Hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were among the earliest and strongest backers of Donald Trump while other elite donors still disdained him. It turned out to be a good investment.While they’ve poured money into conservative causes, they’ve also invested in projects explicitly aimed at overturning the modern conservative movement, like Breitbart News, in which they reportedly invested $10 million. According to tax records from the Mercer Family Foundation, they gave nearly $3.6 million to Citizens United between 2012 and 2014, which sued for access to Clinton Foundation-related emails last year and whose president David Bossie also got a senior job on the Trump campaign.
At first, the Mercers went in for Cruz. They backed Keep the Promise 1, one of the main super PACs supporting Cruz, to the tune of $11 million. Like other campaigns with which the Mercers have been involved, including Trump’s, the Cruz campaign engaged the Mercers’s data firm Cambridge Analytica. In January, before the primaries had even begun, Breitbart News began attacking Cruz, insinuating that he was ineligible to be president because of his Canadian birth (a line also in heavy use by Trump at the time).The Breitbart stories were troubling to Cruz staff, who had seen Breitbart as an ally and who didn’t think they had any reason to doubt the Mercers’ loyalty.What Cruz’s staff may not have taken into account was the behind-the-scenes influence of Steve Bannon.
“Last summer and again this year, Senator Ted Cruz pledged to support the candidacy of the nominee of the Republican Party, whomever that nominee might be,” the Mercers said in a statement to The New York Times afterward. “We are profoundly disappointed that on Wednesday night he chose to disregard this pledge. The Democratic Party will soon choose as their nominee a candidate who would repeal both the First and Second Amendments of the Bill of Rights, a nominee who would remake the Supreme Court in her own image. We need ‘all hands on deck’ to ensure that Mr. Trump prevails. Unfortunately, Senator Cruz has chosen to remain in his bunk below, a decision both regrettable and revealing.”
The tape was too much for many of the Republicans who had begrudgingly come around to Trump; some rescinded their endorsements, and there was pressure on Trump to drop out of the race.But not from the Mercers, who dismissed the tape as “locker room braggadocio” in a statement to the Washington Post:“America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite. Trump is channeling this disgust, and those among the political elite who quake before the boombox of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on Nov. 8.”
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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/no-one-knows-what-the-powerful-mercers-really-want/514529/
