“What a Mess!”: Charles Koch Regrets Funding the Tea Party Movement Because It May Have Fueled the Rise of Donald Trump
Evan James
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Libertarian “conservative” mega donor Charles Koch has expressed regret over funding the Tea Party movement. He claims that in addition to failing to reduce the national debt, it helped usher in an era of extreme partisanship that has culminated in the presidency of Donald Trump.
Koch expressed these sentiments in a forthcoming book co-written with Brian Hooks titled Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World.
“Boy, did we screw up!” Koch wrote. “What a mess!”
His and his late brother David’s decision to pour money into the Tea Party movement was because “we shared their concern about unsustainable government spending,” said Koch in an email to the Wall Street Journal. But now he regrets it because government spending has increased even more and, in his view, the Tea Party deepened the ideological divide between Democrats and Republicans.
In an effort to shed his “partisanship,” Koch is trying to work with Democrats on issues like immigration, criminal justice reform, and foreign policy—though he still does give overwhelmingly to Republicans.
The Wall Street Journal describes Koch’s book overall as “part mea culpa, part self-help guide and part road map toward a libertarian America. Along the way, the book traces Mr. Koch’s life from hardheaded adolescent to student, engineer, industrialist, tycoon and political mastermind. The book suggests that he wants to add one final act: philosopher and, he hopes, unifier.”
Big League Politics has written much about the Koch Network in the past.
Koch is a globalist trying to play both sides of the aisle, and his vision of America is most definitely not a conservative one. These are not times to abandon “partisanship,” but to dig in and fight against globalism and the radical left.
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