Friday, September 30, 2016

How a Reclusive Hedge-Fund Boss and His Daughter Are Reshaping the Republican Party

 
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When Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination in Cleveland, some of the most powerful people in the party had a ticket to watch from Suite 245 in Quicken Loans Arena. Invited to the cushy skybox were financiers, real estate developers, a supermarket magnate and an ambassador. Hardly anyone knew it at the time, but the list also included a pair of political insiders who would soon take control of the Trump campaign: Kellyanne Conway, a consultant who had spent the GOP primary toiling for his top rival, and Steve Bannon, the boss of Breitbart News. Both were guests of a woman named Rebekah Mercer.

Bannon and Conway are hardly the only Republicans who rely on Mercer as a benefactor. To help pay for the convention, the family foundation Mercer runs wrote a $500,000 check–pocket change compared with the tens of millions of dollars it has showered on a sprawling web of conservative foundations, political networks and research institutions. That’s not counting the family’s reputed eight-figure investment in Breitbart, the house organ of the right-wing populist movement that fueled Trump’s ascent, and in Cambridge Analytica, a controversial data firm hired by a growing number of GOP candidates. Rebekah’s father Robert Mercer, a New York hedge-fund executive, has forked over more than $20 million in the 2016 election, which makes him the single largest Republican donor this cycle. Before the Mercers backed Trump, they bankrolled Texas Senator Ted Cruz through a family super PAC that employed Conway. 

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Source: Time Magazine

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