attack on Koch brothers after oil tycoons refuse to back Republican candidate

Donald Trump has launched an extraordinary attack on the Koch brothers, accusing the Republican megadonors of opposing his government’s agenda.

“The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade,” the US president wrote on Twitter early on Tuesday morning.

“I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas.”

Mr Trump’s outburst came after the Koch brothers’ political arm declared it would not help elect a Republican senate candidate in North Dakota, partly over his failure to challenge the White House’s trade tariffs.

The decision sent a strong message to Republican officials across the country unwilling to oppose the spending explosion and protectionist trade policies embraced by Mr Trump.

“For those who stand in the way, we don’t pull any punches, regardless of party,” Tim Phillips, who leads the Kochs’ political arm Americans For Prosperity (AFP), told hundreds of donors during a three-day private Rocky Mountain retreat.

But a furious Mr Trump hit back, claiming he made Charles and David Koch “richer”, and that they “love” his tax cuts, deregulation and judicial nominations.

“Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn,” he continued. “They want to protect their companies outside the US from being taxed, I’m for America First & the American Worker – a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!”

The split marks a new chapter in the strained relationship between the Trump administration and the expanding conservative network created by billionaire industrialists, who refused to endorse the Republican president in 2016.

Mr Trump has effectively taken over the Republican Party on almost every level, even after ignoring long-held conservative beliefs on government spending, free trade and foreign policy. The billionaire Kochs and their nationwide army of conservative activists, however, are not giving in.

That is not to say they are punishing every Trump loyalist in the 2018 election season.

AFP still plans to focus its resources on helping Republican senate candidates in Tennessee, Florida and Wisconsin. It remains unclear how hard the group will work to defeat vulnerable senate Democrats in West Virginia, Missouri and Montana.

The midterm strategy could change in the coming weeks, but the Kochs currently plan to ignore North Dakota’s high-profile senate contest, where three-term Republican congressman Kevin Cramer is trying to unseat Democratic senator Heidi Heitkamp. She is considered among the most vulnerable senate Democrats in the nation.

“He’s not leading on the issues this country needs leadership most right now,” Mr Phillips said of Mr Cramer, specifically citing spending and trade. “If Cramer doesn’t step up to lead, that makes it hard to support him.”

Ahead of the announcement, Charles Koch told reporters that he cared little for party affiliation and regretted supporting some Republicans in the past who only paid lip service to conservative principles.

Network leaders over the weekend repeatedly lashed out at the Republican-backed $1.3 trillion (£990bn) spending bill adopted in March, which represented the largest government spending plan in history. The Trump White House budget office now predicts that next year’s federal deficit will exceed $1 trillion, while reaching a combined $8 trillion over the next 10 years.

The Kochs were equally concerned about the Trump administration’s “protectionist” trade policies, which have sparked an international trade war and could trigger a US recession, Charles Koch said.

“We’re going to be much stricter if they say they’re for the principles we espouse and then they aren’t,” he vowed. “We’re going to more directly deal with that and hold people responsible for their commitments.”

The Koch network has demonstrated in recent months – albeit on a limited basis – a willingness to praise Democrats and condemn Republicans in specific situations.

After first running attack ads against Ms Heitkamp earlier in the year, the Kochs last month launched a digital ad campaign thanking the North Dakota Democrat for voting to roll back Obama-era banking regulations. At around the same time, they launched an advertising blitz to criticise 10 Republican House members, including Pennsylvania Republican senate nominee Lou Barletta, for supporting the massive spending bill.

Following Monday’s announcement, Julia Krieger, a campaign spokesperson for Ms Heitkamp, said, “When it comes to leading on the pocketbook issues North Dakotans care about — from strong trade markets to responsible spending and cutting red tape for North Dakota businesses — Heidi has always been consistent: North Dakota comes first.”

The development marked a dramatic escalation in the Kochs’ willingness to buck partisan loyalties. And some Trump loyalists were furious with the Kochs’ work to undermine Trump and his agenda even before Monday’s news dropped.

Former White House adviser, Steve Bannon, questioned the true influence of “the Koch network management,” seizing on the lack of accountability in the organisations’ spending in recent years given that most of the details are not publicly available.

“Where did the money go, what do they really spend it on, and how much, if anything, do they really put into the network?” Mr Bannon asked in a brief interview with The Associated Press.

And prominent Texas-based Trump donor Doug Deason, who attended the weekend retreat, said Republican candidates should not be punished for embracing the president’s agenda.

“That’s not right,” he said before Monday’s announcement, condemning the Koch network’s recent decision to praise Ms Heitkamp.

“Heitkamp, we’re going to knock her out of the water. She’s gone,” Mr Deason predicted.

The decision to ignore the Republican candidate in North Dakota certainly caught some by surprise, but there appeared to be overwhelming support from others — even if the plan hurts the GOP’s push to maintain its House and Senate majorities.

Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, among a handful of elected officials who mingled with donors at the weekend retreat, said there should be political consequences for those who deviate from conservative principles.

“If in fact you have people espousing these in name, but not in practice, yeah, they’re not going to be supported, nor should they be,” Mr Bevin said in a brief interview. “I think this network supports people who truly respect those principles. And I think they’re agnostic, from what I’ve seen, with respect to what party a person is.”

At the same time, Mr Bevin defended Mr Trump’s push to apply billions of dollars in tariffs on goods from China, Canada, Mexico and the European Union. He dismissed the outcry from businesses in Kentucky and elsewhere as a short-term problem.

Colorado-based energy investor Chris Wright, a longtime Koch donor, said the Republican Party may have lost its way in the age of Mr Trump. He and his wife, Liz, encouraged the Koch network to ignore Republican candidates who turn their back on key conservative principles out of loyalty to Mr Trump.

“They don’t deserve to be funded if they don’t uphold our values,” Liz Wright said.

[The Independent]

Trump Kicks Critic Off His Golf Course

Trump golfing in the rain

President-elect Donald Trump on Friday ejected from his West Palm Beach golf course one of his most critical biographers, Harry Hurt III, who had been preparing to play in a foursome with billionaire mega-donor David Koch.

Hurt is the author of “Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump,” a 1993 book that revealed among other things that Trump was accused of “rape” by his ex-wife Ivana Trump in a sworn deposition during their divorce proceedings.

Donald Trump has denied the allegation, as well as other parts of the book, and Ivana Trump herself later said that she did not intend for her use of the word “rape” to be interpreted in “a literal or criminal sense.”

On Friday, Hurt approached Trump on the practice tee at Trump International Golf Club, and congratulated him on his victory in last month’s presidential election, according to an account that Hurt posted on Facebook on Saturday.

Trump responded by criticizing Hurt’s biography as untrue, to which Hurt replied “It’s all true,” according to both Hurt’s Facebook post and a transition official who was briefed on the incident, but did not want to be identified discussing a testy exchange involving the president-elect.

Trump told Hurt “you’re out of here,” according to the transition official, while Hurt wrote on Facebook that Trump told him it was “inappropriate” for him to play at the club.

David Koch could be reached for comment, and the Trump transition team declined to comment.

Hurt told POLITICO in an interview that he approached Trump “out of courtesy and respect for the office of the President of the United States … I support the office of the President of the United States, and I sincerely hope that Donald Trump will look after the interests of the United States with the same passion as he has looked after his business interests heretofore.”

The various accounts given to POLITICO diverge after the initial interaction between Hurt and Trump.

Hurt’s Facebook post says that Trump “had his security detail escort Hurt, Koch, and their playing partners to the parking lot,” and that Koch “was appalled,” and criticized Trump as “petty” and “vulgar.”

Another member of the Hurt-Koch foursome, fellow GOP donor John M. Damgard, told POLITICO that neither he nor Koch were privy to Hurt’s exchange with Trump, and that Hurt didn’t recount it to them in any detail.

“Harry just said he had been asked to leave,” said Damgard, a former president of the Futures Industry Association who has a house in Palm Beach. “I thought he was kidding. And then I learned that there had been some previous bad blood between them from back in the ‘90s apparently,” Damgard said, adding, “Unbeknownst to us, he had written a book or an article that was critical of Trump.”

So, Damgard continued, “rather than exacerbate something that wasn’t going to go very well, we just decided to get into the car and leave.”

A Koch associate told POLITICO that when Hurt returned from his exchange with Trump, he offered to take an Uber home and allow the rest of the foursome to continue playing without him.

“And David said, ‘No, we came as a foursome and we’ll leave as a foursome,’” said the Koch associate, who was briefed on the incident.

Koch is a member of the golf club, said his associate, adding that Koch and Hurt are “golfing buddies” who have “known each other for years.” The associate said that the final member of the foursome was someone invited by Hurt who boasts of having a scratch handicap and may have been giving golf lessons to the person.

The Koch associate said Hurt had only approached the president-elect “as a courtesy.”

And Damgard said, “Harry was with a young lady who was a friend and he thought it would be fun to introduce her to the president-elect.”

But the transition official described Hurt as “trying to instigate,” and said that, instead of leaving after the exchange with Trump, the biographer returned to his foursome as they waited to tee off.

“The course security actually had to go and tap him on the shoulder and tell him to leave,” said the transition official. Koch protested that Hurt was part of his foursome, said the transition official, who said that security informed Koch that he could either leave with Hurt or play without him.

Damgard denies this, saying, “We had no interaction with security.”

And Hurt told POLITICO “There was nobody tapping me on the shoulder, nobody forcing me out.” He said the reason he did not leave immediately after Trump asked him to do so was that “We had to go collect our stuff.”

Hurt said he posted his account on Facebook “to have a true factual narrative of what happened when I was there between Donald Trump and me.” He said “I knew that this story was going to get out and that there are a lot of people, such as the Trump transition people … who were going to take different facts and twist them and say things that were not true.”

But the transition official suggested Hurt was looking for publicity. “The courtesy would have been to just tee off with David Koch and keep to yourself,” said the official. “He could have easily teed off with Koch, and nobody would have said anything.”

Instead, Koch’s foursome left and played at Emerald Dunes, which Hurt described in his Facebook post as “a much, much better golf course than Trump International.”

Damgard, on the other hand, said that Trump’s West Palm Beach course is “one of [Koch’s] very favorite golf courses,” adding, “if he had thought that there would have been an incident, he would have done whatever he could to avoid it.”

The Koch associate said that Koch “will continue to golf” at the Trump course, and didn’t anticipate that the incident would pose any problems between Koch and the president-elect.

But Trump and Koch have recent history.

Koch, a billionaire industrialist, with his brother Charles Koch spearheads arguably the most influential network of donors and advocacy groups on the right. But the brothers sat out the presidential election out of distaste for both Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Charles Koch once likened the choice between Trump and Clinton to choosing between cancer or a heart attack. Trump in turn boasted that the Kochs could not influence him because he didn’t “want their money or anything else from them.”

When Trump and David Koch encountered one another last week at the president-elect’s luxury Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Trump referenced the brothers’ sitting out the campaign, according to a transition team source.