This is very informative, but takes more than an hour to read.
Miriam
Robert Mercer. (photo: Bloomberg)
Trump's Money Man
By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker
18 March 17
The reclusive hedge-fund tycoon behind the Trump presidency. How Robert
Mercer exploited America's populist insurgency.
ast month, when President Donald Trump toured a Boeing aircraft plant in
North Charleston, South Carolina, he saw a familiar face in the crowd that
greeted him: Patrick Caddell, a former Democratic political operative and
pollster who, for forty-five years, has been prodding insurgent Presidential
candidates to attack the Washington establishment. Caddell, who lives in
Charleston, is perhaps best known for helping Jimmy Carter win the 1976
Presidential race. He is also remembered for having collaborated with his
friend Warren Beatty on the 1998 satire Bulworth. In that film, a kamikaze
candidate abandons the usual talking points and excoriates both the major
political parties and the media; voters love his unconventionality, and he
becomes improbably popular. If the plot sounds familiar, theres a reason:
in recent years, Caddell has offered political advice to Trump. He has not
worked directly for the President, but at least as far back as 2013 he has
been a contractor for one of Trumps biggest financial backers: Robert
Mercer, a reclusive Long Island hedge-fund manager, who has become a major
force behind the Trump Presidency.
During the past decade, Mercer, who is seventy, has funded an array of
political projects that helped pave the way for Trumps rise. Among these
efforts was public-opinion research, conducted by Caddell, showing that
political conditions in America were increasingly ripe for an outsider
candidate to take the White House. Caddell told me that Mercer is a
libertarianhe despises the Republican establishment, and added, He thinks
that the leaders are corrupt crooks, and that theyve ruined the country.
Trump greeted Caddell warmly in North Charleston, and after giving a speech
he conferred privately with him, in an area reserved for V.I.P.s and for
White House officials, including Stephen Bannon, the Presidents top
strategist, and Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law. Caddell is well known to
this inner circle. He first met Trump in the eighties. (People said he was
just a clown, Caddell said. But Ive learned that you should always pay
attention to successful clowns. ) Caddell shared the research he did for
Mercer with Trump and others in the campaign, including Bannon, with whom he
has partnered on numerous projects.
The White House declined to divulge what Trump and Caddell discussed in
North Charleston, as did Caddell. But that afternoon Trump issued perhaps
the most incendiary statement of his Presidency: a tweet calling the news
media the enemy of the American people. The proclamation alarmed liberals
and conservatives alike. William McRaven, the retired Navy admiral who
commanded the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, called Trumps
statement a threat to democracy. The President is known for tweeting
impulsively, but in this case his words werent spontaneous: they clearly
echoed the thinking of Caddell, Bannon, and Mercer. In 2012, Caddell gave a
speech at a conference sponsored by Accuracy in Media, a conservative
watchdog group, in which he called the media the enemy of the American
people. That declaration was promoted by Breitbart News, a platform for the
pro-Trump alt-right, of which Bannon was the executive chairman, before
joining the Trump Administration. One of the main stakeholders in Breitbart
News is Mercer.
Mercer is the co-C.E.O. of Renaissance Technologies, which is among the most
profitable hedge funds in the country. A brilliant computer scientist, he
helped transform the financial industry through the innovative use of
trading algorithms. But he has never given an interview explaining his
political views. Although Mercer has recently become an object of media
speculation, Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, a
nonpartisan watchdog group, who formerly served as the chairman of the
Federal Election Commission, said, I have no idea what his political views
aretheyre unknown, not just to the public but also to most people whove
been active in politics for the past thirty years. Potter, a Republican,
sees Mercer as emblematic of a major shift in American politics that has
occurred since 2010, when the Supreme Court made a controversial ruling in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That ruling, and several
subsequent ones, removed virtually all limits on how much money corporations
and nonprofit groups can spend on federal elections, and how much
individuals can give to political-action committees. Since then, power has
tilted away from the two main political parties and toward a tiny group of
rich mega-donors.
Private money has long played a big role in American elections. When there
were limits on how much a single donor could give, however, it was much
harder for an individual to have a decisive impact. Now, Potter said, a
single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their
thumb but their whole hand on the scaleand we often have no idea who they
are. He continued, Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and
public policyto sweep everything else off the tableeven if they dont
speak publicly, and even if theres almost no public awareness of his or her
views.
Through a spokesman, Mercer declined to discuss his role in launching Trump.
People who know him say that he is painfully awkward socially, and rarely
speaks. He can barely look you in the eye when he talks, an acquaintance
said. Its probably helpful to be highly introverted when getting lost in
code, but in politics you have to talk to people, in order to find out how
the real world works. In 2010, when the Wall Street Journal wrote about
Mercer assuming a top role at Renaissance, he issued a terse statement: Im
happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody. According
to the paper, he once told a colleague that he preferred the company of cats
to humans.
Several people who have worked with Mercer believe that, despite his
oddities, he has had surprising success in aligning the Republican Party,
and consequently America, with his personal beliefs, and is now uniquely
positioned to exert influence over the Trump Administration. In February,
David Magerman, a senior employee at Renaissance, spoke out about what he
regards as Mercers worrisome influence. Magerman, a Democrat who is a
strong supporter of Jewish causes, took particular issue with Mercers
empowerment of the alt-right, which has included anti-Semitic and
white-supremacist voices. Magerman shared his concerns with Mercer, and the
conversation escalated into an argument. Magerman told colleagues about it,
and, according to an account in the Wall Street Journal, Mercer called
Magerman and said, I hear youre going around saying Im a white
supremacist. Thats ridiculous. Magerman insisted to Mercer that he hadnt
used those words, but added, If what youre doing is harming the country,
then you have to stop. After the Journal story appeared, Magerman, who has
worked at Renaissance for twenty years, was suspended for thirty days.
Undaunted, he published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer, accusing
Mercer of effectively buying shares in the candidate. He warned, Robert
Mercer now owns a sizeable share of the United States Presidency.
Nick Patterson, a former senior Renaissance employee who is now a
computational biologist at the Broad Institute, agrees that Mercers
influence has been huge. Bob has used his money very effectively, he said.
Hes not the first person in history to use money in politics, but in my
view Trump wouldnt be President if not for Bob. It doesnt get much more
effective than that.
Patterson said that his relationship with Mercer has always been collegial.
In 1993, Patterson, at that time a Renaissance executive, recruited Mercer
from I.B.M., and they worked together for the next eight years. But
Patterson doesnt share Mercers libertarian views, or what he regards as
his susceptibility to conspiracy theories about Bill and Hillary Clinton.
During Bill Clintons Presidency, Patterson recalled, Mercer insisted at a
staff luncheon that Clinton had participated in a secret drug-running scheme
with the C.I.A. The plot supposedly operated out of an airport in Mena,
Arkansas. Bob told me he believed that the Clintons were involved in
murders connected to it, Patterson said. Two other sources told me that, in
recent years, they had heard Mercer claim that the Clintons have had
opponents murdered.
The Mena story is one of several dark fantasies put forth in the nineties by
The American Spectator, an archconservative magazine. According to
Patterson, Mercer read the publication at the time. David Brock, a former
Spectator writer who is now a liberal activist, told me that the alleged
Mena conspiracy was based on a single dubious source, and was easily
disproved by flight records. Its extremely telling that Mercer would
believe that, Brock said. It says something about his conspiratorial frame
of mind, and the fringe circle he was in. We at the Spectator called them
Clinton Crazies.
Patterson also recalled Mercer arguing that, during the Gulf War, the U.S.
should simply have taken Iraqs oil, since it was there. Trump, too, has
said that the U.S. should have kept the oil. Expropriating another
countrys natural resources is a violation of international law. Another
onetime senior employee at Renaissance recalls hearing Mercer downplay the
dangers posed by nuclear war. Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the
U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the
immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens
healthier. The National Academy of Sciences has found no evidence to support
this notion. Nevertheless, according to the onetime employee, Mercer, who is
a proponent of nuclear power, was very excited about the idea, and felt
that it meant nuclear accidents werent such a big deal.
Mercer strongly supported the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Trumps
Attorney General. Many civil-rights groups opposed the nomination, pointing
out that Sessions has in the past expressed racist views. Mercer, for his
part, has argued that the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mistake.
According to the onetime Renaissance employee, Mercer has asserted
repeatedly that African-Americans were better off economically before the
civil-rights movement. (Few scholars agree.) He has also said that the
problem of racism in America is exaggerated. The source said that, not long
ago, he heard Mercer proclaim that there are no white racists in America
today, only black racists. (Mercer, meanwhile, has supported a super PAC,
Black Americans for a Better Future, whose goal is to get more Blacks
involved in the Republican Party.)
Most people at Renaissance didnt challenge him about politics, Patterson
said. But Patterson clashed with him over climate change; Mercer said that
concerns about it were overblown. After Patterson shared with him a
scientific paper on the subject, Mercer and his brother, Randall, who also
worked at the hedge fund, sent him a paper by a scientist named Arthur
Robinson, who is a biochemist, not a climate expert. It looked like a
scientific paper, but it was completely loaded with selective and biased
information, Patterson recalled. The paper argued that, if climate change
were real, future generations would enjoy an Earth with far more plant and
animal life. Robinson owns a sheep ranch in Cave Junction, Oregon, and on
the property he runs a laboratory that he calls the Oregon Institute of
Science and Medicine. Mercer helps subsidize Robinsons various projects,
which include an effort to forestall aging.
Patterson sent Mercer a note calling Robinsons arguments completely
false. He never heard back. I think if you studied Bobs views of what the
ideal state would look like, youd find that, basically, he wants a system
where the state just gets out of the way, Patterson said. Climate change
poses a problem for that world view, because markets cant solve it on their
own.
Magerman told the Wall Street Journal that Mercers political opinions show
contempt for the social safety net that he doesnt need, but many Americans
do. He also said that Mercer wants the U.S. government to be shrunk down
to the size of a pinhead. Several former colleagues of Mercers said that
his views are akin to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Magerman told
me, Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how
much money they make. A cat has value, hes said, because it provides
pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value.
If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then hes a thousand
times more valuable. Magerman added, He thinks society is upside downthat
government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people
weak by taking their money away, through taxes. He said that this mind-set
was typical of instant billionaires in finance, who have no stake in
society, unlike the industrialists of the past, who built real things.
Another former high-level Renaissance employee said, Bob thinks the less
government the better. Hes happy if people dont trust the government. And
if the Presidents a bozo? Hes fine with that. He wants it to all fall
down.
The 2016 Presidential election posed a challenge for someone with Mercers
ideology. Multiple sources described him as animated mainly by hatred of
Hillary Clinton. But Mercer also distrusted the Republican leadership. After
the candidate he initially supported, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, dropped
out of the race, Mercer sought a disruptive figure who could upend both the
Democratic Party and the Republican Party. Patterson told me that Mercer
seems to have applied a very Renaissance Technologies way of thinking to
politics: He probably estimated the probability of Trump winning, and when
it wasnt very high he said to himself, O.K., what has to happen in order
for this twenty-per-cent thing to occur? Its like playing a card game when
you havent got a very good hand.
Mercer, as it happens, is a superb poker player, and his political gamble
appears to have paid off. Institutional Investor has called it Robert
Mercers Trade of the Century.
In the 2016 campaign, Mercer gave $22.5 million in disclosed donations to
Republican candidates and to political-action committees. Tony Fabrizio, a
Republican pollster who worked for the Trump campaign, said that Mercer had
catapulted to the top of the heap of right-of-center power brokers. Its
worth noting that several other wealthy financiers, including Democrats such
as Thomas Steyer and Donald Sussman, gave even more money to campaigns. (One
of the top Democratic donors was James Simons, the retired founder of
Renaissance Technologies.) Nevertheless, Mercers political efforts stand
apart. Adopting the strategy of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire
libertarians, Mercer enlarged his impact exponentially by combining
short-term campaign spending with long-term ideological investments. He
poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News, andin what David Magerman
has called an extreme example of modern entrepreneurial philanthropymade
donations to dozens of politically tinged organizations.
Like many wealthy families, the Mercers have a private foundation. At first,
the Mercer Family Foundation, which was established in 2004, had an
endowment of only half a million dollars, and most of its grants went to
medical research and conventional charities. But by 2008, under the
supervision of Mercers ardently conservative daughter, Rebekah, the
foundation began giving millions of dollars to interconnected nonprofit
groups, several of which played crucial roles in propagating attacks on
Hillary Clinton. By 2015, the most recent year for which federal tax records
are available, the foundation had grown into a $24.5-million operation that
gave large sums to ultraconservative organizations.
On top of this nonprofit spending, Mercer invested in private businesses. He
put ten million dollars into Breitbart News, which was conceived as a
conservative counterweight to the Huffington Post. The Web site freely mixes
right-wing political commentary with juvenile rants and racist innuendo;
under Bannons direction, the editors introduced a rubric called Black
Crime. The site played a key role in undermining Hillary Clinton; by
tracking which negative stories about her got the most clicks and likes,
the editors helped identify which story lines and phrases were the most
potent weapons against her. Breitbart News has been a remarkable success:
according to ComScore, a company that measures online traffic, the site
attracted 19.2 million unique visitors in October.
Mercer also invested some five million dollars in Cambridge Analytica, a
firm that mines online data to reach and influence potential voters. The
company has said that it uses secret psychological methods to pinpoint which
messages are the most persuasive to individual online viewers. The firm,
which is the American affiliate of Strategic Communication Laboratories, in
London, has worked for candidates whom Mercer has backed, including Trump.
It also reportedly worked on the Brexit campaign, in the United Kingdom.
Alexander Nix, the C.E.O. of the firm, says that it has created
profilesconsisting of several thousand data pointsfor two hundred and
twenty million Americans. In promotional materials, S.C.L. has claimed to
know how to use such data to wage both psychological and political warfare.
Persuading somebody to vote a certain way, Nix has said publicly, is
really very similar to persuading 14- to 25-year-old boys in Indonesia to
not join Al Qaeda. Some critics suggest that, at this point, Cambridge
Analyticas self-promotion exceeds its effectiveness. But Jonathan Albright,
an assistant professor of communications at Elon University, in North
Carolina, recently published a paper, on Medium, calling Cambridge Analytica
a propaganda machine.
As important as Mercers business investments is his hiring of advisers.
Years before he started supporting Trump, he began funding several
conservative activists, including Steve Bannon; as far back as 2012, Bannon
was the Mercers de-facto political adviser. Some people who have observed
the Mercers political evolution worry that Bannon has become a Svengali to
the whole family, exploiting its political inexperience and tapping its
fortune to further his own ambitions. It was Bannon who urged the Mercers to
invest in a data-analytics firm. He also encouraged the investment in
Breitbart News, which was made through Gravitas Maximus, L.L.C., a front
group that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance
Technologies. In an interview, Bannon praised the Mercers strategic
approach: The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution.
Irrefutably, when you look at donors during the past four years, they have
had the single biggest impact of anybody, including the Kochs.
Last summer, Bannon and some other activists whom the Mercers have
supportedincluding David Bossie, who initiated the Citizens United
lawsuitcame together to rescue Trumps wobbly campaign. Sam Nunberg, an
early Trump adviser who watched Mercers group take over, said, Mercer was
smart. He invested in the right people.
Bannon and Rebekah Mercer have become particularly close political partners.
Last month, when Bannon denounced the corporatist, globalist media at the
Conservative Political Action Conference, in his first public appearance
since entering the White House, Rebekah Mercer was part of his entourage.
Bannon supports some initiatives, such as a major infrastructure program,
that are anathema to libertarians such as Robert Mercer. But the Wall Street
Journal has described Bannon joking and swearing on the deck of the Mercers
yacht, the Sea Owl, as if he were a member of the family. Bannon assured me
that the Mercers, despite all their luxuries, are the most middle-class
people you will ever meet.
Robert and Diana Mercer brought up their three daughters in a modest home
near I.B.M.s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, in Westchester County. The
girls attended public schools, and Robert and Diana worried about paying
three college tuitions. According to Donna DAndraia, a family friend, Diana
was a PTA member and a tiger mom who made sure that the girls did all the
right thingsthey were in the honor society, and stayed out of trouble.
DAndraia recalled Diana saying that Robert was brilliant, but DAndraia
found it hard to tell, because he was very quiethe didnt talk to
anybody.
The eldest Mercer daughter, Jennifer, or Jenji, attended Stanford. Rebekah,
the middle daughter, enrolled at Cornell and then transferred to Stanford.
Majoring in biology and math, she graduated in 1996; a few years later, she
got an M.A., in operations research. The youngest daughter, Heather Sue,
was the spitfire, DAndraia recalled. When Heather Sue was a junior in
high school, she tried out to be a place kicker on the football team. She
made it, and, after enrolling at Duke University, she joined its varsity
squad. When the Duke coach refused to treat her as the equal of her male
teammates, she sued the school for gender discrimination, and won two
million dollars in damages. Ron Santavicca, Heather Sues high-school coach,
described the Mercers, who still invite him to their Christmas parties, as
the salt of the earth. He added, The whole family is very determined.
When they have a mission, they go after it.
In 1993, when Nick Patterson mailed Robert Mercer a job offer from
Renaissance, Mercer threw it in the trash: hed never heard of the hedge
fund. At the time, Mercer was part of a team pioneering the use of computers
to translate languages. I.B.M. considered the project a bit of a luxury, and
didnt see its potential, though the work laid the foundation for Google
Translate and Apples Siri. But Mercer and his main partner, Peter Brown,
found the project exciting, and had the satisfaction of showing up experts
in the field, who had dismissed their statistical approach to translating
languages as impractical. Instead of trying to teach a computer linguistic
rules, Mercer and Brown downloaded enormous quantities of dual-language
documentsincluding Canadian parliamentary recordsand created code that
analyzed the data and detected patterns, enabling predictions of probable
translations. According to a former I.B.M. colleague, Mercer was obsessive,
and at one point took six months off to type into a computer every entry in
a Spanish-English dictionary. Sebastian Mallaby, in his 2010 book on the
hedge-fund industry, More Money Than God, reports that Mercers boss at
I.B.M. once jokingly called him an automaton.
In 2014, Mercer accepted a lifetime-achievement award from the Association
for Computational Linguistics. In a speech at the ceremony, Mercer, who grew
up in New Mexico, said that he had a jaundiced view of government. While
in college, he had worked on a military base in Albuquerque, and he had
showed his superiors how to run certain computer programs a hundred times
faster; instead of saving time and money, the bureaucrats ran a hundred
times more equations. He concluded that the goal of government officials was
not so much to get answers as to consume the computer budget. Mercers
colleagues say that he views the government as arrogant and inefficient, and
believes that individuals need to be self-sufficient, and should not receive
aid from the state. Yet, when I.B.M. failed to offer adequate support for
Mercer and Browns translation project, they secured additional funding from
DARPA, the secretive Pentagon program. Despite Mercers disdain for big
government, this funding was essential to his early success.
Meanwhile, Patterson kept asking Mercer and Brown to join Renaissance. He
thought that their technique of extracting patterns from huge amounts of
data could be applied to the pile of numbers generated daily by the global
trade in stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies. The patterns could
generate predictive financial models that would give traders a decisive
edge.
In the spring of 1993, Mercer experienced two devastating losses: his mother
was killed, in a car crash, and his father, a biologist, died six weeks
later. With lifes precariousness made painfully clear, and with tuition
bills mounting, he decided to leave I.B.M. for a higher-paying job at
Renaissance. Brown made the leap, too.
Renaissance was founded by James Simons, a legendary mathematician, in 1982.
Simons had run the math department at Stony Brook University, on Long
Island, and the hedge fund took a uniquely academic approach to high
finance. Andrew Lo, a finance professor at M.I.T.s Sloan School of
Management, has described it as the commercial version of the Manhattan
Project. Intensely secretive and filled with people with Ph.D.s, it has
been sensationally profitable. Its Medallion Fund, which is open only to the
firms three hundred or so employees, has averaged returns of almost eighty
per cent a year, before fees. Bloomberg News has called the Medallion Fund
perhaps the worlds greatest moneymaking machine.
In More Money Than God, Mallaby, who interviewed Mercer, describes his
temperament as that of an icy cold poker player; Mercer told him that he
could not recall ever having had a nightmare. But Mercer warms up when
talking about computers. In the 2014 speech, he recalled the first time he
used one, at a science camp, and likened the experience to falling in love.
He also spoke of the government lab in New Mexico. I loved the solitude of
the computer lab late at night, he said. I loved the air-conditioned smell
of the place. I loved the sound of the disks whirring and the printers
clacking. The speech lasted forty minutesmore than I typically talk in a
month, he noted.
Patterson told me that when Mercer arrived at Renaissance the firms
equities division was lagging behind other areas, such as futures trading.
Mercer and Brown applied their algorithms to equities trading. It took
several years, Patterson recalled, but the equities group eventually
accounted for the largest share of the Medallion Funds profits. Mercer and
Browns code took into account nearly every conceivable predictor of market
swings; their secret formula became so valuable that, when a pair of Russian
mathematicians at the firm tried to take the recipe elsewhere, the company
initiated legal action against them.
Renaissances profits were further enhanced by a controversial tax maneuver,
which became the subject of a 2014 Senate inquiry. According to Senate
investigators, Renaissance had presented countless short-term trades as
long-term ones, improperly avoiding some $6.8 billion in taxes. The Senate
didnt allege criminality, but it concluded that Renaissance had committed
abuses. The I.R.S. demanded payment. (Renaissance defended its practices,
and the matter remains contested, leaving a very sensitive material issue
pending before the Trump Administration.)
The Medallion Fund made Renaissance employees among the wealthiest people in
the country. Forbes estimates that Simons, who has the biggest share, is
worth eighteen billion dollars. In 2009, Simons stepped aside, to focus on
philanthropy, and named Mercer and Brown co-C.E.O.s. Institutional
Investors Alpha estimates that, in 2015, Mercer earned a hundred and
thirty-five million dollars at Renaissance.
Mercers fortune has allowed him and his family to indulge their wildest
material fantasies. He and Diana moved into a waterfront estate in Head of
the Harbor, a seaside community on Long Island, and called the property
Owls Nest. Mercer, a gun enthusiast, built a private pistol range there.
(He is also a part owner of Centre Firearms, a company that claims to have
the countrys largest private cache of machine guns, as well as a weapon
that Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in The Terminator.) At Owls Nest,
Mercer has installed a $2.7-million model-train set in his basement; trains
chug through a miniature landscape half the size of a basketball court. The
toy train attracted unwanted tabloid headlines, such as Boo-hoo over 2m
Choo-choo, after Mercer sued the manufacturer for overcharging him. (The
case was settled.)
Mercer retains a domestic staff that includes a butler and a physician; both
accompany him whenever he travels. But this, too, has sparked bad publicity.
In 2013, three members of the household staff sued to recover back wages,
claiming that Mercer had failed to pay overtime, as promised, and that he
had deducted pay as punishment for poor work. One infraction that Mercer
cited as a demerit was a failure to replace shampoo bottles that were
two-thirds empty. This suit, too, was settled.
Mercer has bought several spectacular yachts, including the Sea Owl, which
is two hundred and three feet long. A 2013 photo shows the gates of the
Tower Bridge, in London, raised high to allow it to proceed up the Thames.
The Sea Owl has a crew of eighteen, and features a hand-carved tree that
twists through four levels of decks. Designed, in part, as a place where the
extended Mercer family can gather, the yacht has many fanciful and didactic
touches for the Mercer grandchildren, such as frescoes that allude to the
discoveries of Darwin and Newton. Theres a self-playing Steinway, a spa
pool, and an elevator.
Mercer has given major credit to his family for the yachts special details,
telling Boat International that they are endowed with both exceptionally
good taste and exceptionally strong opinions. The Mercer daughters are
indeed forceful. When a Manhattan bakery that the sisters loved, Ruby et
Violette, threatened to close, depriving the Mercers of their favorite
cookies, they bought it. In a Fox News interview, Heather Sue recalled
telling the others, We are going to buy a bakery! The Mercers still own
the business, although it is now online-only.
After graduating from Duke, Heather Sue began competing in high-stakes poker
tournaments; she is admired on the circuit for her cool manner. When Mercer
insisted that Heather Sue take a security guard with her, Santavicca said,
they became friends, then they became whatever, and now theyre married,
with two beautiful daughters.
Jenji has a law degree from Georgetown, but she has pursued an interest in
horses instead. In 2008, the Mercers bought a horse farm in Wellington,
Florida, for $5.9 million. Jenji and Diana regularly attend the Winter
Equestrian Festival, in Palm Beach. They are investors in an equestrian
center in North Carolina, and have announced plans to open one in Colorado.
Diana is also listed as the owner of Equinimity, a horse stable in Florida.
According to the stables Web site, it specializes in Equine Facilitated
Learning, a system that teaches non-verbal leadership and interpersonal
communication skills through non-predatory horse-inspired wisdom.
Rebekah worked for a few years at Renaissance after graduating from
Stanford. A former colleague recalls her as smart but haughty. In 2003, she
married a Frenchman, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, who is a managing director of
Morgan Stanley. They had four children and bought a
twenty-eight-million-dollar propertysix apartments joined togetherat Trump
Place, on the Upper West Side. Now forty-three, she is divorcing
Mirochnikoff. She homeschools the children, but in recent years she has
become consumed by politics. She is the First Lady of the alt-right,
Christopher Ruddy, the owner of the conservative outlet Newsmax Media, said.
Shes respected in conservative circles, and clearly Trump has embraced her
in a big way.
Amity Shlaes, the conservative writer and the chair of the Calvin Coolidge
Presidential Foundation, where Rebekah Mercer is a trustee, told me, In the
dull crowds of policy, the Mercers are enchanting firecrackers. She likened
the Mercer sisters to the Schuylersthe high-spirited, witty sisters made
famous by the musical Hamilton. Shlaes went on, The Mercers have strong
values, theyre kind of funny, and theyre really bright. Their brains are
almost too strong. Rebekah, she noted, supports several think tanks, but
grows tired of talk; she is into action.
After the Citizens United decision, in 2010, the Mercers were among the
first people to take advantage of the opportunity to spend more money on
politics. In Oregon, they quietly gave money to a super PACan independent
campaign-related group that could now take unlimited donations. In New York,
reporters discovered that Robert Mercer was the sole donor behind a
million-dollar advertising campaign attacking what it described as a plan to
build a Ground Zero Mosque in Manhattan. The proposed building was neither
a mosque nor at Ground Zero. The ads, which were meant to boost a
Conservative Party candidate for governor, were condemned as Islamophobic.
In Oregon, the Mercers gave six hundred and forty thousand dollars to a
group that attacked Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, with a barrage
of negative ads during the final weeks of his 2010 reëlection campaign. This
effort also failedit didnt help when DeFazio announced that a New York
hedge-fund manager and his daughter were meddling in Oregon politics.
Press accounts speculated that Robert Mercer may have targeted DeFazio
because DeFazio had proposed a tax on a type of high-volume stock trade that
Renaissance frequently made. But several associates of Mercers say that the
truth is stranger. DeFazios Republican opponent was Arthur Robinsonthe
biochemist, sheep rancher, and climate-change denialist. The Mercers became
his devoted supporters after reading Access to Energy, an offbeat scientific
newsletter that he writes. The family has given at least $1.6 million in
donations to Robinsons Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Some of
the money was used to buy freezers in which Robinson is storing some
fourteen thousand samples of human urine. Robinson has said that, by
studying the urine, he will find new ways of extending the human life span.
Robinson holds a degree in chemistry from Caltech, but his work is not
respected in most scientific circles. (The Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, a
Democrat, has called Robinson an extremist kook.) Robinson appears to be
the source of Robert Mercers sanguine view of nuclear radiation: in 1986,
Robinson co-authored a book suggesting that the vast majority of Americans
would survive an all-out atomic attack on the United States. Robinsons
institute dismisses climate change as a false religion. A petition that he
organized in 1998 to oppose the Kyoto Protocol, claiming to represent thirty
thousand scientists skeptical of global warming, has been criticized as
deceptive. The National Academy of Sciences has warned that the petition
never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, though it is printed in a format
that is nearly identical to that of scientific articles. The petition,
however, still circulates online: in the past year, it was the most shared
item about climate change on Facebook.
Robinson, who calls himself a Jesus-plus-nothing-else Christian, has
become a hero to the religious right for homeschooling his six children.
Robert and Rebekah Mercer have praised a curriculum that Robinson sells. (An
advertisement for it casts doubt on evolution: No demonstration has ever
been made of the process of spontaneous origin of life. ) Robinson has
said that the socialist agenda of public schools is evil and represents
a form of child abuse.
Even though 2010 was a successful election year for Republicans, the
candidates that the Mercers had supported in Oregon and New York both lost
decisively. Their investments had achieved nothing. Wealthy political donors
sometimes make easy marks for campaign operatives. Patrick Caddell, the
former pollster, told me, These people who get so rich by running
businesses get so taken in when it comes to politics. Theyre just sheep.
The consultants suck it out of them. A lot of them are surrounded by palace
guards, but thats not true of the Mercers.
By 2011, the Mercers had joined forces with Charles and David Koch, who own
Koch Industries, and who have run a powerful political machine for decades.
The Mercers attended the Kochs semiannual seminars, which provide a
structure for right-wing millionaires looking for effective ways to channel
their cash. The Mercers admired the savviness of the Kochs plan, which
called for attendees to pool their contributions in a fund run by Koch
operatives. The fund would strategically deploy the money in races across
the country, although, at the time, the Kochs chief aim was to defeat
Barack Obama in 2012. The Kochs will not reveal the identities of their
donors, or the size of contributions, but the Mercers reportedly began
giving at least a million dollars a year to the Kochs fund. Eventually,
they contributed more than twenty-five million.
The Mercers also joined the Council for National Policy, which the Times has
described as a little-known club of a few hundred of the most powerful
conservatives in the country. The Mercers have contributed hundreds of
thousands of dollars. The group swears participants to secrecy. But a leaked
2014 roster revealed that it included many people who promoted anti-Clinton
conspiracy stories, including Joseph Farah, the editor of WorldNetDaily. The
group also brought the Mercers into the orbit of two people who have become
key figures in the Trump White House: Kellyanne Conway, who was on the
groups executive committee, and Steve Bannon.
In 2011, the Mercers met Andrew Breitbart, the founder of the fiery news
outlet that bears his name, at a conference organized by the Club for
Growth, a conservative group. They were so impressed by him that they became
interested in investing in his operation. Breitbart, a gleefully offensive
provocateur, was the temperamental opposite of Robert Mercer. (In 2010,
Breitbart told this magazine, I like to call someone a raving cunt every
now and then, when its appropriate, for effect.) Nevertheless, the Mercers
were attracted to Breitbarts vision of taking back the culture by
building a media enterprise that could wage information warfare against the
mainstream press, empowering what Breitbart called the silenced majority.
Breitbart soon introduced the Mercers to Steve Bannon. For a while,
Breitbart News operated out of office space that Bannon owned in Santa
Monica. A Harvard Business School graduate, Bannon had worked at Goldman
Sachs, but he eventually left the world of finance and began making
political films. His ambition, apparently, was to become the Michael Moore
of the right. In the aughts, he directed polemical documentaries, among them
Fire from the Heartland and District of Corruption. A former associate
of Bannons in California recalls him as a strategic thinker who was adept
at manipulating the media. A voracious reader, he was quick and charming,
but, according to the former associate, he had a chip on his shoulder about
class. He often spoke of having grown up in a blue-collar Irish Catholic
family in Richmond, Virginia, and of having served as a naval officer when
he was young. Bannon seemed to feel excluded from the social world of Wall
Street peers who had attended prep schools. He had left Goldman Sachs, in
1990, without making partner, and, though he was well off, he had missed out
on the gigantic profits that partners had made when the company went public,
in 1999.
In 2011, Bannon drafted a business plan for the Mercers that called for them
to invest ten million dollars in Breitbart News, in exchange for a large
stake. At the time, the Breitbart site was little more than a collection of
blogs. The Mercers signed the deal that June, and one of its provisions
placed Bannon on the companys board.
Nine months later, Andrew Breitbart died, at forty-three, of a heart attack,
and Bannon became the sites executive chairman, overseeing its content. The
Mercers, meanwhile, became Bannons principal patrons. The Washington Post
recently published a house-rental lease that Bannon signed in 2013, on which
he said that his salary at Breitbart News was seven hundred and fifty
thousand dollars.
Under Bannons leadership, the Web site expanded dramatically, adding a
fleet of full-time writers. It became a new force on the right, boosting
extreme insurgents against the G.O.P. establishment, such as David Brat,
who, in 2014, took the seat of Eric Cantor, the Virginia congressman. But it
also provided a public forum for previously shunned white-nationalist,
sexist, and racist voices. One pundit hired by Bannon was Milo Yiannopoulos,
who specialized in puerile insults. (He recently resigned from the site,
after a video of him lewdly defending pederasty went viral.)
In 2014, Bannon began hosting a radio show that often featured Patrick
Caddell, who effectively had been banished by Democratic Party leaders after
years of tempestuous campaigns and fallings-out. On the air, Caddell floated
dark theories about Hillary Clinton, and often sounded a lot like Bannon,
describing economic nationalism as the driving force in American politics.
Under Barack Obama, he said, America had turned into a banana republic.
By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on
Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors
could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbarts content. An
insider there said, She reads every story, and calls when there are
grammatical errors or typos. Though she doesnt dictate a political line to
the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require
more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the
Republican leadership, are scathing. She was at the avant-garde of
shuttering both political parties, the insider at Breitbart said. She went
a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.
The Mercers investment in Breitbart enabled Bannon to promote
anti-establishment politicians whom the mainstream media dismissed,
including Trump. In 2011, David Bossie, the head of the conservative group
Citizens United, introduced Trump to Bannon; at the time, Trump was thinking
about running against Obama. Bannon and Trump met at Trump Tower and
discussed a possible campaign. Trump decided against the idea, but the two
kept in touch, and Bannon gave Trump admiring coverage. Bannon noticed that,
when Trump spoke to crowds, people were electrified. Bannon began to think
that Trump might be the one who could shake up American politics.
Breitbart gave Trump a big role, Sam Nunberg, the aide who worked on the
early stages of Trumps campaign, has said. They gave us an outlet. No one
else would. It allowed us to define our narrative and communicate our
message. It really started with the birther thingTrumps false claim that
Obama was not born an American citizenand then immigration, and Iran.
Trump was developing his message. By 2013, Nunberg said, Trump, like others
on Breitbart, was hitting the establishment by slamming the Republican
leadership in Congress, including Paul Ryan. Nunberg added, It wasnt like
Charlie Rose was asking us on.
The Mercer Family Foundation kept expanding its political investments.
Between 2011 and 2014, it gave nearly eleven million dollars to the Media
Research Center, an advocacy group whose sole mission, according to its
Web site, is to expose and neutralize the propaganda arm of the Left: the
national news media. The groups founder, L. Brent Bozell III, is best
known for his successful campaign to get CBS sanctioned for showing Janet
Jacksons bared breast during the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast. The Mercers
have been among the M.R.C.s biggest donors, and their money has allowed the
group to revamp its news site, and it now claims to reach more than two
hundred million Americans a week.
In 2012, the Mercer Family Foundation donated two million dollars to
Citizens United, which had trafficked in Clinton hatred for years. During
the Clinton Administration, David Bossie, the groups leader, was a
Republican congressional aide, and he was forced to resign after releasing
misleading material about a Clinton associate. In 2008, Citizens United
released a vitriolic film, Hillary: The Movie. Two years ago, after the
group received an additional five hundred and fifty thousand dollars from
the Mercers foundation, it filed a Freedom of Information Act request
demanding access to Hillary Clintons State Department e-mails. When the
e-mails were released, her Presidential campaign became mired in negative
news stories.
Bannon has often collaborated with Bossie, producing half a dozen films with
him. In 2012, Bossie suggested a new joint project: a movie that urged
Democrats and independents to abandon Obama in the Presidential election.
The films approach was influenced by polling work that Patrick Caddell had
shared with Bannon. The data suggested that attacking Obama was
counterproductive; it was more effective to express disappointment in him,
by contrasting him with earlier Presidents.
Caddell and Bannon made an unholy alliance, but they had things in common:
both men were Irish Catholic sons of the South, scourges to their respective
parties, and prone to apocalyptic pronouncements. We hit it off right
away, Caddell told me. Were both revolutionaries. Bannon was excited by
Caddells polling research, and he persuaded Citizens United to hire Caddell
to convene focus groups of disillusioned Obama supporters. Many of these
voters became the central figures of The Hope & the Change, an anti-Obama
film that Bannon and Citizens United released during the 2012 Democratic
National Convention. After Caddell saw the film, he pointed out to Bannon
that its opening imitated that of Triumph of the Will, the 1935 ode to
Hitler, made by the Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Bannon laughed and
said, Youre the only one that caught it! In both films, a plane flies
over a blighted land, as ominous music swells; then clouds in the sky part,
auguring a new era. The disappointed voters in the film seared into me,
Bannon said, the fact that middle-class Americans badly wanted change, and
could be lured away from the Democratic Party if they felt that they had
been conned.
In 2012, Citizens Uniteds foundation paid Bannon Strategic Advisors, a
consultancy group founded by Bannon, three hundred thousand dollars for what
it described to the I.R.S. as fund-raising services. Bossie told me that
the tax filing must have been made in error: the payment was actually for
Bannons film development work. Charitable groups are barred from spending
tax-deductible contributions on partisan politics, yet, as Breitbart News
noted at the time, The Hope & the Change was a partisan film targeting
Democrats during an election year. Even so, the Mercers took a hefty tax
deduction for their two-million-dollar donation to Citizens United.
Bossie told me that the Mercers are very interested in films. Indeed,
Rebekah Mercer is on the board of the Moving Picture Institute, a
conservative group devoted to countering Hollywood liberalism with original
online entertainment. Among its recent projects was a cartoon, Everyone
Coughs, which spread the rumor that Hillary Clinton was mortally ill. The
film ended by depicting an animated Clinton literally coughing herself to
death.
On Election Night in 2012, the Mercers and other top conservative donors
settled into the V.I.P. section of a Republican Party victory celebration,
having been assured that their investments would pay off. Obamas defeat of
Mitt Romney particularly infuriated Rebekah Mercer, who concluded that the
pollsters, the data crunchers, and the spin doctors were all frauds. Soon
afterward, Republican Party officials invited big donors to the University
Club, in New York, for a postmortem on the election. Attendees were stunned
when Rebekah Mercer ripped the shit out of them, a friend of hers told me,
adding, It was really her coming out. As the Financial Times has reported,
from that point on Mercer wanted to know exactly how her donations were
being spent, and wanted to invest only in what another friend described as
things that she thinks put lead on the target.
That year, Rebekah Mercer joined the board of the Government Accountability
Institute, a nonprofit group, based in Tallahassee, which Bannon had
recently founded. In 2013, the Mercer Family Foundation contributed a
million dollars to the institute, and in 2014 it contributed another
million. In 2015, it donated $1.7 million, which exceeded the groups entire
budget the previous year. The G.A.I., meanwhile, paid Bannon three hundred
and seventy-six thousand dollars during its first four years; it told the
I.R.S. that Bannon was working for it thirty hours a week, ostensibly on top
of his full-time job running Breitbart News.
The G.A.I. billed itself as a nonpartisan research institute, but in 2015
Bannon told Bloomberg Businessweek that its mission was to dig up dirt on
politicians and feed it to the mainstream media. (A G.A.I. staffer called
this weaponizing information.) The group reportedly hired an expert to
comb the Deep Websites that dont show up in standard searchesfor
incriminating information about its targets. The plan was to exploit the
mainstream medias growing inability to finance investigative reporting by
doing it for them. The strategy paid off spectacularly in April, 2015, when
the Times ran a front-page article based on the book Clinton Cash, a
compendium of corruption allegations against the Clintons, which was written
by the G.A.I.s president, the conservative writer Peter Schweizer. (The
G.A.I. had given the paper an advance copy.) The book triggered one story
after another about Hillary Clintons supposed criminality, and became a
best-seller. In 2016, a film version, co-produced by Bannon and Rebekah
Mercer, débuted at the Cannes Film Festival, as the Mercers yacht bobbed
offshore.
The G.A.I. also undermined Jeb Bush, the candidate favored by the Republican
establishment, with another Schweizer book, Bush Bucks. As Bannon put it
in a 2015 interview, it depicted Bush as a figure of grimy, low-energy
crony capitalism.
During this period, the Mercers continued giving money to election
campaigns. In 2014, Robert Mercer made a two-and-a-half-million-dollar
contribution to the Kochs Freedom Partners Action Fund. This exceeded the
two-million-dollar contributions of David and Charles Koch, prompting a
memorable headline about Mercer from Bloomberg News: The Man Who Out-koched
the Kochs.
Rebekah Mercer, meanwhile, was growing impatient with the Kochs. She felt
that they needed to investigate why their network had failed to defeat Obama
in 2012. Instead, the Kochs gathered donors and presented them with more
empty rhetoric. Mercer demanded an accounting of what had gone wrong, and
when they ignored her she decided to start her own operation. In a further
blow, Mercer soured several other top donors on the Kochs.
In 2012, one area in which the Republicans had lagged badly behind the
Democrats was in the use of digital analytics. The Mercers decided to
finance their own big-data project. In 2014, Michal Kosinski, a researcher
in the psychology department at the University of Cambridge, was working in
the emerging field of psychometrics, the quantitative study of human
characteristics. He learned from a colleague that a British company,
Strategic Communication Laboratories, wanted to hire academics to pursue
similar research, for commercial purposes. Kosinski had circulated
personality tests on Facebook and, in the process, obtained huge amounts of
information about users. From this data, algorithms could be fashioned that
would predict peoples behavior and anticipate their reactions to other
online prompts. Those who took the Facebook quizzes, however, had been
promised that the information would be used strictly for academic purposes.
Kosinski felt that repurposing it for commercial use was unethical, and
possibly illegal. His concerns deepened when he researched S.C.L. He was
disturbed to learn that the company specialized in psychological warfare,
and in influencing elections. He spurned the chance to work with S.C.L.,
although his colleague signed a contract with the company.
Kosinski was further disconcerted when he learned that a new American
affiliate of S.C.L., Cambridge Analyticaowned principally by an American
hedge-fund tycoon named Robert Mercerwas attempting to influence elections
in the U.S. Kosinski, who is now an assistant professor of organizational
behavior at Stanfords business school, supports the idea of using
psychometric data to nudge people toward socially positive behavior, such
as voting. But, he told me, theres a thin line between convincing people
and manipulating them.
It is unclear if the Mercers have pushed Cambridge Analytica to cross that
line. A company spokesman declined to comment for this story. What is clear
is that Mercer, having revolutionized the use of data on Wall Street, was
eager to accomplish the same feat in the political realm. He screened many
data-mining companies before investing, and he chose Cambridge Analytica, in
part, because its high concentration of accomplished scientists reminded him
of Renaissance Technologies. Rebekah Mercer, too, has been deeply involved
in the venture. Cambridge Analytica shares a corporate address in Manhattan
with a group she chairs, Reclaim New York, which opposes government
spending. (Bannon has reportedly served as a corporate officer for both
Reclaim and Cambridge Analytica.)
Political scientists and consultants continue to debate Cambridge
Analyticas record in the 2016 campaign. David Karpf, an assistant professor
at George Washington University who studies the political use of data, calls
the firms claim to have special psychometric powers a marketing pitch
thats untrue. Karpf worries, though, that the company could take a very
dark turn. He explained, What they could do is set up a MoveOn-style
operation with a Tea Party-ish list that they could whip up. Typically,
lists like that are used to pressure elected officials, but the dangerous
thing would be if it was used instead to pressure fellow-citizens. It could
encourage vigilantism. Karpf said of Cambridge Analytica, There is a
maximalist scenario in which we should be terrified to have a tool like this
in private hands.
Cambridge Analytica is not the only data-driven political project that the
Mercers have backed. In 2013, at a conservative conference in Palm Beach, an
oil tycoon named William Lee Hanley, who had commissioned some polls from
Patrick Caddell, asked him to show the data to Mercer and Bannon, who were
at the event. The data showed mounting anger toward wealthy élites, who many
Americans believed had corrupted the government so that it served only their
interests. There was a hunger for a populist Presidential candidate who
would run against the major political parties and the ruling class. The data
showed that someone could just walk into this election and sweep it,
Caddell told me. When Mercer saw the numbers, he asked for the polling to be
repeated. Caddell got the same results. It was stunning, he said. The
country was on the verge of an uprising against its leaders. I just fell
over!
Until Election Day in 2016, Mercer and Hanleytwo of the richest men in
Americapaid Caddell to keep collecting polling data that enabled them to
exploit the publics resentment of élites such as themselves. Caddells
original goal was to persuade his sponsors to back an independent candidate,
but they never did. In 2014, Caddell and two partners went public with what
they called the Candidate Smith project, which promoted data suggesting that
the public wanted a Mr. Smith Goes to Washington figurean outsideras
President. During the next year or so, Caddells poll numbers tilted more
and more away from the establishment. Caddells partner Bob Perkins, an
advertising executive and a former finance director of the Republican Party,
told me, By then, it was clear there wouldnt be a third-party candidate.
But we thought that a Republican who harnessed the angst had a real chance.
At one point, Caddell tested all the declared Presidential candidates,
including Trump, as a possible Mr. Smith. People didnt think Trump had the
temperament to be President, Caddell said. He clearly wasnt the best
Smith, but he was the only Smith. He was the only one with the resources and
the name recognition. As Bernie Sanderss campaign showed, the populist
rebellion wasnt partisan. Caddell worried, though, that there were dark
undertones in the numbers: Americans were increasingly yearning for a
strong man to fix the country.
Caddell circulated his research to anyone who would listen, and that
included people inside the Trump campaign. Pat Caddell is like an Old
Testament prophet, Bannon said. Hes been talking about alienation of the
voters for twenty-five years, and people didnt pay attentionbut hes a
brilliant guy, and he nailed it. The political consultant and strategist
Roger Stone, who is a longtime Trump confidant, was fascinated by the
research, and he forwarded a memo about it to Trump. Caddell said that he
spoke with Trump about some of the data, but noted, With Trump, its all
instincthe is not exactly a deep-dive thinker.
Robert Mercer, too, was kept informed. Perkins said, He just loves the
numbers. Most people say, Tell me what you thinkdont show me the
numbers. But hes, like, Give me the numbers!
During the 2016 campaign, as the Mercers considered which Presidential
candidate to back, they rejected insiders such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio,
who they believed couldnt win. They initially gravitated toward Ted Cruz,
in part because he was an outsider in the Senateloathed by even his
Republican peers. During the primaries, the Mercers gave eleven million
dollars to a super PAC supporting Cruz, run by Kellyanne Conway. According
to Politico, Rebekah Mercer soon wore out her welcome with the Cruz
campaign by offering withering appraisals of his debate performances. She
also insisted that the campaign hire Cambridge Analytica, even though Cruz
campaign officials were skeptical of it.
After Cruz dropped out, many Republicansincluding Cruz himselfrecoiled
from Trump. The Mercers, however, joined the Trump camp, and publicly
rebuked Cruz, giving a statement to the Times. If Clinton won, the Mercers
claimed, she would repeal both the First and Second Amendments of the Bill
of Rights. Given the stakes, they said, all hands were needed on deck
in order to insure a Trump victory. Cruz, they noted, had chosen to stay in
his bunk below.
The Mercers redirected their Cruz super PAC to support Trump, and gave two
million dollars to it. According to one Trump adviser, there were strings
attached to the donation. He says that, two weeks before Cruz dropped out,
Bannon urged the Trump campaign to talk to Alexander Nix, Cambridge
Analyticas C.E.O., about hiring the company. (The previous year, the Trump
campaign had rebuffed a pitch from the firm.) The adviser said that Nix
followed up and offered cash inducements, in the form of a finders fee,
to a Trump operative. (A Cambridge Analytica spokesman denied that this
occurred.) Paul Manafort, Trumps campaign manager at the time, said that he
knew nothing of Nixs cash offer but gave Cambridge Analytica a limited
contract, though he didnt see the need, in deference to the Mercers.
Later that summer, Manafort was forced to resign, after the press reported
his links to Ukrainian oligarchs. In the vacuum, the Mercers soon
established control over the Trump campaign. Rebekah Mercer successfully
pushed for a staff shakeup that led to the promotions of three people funded
by the family: Bannon became the campaigns C.E.O., Conway its manager, and
Bossie its deputy manager. William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly
Standard and an adamant Trump opponent, warned, Its the merger of the
Trump campaign with the kooky right. But an e-mail that Bannon sent to a
friend in 2015, and that was later leaked to the Daily Beast, confirms that
the elevation of the Mercers and their operatives was, in many ways, a
formality. A year before Bannon joined Trumps campaign staff, he described
himself in the e-mail as Trumps de-facto campaign manager, because of the
positive coverage that Breitbart was giving Trump. That coverage had largely
been underwritten by the Mercers.
Brendan Fischer, a lawyer at the Campaign Legal Center, said that the
Mercers financial entanglement with the Trump campaign was bizarre and
potentially illegal. The group has filed a complaint with the Federal
Election Commission, which notes that, at the end of the 2016 campaign, the
super PAC run by the Mercers paid Glittering Steela film-production company
that shares an address in Los Angeles with Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart
Newstwo hundred and eighty thousand dollars, supposedly for campaign ads
attacking Hillary Clinton. Although Bannon was running Trumps campaign,
Fischer said that it appears to have paid him nothing. Meanwhile, the
Mercers super PAC made a payment of about five million dollars to Cambridge
Analytica, which was incorporated at the same address as Bannon Strategic
Advisors. Super PACs are legally required to stay independent of a
candidates campaign. But, Fischer said, it raises the possibility of the
Mercers subsidizing Steve Bannons work for the Trump campaign.
On December 3rd, the Mercer family hosted a victory celebration at Owls
Nesta costume party with a heroes-and-villains theme. Rebekah Mercer
welcomed several hundred guests, including Donald Trump. In extemporaneous
remarks, Trump thanked the Mercers, saying that they had been instrumental
in bringing some organization to his campaign. He specifically named
Bannon, Conway, and Bossie. Trump then joked that hed just had the longest
conversation of his life with Bob Mercerand it was just two words. A
guest at the party told me, I was looking around the room, and I thought,
No doubt about itthe people whom the Mercers invested in, my comrades, are
now in charge.
After the election, Rebekah Mercer was rewarded with a seat on Trumps
transition team. She basically bought herself a seat, Fischer said. She
had strong feelings about who should be nominated to Cabinet positions and
other top government jobs. Not all her ideas were embraced. She
unsuccessfully pushed for John Bolton, the hawkish former Ambassador to the
United Nations, to be named Secretary of State. So far, her suggestion that
Arthur Robinson, the Oregon biochemist, be named the national science
adviser has gone nowhere. Like her father, she advocates a return to the
gold standard, but as of yet she has failed to get Trump to appoint
officials who share this view.
Still, Mercer made her influence felt. Her pick for national-security
adviser was Michael Flynn, and Trump chose him for the job. (Flynn lasted
only a month, after he lied about having spoken with the Russian Ambassador
before taking office.) More important, several people to whom Mercer is very
closeincluding Bannon and Conwayhave become some of the most powerful
figures in the world.
Rebekahs father, meanwhile, can no longer be considered a political
outsider. David Magerman, in his essay for the Inquirer, notes that Mercer
has surrounded our President with his people, and his people have an
outsized influence over the running of our country, simply because Robert
Mercer paid for their seats. He writes, Everyone has a right to express
their views. But, he adds, when the government becomes more like a
corporation, with the richest 0.001% buying shares and demanding board
seats, then we cease to be a representative democracy. Instead, he warns,
we become an oligarchy.
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