#Charles #Koch, perhaps the most legendary Republican financier of recent decades,
has never backed Trump, either.

The political network affiliated with him and his late brother #David remained officially neutral in the Presidential races of 2016 and 2020,
and spent tens of millions of dollars trying to defeat Trump in this year’s Republican primaries,
-- much of it supporting Haley.

When she dropped out, the Koch network concentrated on down-ballot races.

But Kochworld, like the Republican Party more broadly, remains divided.

“There are a lot of donors in that network lobbying Charles from the perspective of,
I know you don’t like him,
but he’s better than the alternative,”
Marc Short, who worked for a Koch-affiliated group
and later served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said.

Nevertheless, neither Koch nor Pence is supporting Trump this fall
—a remarkable rift, given the role that each of them has played in Republican politics.

At the same time, Trump has cultivated a new group of what might be called #maga #megadonors.

A study conducted for The New Yorker by the campaign-finance expert Robert Maguire,
of the nonprofit good-government group #crew,
found that, as of this summer,
more than forty of the G.O.P.’s biggest super-pac donors during Romney’s 2012 campaign had never given to a pro-Trump super pac,
including Oracle’s co-founder #Larry #Ellison,
the Dallas real-estate tycoon #Harlan #Crow,
and the hotel magnate J. W. #Marriott, Jr.

Meanwhile, nearly sixty pro-Trump donors in the study,
including #Lutnick, #Mellon, #Perlmutter, and the Wisconsin shipping magnates #Richard and #Elizabeth #Uihlein, had given nothing to the pro-Romney super pac.

Others have significantly increased their giving.

The #Adelsons, for example, donated $53 million to the pro-Romney super pac in 2012 and $90 million to support Trump in 2020,
when they were the largest individual donors of the cycle.

By the end of September, Miriam Adelson had given $100 million to back Trump in 2024.

With such sums at stake, Trump has pursued what the former Bush Pioneer called a “high touch” approach to the Republican billionaire class.

The ex-President has all but invited donors to view their contributions as business investments,
telling oil-and-gas executives who went to see him in April at Mar-a-Lago, for example, that,
because he would allow unrestricted drilling,
they should raise $1 billion for his campaign
—a statement redolent of Sondland’s “quid pro quo” that soon leaked to the Washington Post.

The campaign’s strategy, another longtime fund-raiser told me,
was essentially to let Trump be Trump:

“He talks the same book to everybody.”

Oliver, the former Bush finance director, observed that the difference between the model of the Bush campaigns and Trump’s is the difference between having a large pool of “institutional investors” which had been built up in the course of years, and a series of ad-hoc “transactional” dealings with a relatively small group of the ultra-rich.

Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton University, offered another key distinction. Trump’s billionaires—many of whom have made their fortunes as hedge-fund managers, activist investors, and corporate raiders—tend to be highly motivated ideologues and individual operators. “It’s transactional, but their end of the bargain is a lot different than just having access to the President of the United States,” Wilentz told me. “They see Trump as their instrument. This is an investment for them to take power.” Wilentz noted that, unlike the “traditional corporate conservative élite” dating back to the Gilded Age, this new “class of the super-rich” appears both more numerous and less civic-minded. “The other guys might have been robber barons,” Wilentz said. “These guys are oligarchs.”

Backed by a cabal of wealthy conservative patrons like industrialist #David #Koch,
banker #Richard #Mellon #Scaife,
and the devout Catholic entrepreneur #Frank #Hanna,
the Federalist Society under Leo became a breeding ground for conservative judges who were recruited at law school,
groomed through the society’s program of events and talks,
and then bound together through their careers.

“The key was to figure out how to develop what I call a ‘pipeline’
— basically, where you recruit students in law school,
you get them through law school,
they come out of law school,
and then you find ways of continuing to involve them in legal policy,” Leo later explained.

In 2005, the Federalist Society began openly advocating for #John #Roberts
— a former member
— to be nominated to fill a vacant seat at the Supreme Court,
the first time it had campaigned publicly for a particular candidate.

A few months later, its sway had grown so much that it torpedoed President George W. Bush’s own preferred candidate for another vacant seat on the Supreme Court
— #Harriet #Miers, a judge and close friend of the president who wasn’t a member of the Federalist Society
— and pressured him to nominate #Samuel #Alito, one of its members, in her place.

Leo worked closely with the "Judicial Confirmation Network",
a new nonprofit organization set up using funds from #Robin #Arkley, a California businessman known as the
“foreclosure king,” who had made billions buying up mortgages of people in financial difficulties.

The idea for #JCN had been hatched at a dinner in Washington attended by Leo and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia shortly after Bush’s reelection in late 2004.

JCN spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on radio and online advertisement to shape public opinion.

It was run by #Neil and #Ann #Corkery, a couple who had been members of #Opus #Dei since at least the eighties.

Neil had been a critical figure in getting a new residence for male, celibate members of the Catholic movement built in Reston, Virginia.

“Opus Dei members preach their faith through their work as well as the friendships they develop,” Ann explained.

She and her husband would later preach their faith by becoming central figures in a series of nonprofits that would channel dark money for Leo’s efforts.