This archive report was first published on 24 August 2019.
By 2017, the Koch brothers, with a combined net worth of over $100 billion, had become the leaders of a libertarian juggernaut loosely allied with the Republican Party. Their influence in Washington seemed to be on the rise, especially after Donald J. Trump's election victory in 2016.
However, beneath the surface, the Koch brothers and President Trump had substantive political and personal differences. While the Kochs did not endorse Trump, David Koch attended his election night victory party and later met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The Kochs contributed heavily to Vice President Mike Pence's campaigns for governor of Indiana and counted close allies among the president's cabinet choices and Republican advisers.
As reported by The New York Times in September 2016, "The Kochs will be key figures in any discussion about what direction the party takes after 2016, and they are determined to steer it toward their free-market vision." This proved prophetic as the Koch brothers' frustrations with Trump's policies broke into an open exchange between Charles Koch and the president in 2018.
Charles Koch denounced Trump's restrictive trade and immigration policies as divisive and threatened to withhold the family's support for Republican candidates who opposed the free-trade, government-shrinking policies at the heart of the Koch political philosophy. Trump struck back on Twitter, calling the Koch political apparatus "overrated" and "a total joke in real Republican circles."
Critics accused the Koch brothers of buying influence and using their political machine to manipulate elections and government policies under a guise of patriotism and freedom. Those efforts, the critics said, cloaked an agenda to cut taxes and federal regulations governing business, the environment, and other interests, primarily to benefit the Koch family and its enterprises.
According to Jane Mayer, a critic of the Koch brothers, their libertarian policies benefited Koch chemical and fossil fuel businesses, which were among the nation's worst polluters, and paid millions in fines and court judgments for hazardous-waste violations. The Koch brothers rejected these allegations.
