The Koch brothers are signaling their political machine will work to nominate someone other than Donald Trump for the GOP 2024 nomination.
The Koch political machine, which fuels the most powerful donor network in conservative politics, is declaring itself as part of the NeverTrump effort for 2024, aiming to deny former President Donald Trump a third nomination for the White House.
The declaration, released in a recent memo to staffers and activists, never explicitly mentions Trump, but it’s abundantly clear from the tone in Americans for Prosperity CEO Emily Seidel’s message that the grassroots behemoth she leads has no plans of being a passive player in Republican politics when it comes to the White House. “Our country must move past the current political situation—we’ve got to turn the page on the past several years,” she wrote. “If we want to elect better people, we need better candidates. And if we want better candidates, we’ve got to get involved in elections earlier and in more primaries.”
But, in the intervening time, many of the Trump apologists in the Koch orbit have soured on the ex-President. The deadly Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, was a last straw for many, and the threat posed by a leader without respect for the rule of law—a key tenant for the free-market donors central to the Koch orbit—was too much to ignore. So, heading into the early days of the 2024 jockeying, it’s clear that the massive vault of cash controlled by these groups is up for grabs. It alone won’t be enough to win anyone the nomination—and maybe not enough to deny it to Trump—but it’s a force that doesn’t have a peer.
