August 26 2019, 12:15 p.m.
DAVID KOCH, the fossil
fuel industry billionaire who passed away on August 23 at the age of 79,
spent the second half of his life building a political power structure
alongside his brother Charles that radically reshaped society and set the
conditions for the rise of President Donald Trump.
Many obituaries published in
recent days examine Koch’s history of polluting the environment and political
system, how the donor network he helped lead mobilized opposition
to addressing climate change, transformed our election laws to allow
unlimited secret spending by the very rich, and systematically fought any
regulation, labor reform, or tax viewed as a threat to the corporate power
elite.
Yet Koch’s most visible
accomplishment is the current occupant of the White House — a legacy
largely unrecognized, and one that goes well beyond any other single triumph in
his life.
The nexus is not readily
clear to most, especially given that the two clashed publicly; Trump, for
instance, has taken to gleefully ridiculing Koch and his brother as “globalists.”
But in his scorched-earth quest for unparalleled influence, Koch, perhaps
unwittingly, laid the path for Trump.
First, there were obvious
efforts made by Koch, though largely ignored by the mainstream press, that
directly elected Trump. In 2016, Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs’s primary
vehicle for influence that operates as a privately run political party, hired
over 650
staffers, deploying many to battleground states, including Wisconsin,
Pennsylvania, and Michigan, to turn out Republican voters. The field staff
filled in the gaps left by Trump’s chaotic field operation. In Wisconsin
alone, Americans for Prosperity staff, equipped with state-of-the-art voter
contact technology, made 1.5 million phone calls and knocked on nearly 30,000
doors.
Late in the campaign,
the Koch money flowed to television advertisements in the Rust Belt,
including the crucial states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, that hammered
Hillary Clinton. Political scientist Thomas Ferguson has persuasively
argued that the spending blitz by Republican billionaires,
including Koch, in late October and early November, was the decisive factor in
Clinton’s defeat. Koch groups spent $4.3
million in Wisconsin, eclipsing the $3
million spent by the Clinton campaign, with television ads that sought
to simultaneously tear
down Democrat Russ Feingold and Clinton, a pattern repeated in other crucial
swing states.
What’s more, over the previous
eight years, the Koch network had plowed tens of millions of dollars into the
region, with a focus on Wisconsin, to transform the state, once a progressive
bastion, into a laboratory for the radical right. The network focused carefully
on political investments designed to change the power alignment throughout the
upper Midwest: new barriers to voting, dramatic restrictions on labor unions,
and investments in a localized conservative voter mobilization apparatus. The
states that produced the Electoral College victory over Clinton had been
primed for electing a future GOP presidential nominee, and Trump was simply the
beneficiary.
MORE IMPORTANT, however,
are the structural investments and vindictive political style nurtured by
Koch. Though he wielded power largely behind closed doors, in the shadows
of a complex web of dark-money lobby groups and think tanks, there were public
glimpses of the Koch fiefdom. The most revealing of these can be seen
in the the archived footage, preserved on
C-SPAN, of the 2009 Americans for Prosperity annual gala.
The event space was
transformed into a miniature presidential convention hall, complete with
vertical placards among the rows to represent the various states of the
union. But these were not elected delegates convened to nominate
an American president. These were the assorted paid operatives and talking
heads that had taken a wrecking ball to progressive society. They were there to
thank their benefactor in an Orwellian four-hour tribute. A parade of
prominent Republican politicians and pundits took the microphone, followed
by staff of Americans for Prosperity, to sing praises to Koch, who stood
before the hall. As each operative stood to explain what they had accomplished
on his behalf, they dutifully addressed the billionaire as “Mr.
Chairman.”
The cutthroat tactics that
would define Koch’s anything-goes approach, and the men who would later serve
as the lieutenants in Trump’s remarking of the country, were also on full
display.
“Mr. Chairman,” said Corey
Lewandowski, then the New Hampshire state leader for Americans for Prosperity,
before boasting that he had organized right-wing rallies so raucous
that when President Barack Obama visited the state, they had “forc[ed] him
to change his motorcade route to avoid the angry mob.” Koch can be seen in the
front of the room, clapping in approval.
Other officials took turns at
the microphone to blast the policies of Obama and his administration. One
speaker bragged that he had forced the resignation of former White House
official Van Jones by appearing on the Glenn Beck program to accuse Jones of
being a secret communist. Another promised to work to repeal the estate tax,
euphemistically referred to as the “death tax.” And many others discussed the
coast-to-coast tea party rallies they mobilized, focused on preventing action
on climate change and health care reform.
Over the years, Americans for
Prosperity and its affiliated nonprofits continued to battle Obama as the Koch
network poured billions into election advocacy and lobbying. Their
political rhetoric rarely matched Koch’s idealized form of libertarianism
about limited government. Money flowed freely to anti-abortion groups as well
as anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremists. But principled laissez-faire
activism was never a criterion for receiving Koch money.
The assembled speakers at the
2009 convention were quick to form the basis of Trump’s inner circle. Newt
Gingrich, who helped open the event, was the first major figure from the GOP
establishment to endorse Trump’s bid for the Republican nomination. Larry
Kudlow, another speaker at the event, is now in the executive office shaping
Trump’s economic policies. Trump himself appeared at Americans for Prosperity
events as early as
2014.
The permanent political
machine gainfully employed by Koch to fan the flames of the tea party movement
seamlessly transitioned into
Trump’s orbit. Lewandowski would later serve as Trump’s presidential
campaign manager. Alan Cobb, the vice president of Americans for Prosperity,
became a senior adviser to the Trump election effort. Marc Short, who later
became Trump’s liaison to Congress, previously worked as president of Freedom
Partners, Koch’s central clearing house for doling out political grants.
Donald McGahn, Koch’s campaign operation lawyer, became Trump’s campaign
and White House attorney. And Mark Block, a key Americans for Prosperity
official in Wisconsin, seen in the C-SPAN video reporting out the success of
his growing chapter in mobilizing anti-Obama demonstrations, was the first
to introduce Cambridge
Analytica’s services to Steve Bannon, according to a whistleblower account.
No wonder, then, that much of
Trump’s administration has been hyper-focused on the policy goals of
the Koch network: deregulation, tax cuts, and business-friendly judges. A
memo circulated to
the Koch donor network last year compiled the
laundry list of environmental and judicial victories scored through the
administration, including leaving the Paris climate agreement and the
appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
I BECAME ACUTELY familiar
with the Koch network early in my career while traveling across the country in
2009 and 2010 to cover the emerging tea party protests. I was the
first to report on Koch’s hidden hand in helping to
orchestrate the tea party movement and harness its anger for his own
political agenda, and interviewed him about climate change.
At the congressional swearing
in ceremony for the Tea Party wave, I saw David Koch leaving the building and
got a short interview. Every other political interview Koch ever gave was carefully
screened. This one wasn't.
The tactics were often covert.
During a town hall hosted by then-congressman Tom Perriello, a Democrat from
rural Virginia, angry citizens took turns screaming into the mic, accusing the
lawmaker of “ignoring the law of the Constitution that requires Obama to prove
that he is a natural born citizen.” I witnessed Americans
for Prosperity staff in the back, videotaping the confrontations to create
viral moments of constituent unrest. Several of the loudest protesters told me
after the event that they had met with Americans for Prosperity staff, who had
provided talking points and advice for confronting Democratic lawmakers.
Later, in the midterm
elections, an avalanche of television advertisements, many of which were funded
by Koch, accused Perriello of abandoning his constituents by voting for
health reform and the cap-and-trade
bill in Congress.
In Washington, D.C., as the
vote on the Affordable Care Act neared, Americans for Prosperity provided free
buses, food, and other arrangements for thousands of demonstrators to storm
Capitol Hill. When lawmakers saw hundreds of rowdy protesters storm the halls
in opposition to the vote, few were aware that a single billionaire had paid
their way.
In other instances, the
propaganda techniques bordered on comical. One television advertisement featured
an actor who played “Carleton the eco-hypocrite,” who sought action on
global warming only to enrich himself and cause “massive unemployment.”
Another Americans for Prosperity campaign depicted the
Environmental Protection Agency’s climate policies represented as a Big
Brother-style power grab, falsely claiming that “carbon cops” would arrest
Americans and regulate churches under
the guise of combating global warming. The campaign toured throughout the
country with free food and an inflatable bounce house for children shaped as
a giant
green police car to illustrate the point.
Other advocacy
efforts worked to grow the dark underbelly of American paranoia. American
Future Fund was one of several groups that received over $10 million in
2010 from a Koch-financed nonprofit to run attack ads, including spots
that spread the bigoted lie that a victory mosque was
planned near the former World Trade Center.
In the end, media attention
did little to dim Koch’s prospects for power. In the midterm elections
that year, Koch’s advocacy machine helped deliver 63 seats in the House of
Representatives, including Perriello’s seat, the entire state government in
Wisconsin, and hundreds of other elections across the country into
Republican hands in one of the greatest election routs in American history. The
move to extremism was rewarded with raw power, with Koch as the kingmaker.
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