GOP’s rifts exposed through Kochs’ conflicts with Trump
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s tight grip on the Republican Party is being openly challenged by the powerful network of ideological conservatives linked to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, splaying out long-simmering tensions over the party’s future just months before the midterm elections.
Trump on Tuesday dismissed the mounting criticism of his trade and immigration policies from Koch and his allies as the battle cry of a faction that has “become a total joke in real Republican circles.”
“I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” Trump wrote on Twitter, adding, “I have beaten them at every turn.”
The Koch network pointedly declined to endorse Trump as a presidential candidate in 2016. But this latest feud — following last weekend’s gathering at which Kochaffiliated officials sought to distance their operation from Trump — has exposed the rift between a president pushing his party toward populism, and establishment Republicans espousing the longstanding policy of free trade.
Republican lawmakers, awkwardly stuck between two of the party’s most influential forces, are scrambling to adjust. On Monday, GOP senators privately deliberated about the path the Koch network has charted and its implications, according to two Republicans familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
In a private meeting at the Capitol, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, recounted his visit to the Koch conference to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and other GOP senators and aides, and described the frustration he encountered over Trump’s trade policies and conduct, the Republicans said.
Some senators in the meeting struggled to make sense of the Koch network’s new strategy of limiting its work for GOP candidates.
“These guys want to change the direction of the country. They don’t understand how hard that is,” McConnell said, according to one of the Republicans.
Representatives for McConnell and Cornyn declined to comment, citing a practice of not discussing private meetings.
Trump supporters expressed outrage Tuesday at what they saw as a betrayal.
“The donor class controlled the Republican Party — that is, until the rise of Trump. The Kochs see that being ripped away, thus the open contempt for the president and his movement,” said former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
Trump’s critics, however, said the fissures within the Republican Party have only grown over the past year, and they called the split a sign of wider unease.
“The Kochs are rather appalled at what they’re seeing from Republicans who they helped elect in 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and who promised to be fiscally responsible and support free markets,” said conservative activist Erick Erickson, who has worked with Koch-affiliated groups and who will host a conservative summit this week in Austin that is partly sponsored by the Koch Institute.
The Koch network — which over the past decades has become a robust conservative grass-roots organizing and advertising apparatus with a heft comparable to that of the Republican National Committee — has pledged to spend as much as $400 million in this election cycle.