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Just when we thought Agent Orange couldn’t sink any lower, he’s plummeted to new depths. While the White House flag was lowered to half staff over the weekend, Trump ordered it raised on his return from whichever private club he was publicizing last weekend. John McCain was a hero, whether one agrees with him or not. He served the country, first in war and then for decades as a Senator. One may not have agreed with his views, but he held them in earnest. He was one of few politicians who acknowledged their mistakes.

45 seems to love the Stars and Stripes as a weapon for his own petty vengeance. He has never once defended it, unlike John McCain who laid his life on the line and suffered in a prisoner of war camp for 5 long years, surviving with physical damage that lasted him a lifetime. The BullyPresident has nuzzled a flagpole, but its symbolism seems to have eluded him. Instead, he favors its use as a spear to be chucked at Black football players or war heros who just happen to be among his critics. That’s a stunning image: Donald Trump as spear chucker with a loin cloth draped over his balls now shrivelled back up into his pelvis!

One might suspect Trump is just plain jealous of the man and the accolades that have come pouring in. He has refused to speak McCain’s name, first in the ceremony for a military bill that bore his name. He refused to make a statement that was already written after McCain died, preferring instead to tweet condolences to the family. He refused to answer questions from the press. Sure, he’s probably miffed that McCain disinvited him from his funeral, while asking Barack to speak-ooh, that’s gotta sting. But then again, the CelebrityPresident hasn’t attended any funerals, always deferring to Mike Pence. He’s probably a little skittish about the thought of coffins in his not too distant future.

Still, he is our president who is supposed to be bigger than that. He never fails to disappoint in ways that one could never imagine. He represents the nation or the office is supposed to. It’s safe to say that he hasn’t before and clearly he can’t. Trump can’t stand for anything larger than himself. Alas, he is but a dwarf, meant in the politically incorrect way.

This just in: a swarm of advisors must have besieged the BullyPresident to relent and lower the flag by Monday afternoon. They probably found that it wasn’t playing well with the base or simply that it made him look so-o-o trifling. So 45 fell in line and signed the proclamation to fly flags at half staff for the next week. But the need to be convinced exposes his true self and he doesn’t get any credit for the do-over.

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Agent Orange has no legitimate claim to wave the American flag. He can speechify that everyone must stand for the national anthem, but he doesn’t himself know the words, as he demonstrated at a couple of events. Instead, he has weaponized the flag in service of the very causes it shouldn’t represent. It shouldn’t be used to denigrate fallen heroes. It shouldn’t represent racism and oppression, but it has and will continue to in the hands of the current administration and their supporters.

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BOOM! From the moment Michael Cohen plead guilty to inappropriate campaign contributions and named the president as the man who ordered him to do it, Agent Orange became an unindicted co-conspirator. Any other person named would been indicted for that, but the Oval Office stands between him and an orange jumpsuit. The minions have already mobilized to question whether it is indeed a campaign contribution to bribe your mistresses into silence. One former prosecutor even suggested that if the money had another purpose outside the campaign, the law did not  apply. Wanting to spare one’s wife automatically buys a pass.  How are any of us to know if we’re not legal experts in campaign laws? Still, the prevailing wind in the Justice Department is that a sitting president can not be indicted, although this is still up for debate in legal circles as well. Mueller for his part is a true believer, so the best he can do is deliver his report to the Justice Department and then to Congress or not, because that isn’t clear either.

The administration’s response is on rewind, TheCelebrityPresident is unconcerned that his long time personal attorney/bagman lied about Trump’s role in order to implicate him in Cohen’s personal crimes. 45 did nothing wrong, and never has. He hasn’t put forward contradictory statements/tweets. And as with all things Mueller related, NO COLLUSION! is mixed in whenever possible. Do they see this development as dangerous? No, they are in a constant state of denial that the rule of law will finally ensnare him. He is rendered bulletproof by the Trumpophants and the GOP. And so far, they seem to be right.

However, no collusion is simply not true. Donald Jr by his own admission, colluded. Not in any of the statements carefully overseen by his dad. But a series of emails present a clear case. Junior knew the people he was meeting at Trump Tower were Russian agents and that Russia wanted his father to win. Not only that, but in emails after the meeting, he relished the release of emails related to the Clinton campaign. Then clearly he tried to cover it up, because he knew it could be politically unsavory, without any indication, even today, that he knew it was wrong. The emails must be true, because Donald Jr released them himself.

Still we are early days. We have no idea what information Mueller has or how he’s building his case or what new witnesses, many of whom we probably don’t yet know, have or will say. But in the tornado that surrounds 45, there appears to be little that can break through the madness. Fox News did not run the Cohen or Manafort stories as leads. Granted, they had to marshall their retorts but editorially, they didn’t want to make it appear important. Their viewership inhabits their space and will follow their Pied Pipers anywhere.

Will Agent Orange finally dawn that color coordinated jumpsuit? The overall probability that a rich white man with political power will go to jail in this country is pretty low, even in the face of the MIchael Cohen, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates convictions. They’ve not yet been sentenced. And one with the full power of the federal government behind him, it’s never happened. Wow, the momentary lift of yesterday’s cases has already faded.

The idea that white supremacists would mass in a park across the street from the White House was ludicrous on the face of it. The permit was only for 400 and attendance was one tenth of that. In a city with presidential level security, like snipers perched on the roof of the White House and surrounding buildings, the militias, Nazis and sundry white supremacists would not have that visual presence, dramatized by AKs, and military grade weapons. With security cameras concentrated on the site, they couldn’t march barefaced and proud. That was all in the past. They chose Charlottesville last year, for its open carry gun laws and a mayor primed to let his police stand by and watch people being beaten, arrest no one and later pursue and prosecute none of those barefaced boys so easily identified in the gigabytes of videos. Charlottesville had its tradition of selective policing to uphold. It’s not as if the violence couldn’t have been anticipated from the violent confrontations that had been scattered across the area leading up to the march. Washington DC promised none of that.

And why would they need to do any of that when they have the White Supremacist in Chief in the White House? They have Laura Ingraham on Fox News calmly staring directly into a camera sharing their message with the world. They can go back to their computers where they can create ways to work around the apparent social media crackdown on hate groups. They still have their message boards and dark websites. And the thugs among them can practice their fight drills so they can attack anti-fa groups at protests or random people of color they don’t like. They don’t need to parade in front of the media anymore because the bargain had be struck in Charlottesville last year. Donald J Trump, president of the United States told them all the needed to know.

People who work for crooks become crooks. Even if they didn’t begin that way. If they work in an atmosphere that winks at dishonesty, they are likely to do what others around them do.

“Drain the swamp!” was a chant that resonated throughout Make America Great rallies during the 2016 campaign. It’s Hillary Clinton who was the crook that schemed with the wealthy, with the implication that Trump is honest as the day is long. Fast forward to the day when the CelebrityTVPresident announced that he needs to have rich people in his administration, not that he didn’t love poor people.

That statement was a defense of Trump’s cabinet and administration picks. 45 has drawn from a circle of the 1%, shepherded by his friends in the Koch Klatch. Normally, presidential appointments are extensively vetted before a job is offered. But in the current administration, appointments were announced before any vetting had been done, sometimes surprising the appointee themselves.

There is no question that Trump is a crook. His business history is replete with shaky deals with money laundering Russian millionaires. Even before that, he was well known to refuse to compensate contractors, many cases ending in lawsuits and settlements. He created scams like Trump University. His long time lawyer, Michael Cohen, is essentially a shakedown artist, who sounds more like a mob lawyer bullying opponents. And since he’s become president, he’s shamelessly promoted his own properties. He’s shunted foreigners, government officials, lobbyists and businessmen to his Washington Hotel.

Is it any wonder that his administration would attract fellow travelers, itching to feed at the government trough? Alligators came out of the brush to slither into the Trump swamp, as longtime established Washington gators found themselves outside the MAGA sphere. It’s a new day in the more densely populated DC Everglades.

A trap has recently been sprung on Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross. In an article in Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2018/08/06/new-details-about-wilbur-rosss-businesses-point-to-pattern-of-grifting/. Dan Alexander lays out a devastating portrait of Ross, the most dotardly looking member of the cabinet. Ross has been the defendant in a number of lawsuits alleging that he systematically stole from the associates in WL Ross & Company, a private equity firm. In one, Ross settled confidentially with David Storper for $4 million on the eve of the trial. Another suit was settled in 2007 for much the same allegations. And yet another suit, dismissed on a technicality, is now being appealed.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Former associates have described Ross as a money grubbing operator who is loose with the truth. Alexander quoted one colleague, “he’s a pathological liar”. One of his little lies was to Forbes, where he consistently overstated his wealth to join and move up in its billionaire ranking list.

The most serious charges involve Ross’ private equity fund. Apparently, Ross was nickel and diming his investors through improperly calculated fees and pocketing some of the contractual rebates. It’s not exactly nickels and dimes; at least one lawsuit alleged $48 million of improper fees. He was also pocketing a portion of the compensation he was receiving for serving on corporate boards, which was supposed to be rebated to investors.

Trump came to his rescue with his job offer. His fund’s returns were flagging; the SEC had just announced that the firm would pay a $2.3 million fine. Actually, the fine was a bit larger. Over the previous 2 years, the firm’s parent company, Invesco, had paid $43 million in reimbursements and regulatory expenses related to WL Ross. The SEC also forced the firm to refund $11.9 million that had been skimmed from its investors through inappropriately charging fees, even on its own employees personal accounts.

Ross has of course denied it all, even in the face of court filings and SEC documents, as any liar would. 45 recognized Ross as a kindred spirit. But there’s something else the two have in common, a penchant to fraternize with Russian oligarchs and actually with Putin’s family. Why is Donald Trump Putin’s Bonbon? As vice chairman and leading investor in the Bank of Cyprus, an offshore haven for Russian oligarch cash, one of his colleagues was Vladimir Strzhalkovsky, who had worked with Putin in the KGB. Another major investor in the bank was Viktor Vekselberg, a close associate of Putin as well. After moving to head the Commerce Department, Ross resigned from the Bank, but retained part ownership of Navigator Holdings, a shipping company that transported Russian natural gas for Sibur. Two of Sibur’s owners are Gennady Timchencko, a judo partner and close friend of Putin’s, and Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s son-in-law.

People who work for crooks become crooks.

It’s hard for a zebra to change its stripes and Ross is no different. While he signed a document attesting that he had divested himself of all his interests after entering the cabinet, Navigator Holdings would seem to contradict that. He also retained somewhere between $10 and $50 million in stock in Invesco. It seemed he was holding on to it to sell when its value rose by $1.2 million one month later. He claimed he didn’t know he still had it, much like he did over the $73,000 in Air Lease which he finally sold a full year after he said he had. Those omissions for a seasoned investor obsessed with money simply strain our credibility.

Undaunted by an investigation by the Office of Government Ethics, Ross dined with the CEO of a company in which he still held a stake after the investigation had ended in a simple reprimand. But Senator John Thune brought the information to the inspector general to take another look. And thinking he was ahead of the game, he short sold his Navigator Holdings shares after he was tipped that the information was about to leak.

Ross is but one of the alligators cruising the swamp. Paul Manafort is front and center as a study of swampiness. He was one of the original swamp dwellers, back in the days of Ronald Reagan. His contribution was the innovative double breasted operation of helping candidates to win and then lobbying those he helped elect for clients he had solicited based on his connections with elected officials. Influence peddling by a grander name. He then exported his dog and pony show to other countries, taking on foreign dictators like Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and Mabuto in Zaire to name a few. Later he moved onto the former Soviet Union countries and then tried to make a jump back into the Republican Party from which he came. When he stepped into Trump’s campaign as a volunteer campaign manager, he found a home for his sundry baggage with a lot of other kindred reptiles. Although he was forced to leave the campaign after 6 months when FBI investigations into payments from the Ukraine were revealed, Manafort remained in contact with Trump at least until the transition if not into the White House. Here again, a little vetting could have gone a long way, although the ethics or lack thereof in the group around 45 prevent them from evaluating behaviors that are by most other standards unethical and often illegal. Instead, their moral turpitude seems to draw these people together.  

More on the swamp to come.

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On the heels of their acquisition of control of federal government, the cluster of billionaire donors around the Koch brothers has come out of the shadows this year for the twice a year meeting of their Network Seminar, quietly begun in 2003. Each member pledges to donate at least $100,000; some have committed millions. The group started small but Barack Obama’s election blossomed its growth exponentially. In the interim, spearheaded by the work of @JaneMayerNYer, author of Dark Money, we have come to learn more about this collection of fabulously wealthy libertarians and crackpots who want to make sure that they continue to retain and multiply their fortunes, protected from prying IRS hands. This year, it appears Koch wanted to use the media to make announcements about some new directions, sending out public cautions to wayward elected officials that their coffers might be less full in the future while at the same time pressuring them to alter their course.

Since David Koch exited Koch Industries and the organization in the spring, due either to  ill health, the official reason, or a push from Charles as some have rumored, Charles has been moving to make some changes. His son, Chase, a Koch Industries executive has increased his involvement probably being groomed for an eventual takeover from his 82 year old father. At the same time, Charles has always been the political mastermind behind billionaire’s strategy for kleptocracy. When he heard that GOP Senator Kevin Cramer from North Dakota had told others not to worry about the Kochs because they were going to support Republicans no matter what, it started the billionaire political heavyweight thinking. Koch considered that building the GOP majority by supporting party candidates has had checkered success, from the election of Obama for two terms to the ascension of the CelebrityPresident to the White House. Their beloved Tea Party, having evolved into representatives in the Freedom Caucus, has been at odds with other wings of the party, sinking critical legislation and obstructing the crafting of new bills.

The Kochs were inhaling that victim vibe from Trump and feeling used. Even as they built the party, they felt like they were taken for granted. They found that money didn’t buy lock step political agreement and philosophical alignment with them. The $1 trillion spending bill with the enormous projected increase in the federal deficit should never have happened. They were disappointed that some legislators had paid some minimal attention to their constituents’ concerns; constituents who had not been completely captured by Koch funded political propaganda. Perhaps they should have adopted the old strategy of under the table direct payment to individual voters, standard practice for political parties in the good old days of political machines.

Not that the network hasn’t scored tremendous victories under Trump in addition to well placed cabinet members dismantling the federal bureaucracy while transforming their agencies into mouth pieces for industry and finance. Advocacy groups can’t get an appointment in a schedule filled with lobbyists. The tax bill is perhaps the capping achievement. Almost as good was their ability to kill the initial device Trump adopted to help pay for it, a border adjustment tax cooked up by Paul Ryan. They also managed to continue the carried-interest loophole which allows primarily hedge fund managers and private equity investors to pay taxes at the much lower capital gains rate on the majority of their income. Trump had campaigned around eliminating it, but it remains alive and well. With Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, the word climate change disappeared from government documents and all scientific investigation came to a halt, along with the scientists who have disappeared from both the payroll and consulting roles. Global warming is not a threat when your head is buried in the sand, at least until the sea rises to meet your hole.  

Koch’s disappointment led to his announcement at the latest donor meeting that the organization was going to switch to supporting candidates who would vote the way they wanted, no matter their party affiliation. The network will be intervening in a limited number of races in Tennessee, Wisconsin, Florida and Missouri for the Senate and governors races in Florida, Michigan and Nevada. Much of its $300-400 million will be spent on agitation around political and policy issues such as free trade and open immigration policies.

The Koch Klatch has already moved against Cramer in North Dakota. Americans for Prosperity weighed into his contest by supporting his opponent Heidi Heitkamp for her vote on the bill that rolled back Dodd-Frank regulations on community banks, which passed Congress with bipartisan support. They have also unveiled an advertising campaign against more Republican than Democratic lawmakers who voted for the $1 trillion federal spending package. They seem to be stopping short of  all out support of Democrats however.

Trump has turned to badmouthing the Kochs on Twitter, bragging that he’s not controlled by them because he had his own money. Using one of his stock phrases, he called their ”network highly overrated” and designated them, “Two nice guys with bad ideas.”  He taunted them with a slur that called them “a total joke in real Republican circles.” That deftly sidesteps the Breitbart hegemony that brought white nationalists out of the woodwork to the voting booths to help push Trump over the top. Breitbart and Steve Bannon are Robert Mercer babies; Mercer is an active member in the Koch orbit. 45 is one to attribute all “winning” policy and practices of his administration to his own genius, even as he happily filled his administration with Mike Pence, Kellyanne Conway, Betsy DeVos, Steve Bannon, Scott Pruitt, Ryan Zinke. Marc Short, former Congressional liaison and Mike Pompeo, all Koch sponsorees. Those are only the most visible examples; many federal agency jobs have gone to operatives or fellow travelers of the many Koch foundations and social welfare organizations. Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were drawn from the Federalist Society list, a professional organizational product of Koch funded educational initiatives at law schools and with practicing attorneys and judges.

Charles Koch may be reconsidering the potential of a Democratic majority in the House, especially as the possibility seems to be growing. A snarl in Congress might be able to limit damage from Trump’s baser instincts on trade and immigration. Their willingness to expand their reach and reconfigure their approaches is a large contributor to their success to date. But he may have trouble taking some of the over 700 members of the Network Seminar with him. There are Trump supporters among them and how they react to Koch’s elliptical attacks on 45 is yet to be seen. Will Trumpophants curtail their donations to the network or perhaps sink them into another tax-sheltered anonymous political network?

But the Kochs have had their tentacles in many pies. Their political successes have always been based in a multipronged strategy to create the intellectual capital to support their quest for the tax-free unregulated state. They have invested heavily in universities to shift them from what they consider to be bastions of liberal intellectuals to a home for conservative thought across all disciplines. From the start, they also understood the importance of local grassroots organizing, not just for national electoral contests but also for the local elections, from school boards on up the ballot and beyond, to ballot initiatives. And they are very good at it.

One of the current Koch issue targets is mass transit. Investment in infrastructure was one of the minor issues briefly raised by 45 but then obscured within Trumpnado. Koch Industries has a lot of skin in the transportation game. Many in the Seminar Network are oil and gas men and the thought of fewer cars on the road gnaws at their bottom line. Koch Industries are major producers of gasoline and asphalt as well as automotive parts, tires and seatbelts. They do have a very different public rationale. 

Americans for Prosperity, the principle political arm of Koch organizations, has been quietly conducting campaigns to stop transit initiatives on the local level. Since 2015, the group has opposed transit measures in almost 25 separate contests. In the absence of federal initiatives, localities choking in traffic and its accompanying pollution have tried to generate their own funding with taxes. The transportation sector is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the nation’s economy. Americans for Prosperity has been fanning out going door to door to defeat proposals to increase local taxes to support mass transit in middle sized cities and towns, places like Little Rock Arkansas, Phoenix Arizona, central Utah, Indianapolis and Florida. In May, they scored a victory in Nashville Tennessee.

The group typically takes its show on the road to more conservative areas that have strong Republican bases. These are areas that lack a strong constituency for transit or  historical support for transportation. Residents also tend to support low taxes in preference to providing government services. In Little Rock, Americans for Prosperity fought a proposed sales tax increase for a bus and trolley by knocking on almost 5,000 doors and making over 39,000 phone calls. The group used a unique device in Utah, giving out gift cards worth $50, an amount they said represented the annual amount it would cost each resident.

Americans for Prosperity understands that the best way to win hearts and minds is through human interaction, particularly for non-Millennials. Because they are so well funded, Americans for Prosperity has the benefit of the latest technology. In this case it is a sophisticated data system built by the Kochs called i360 which uses voter registration information, social media activity and consumer data to develop its profiles. It helps identify like minded individuals who might be swayed by the group’s arguments, which makes their canvassing extremely efficient without wasting time on cold calls. They’ve used the data to make thousands of phone calls and knock on thousands of doors where they argued that trains and buses are outdated modes of transportation when we are on the verge of driverless vehicles. They point out that raising taxes for any reason is always bad, but to waste it on something that most people won’t use is worse. After all, they argue, Americans have the right to go where ever they want, whenever they want and automobiles make that possible. Most locations lack the population density to support an efficient mass transit system, with little alternative to buses which add to traffic snarls.

The group deftly exploits anxieties among residents that new modes of transportation will open their neighborhoods to “others” who live elsewhere in the city. It also raises the specter of gentrification, an attack on neighborhood cohesiveness which raises property tax bills, often to levels current residents can’t afford. Magically, keeping company profits from automobiles and gasoline high is transformed into we share common interests in cars and we have your interests at heart; the taxes we have should be lower not higher and spent on roads and highways.

In Nashville, the transit initiative seemed like a sure thing in the beginning, but it hit a stumbling block when the mayor left office after a scandalous extramarital affair with one of her security team. Americans for Prosperity was well organized and efficient; they focused on registered voters. Their inventions have rigid protocols about politeness including no more than 2 people at a door in order not to intimidate and staying off lawns. They have well practiced scripts. The supporters of mass transit floundered without a leader. Often, elections for transit initiatives have low turnout, so the groups that mobilize voters are the ones that win the day. Comfortable in their sense of overwhelming popularity, mass transit supporters were completely surprised.

Luckily for forces trying to increase our response to global warming, Americans for Prosperity hasn’t always been successful. Phoenix Arizona overcame the group’s opposition to go on to expand its light rail system.

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Another area in which Koch has invested extensively is education from kindergarten through graduate and professional schools. The Koch Foundation awarded more than $49 million to a little over 250 colleges in 2016. Recently, their university centers and grant awards have been challenged for using questionable stipulations outside the usual scope of academic arrangements. Controversy over George Mason University, one of the early recipients of Koch largesse, has been percolating for a while.

In 1981, the Mercatus Center, a think tank for “market-oriented ideas” which the Washington Post called a “staunchly anti-regulatory center” moved onto the George Mason campus, the beneficiary of some $30 million from Koch foundations. There were critics who charged that Mercatus was a lobbying group disguised as an academic center. In fact, the Institute for Humane Studies, chaired by Charles Koch shared the building with Mercatus. The aim of the IHS was to cultivate a generation of libertarian scholars. Acceptance criteria included the number of times Ayn Rand’s name came up in applicant essays. At the same time, George Mason’s economics department was generating theories that fed the supply-side economics of the Reagan administration. George Mason emerged as a libertarian mecca.

Over the last year, George Mason students and faculty submitted Freedom of Information Act requests for details of Koch Foundations grants; in response, the institution’s president revealed that since 2003, all of the agreements except one stated that the university had final approval of faculty hiring but that donors were granted the right to participate in selection and evaluation committees. Such arrangements are far outside academic standards but it was a retreat from the original arrangements where the foundation determined both faculty and students. Even as late as 2007 and 2009, five member selection committees for professors included 2 donor members. There are also concerns about the anonymous donor whom some believe is Leonard Leo, the director of the Federalist Society, who funded a name change of the law school to Antonin Scalia.

Faculty and students at Wake Forest, Florida State and others have voiced similar criticism. An FSU agreement from 2008 and one from the same period at Utah State also granted donors seats on faculty selection committees. Concern on campuses has stoked an  organization, UnKoch My Campus. Koch’s new policy of transparency applies only to future grant agreements, not previous ones and UnKoch My Campus is doggedly pursuing disclosure of previous Koch agreements, even into court. Montana State and University of Utah also have active UnKoch My Campus members.

As part of Charles Koch’s efforts to emerge from the group’s cloak and dagger approach, he announced recently that his foundation would begin publishing the details of its multi year university grants. In that vein, the foundation gave their latest agreement with Arizona State for a $6.5 million center in the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law to Atlantic Magazine. In a statement of its giving guidelines, it said that the faculty would determine how the funds were used, how the leadership, including the Director was selected and that those procedures would be in line with University policies. These contracts do not, however, preclude a less formalized process for influencing faculty hires and the direction of faculty research. Koch funded faculty could easily sit on search committees and follow fund criteria. This wink and nod approach of unwritten and unspoken practices leaves no record to be unearthed and those involved are unlikely to betray their roles. Koch’s announcement of new transparency may simply signal a change to less traceable donor influence at academic institutions. He has used this strategy in the past.

   Although Koch groups continue to press issues surrounding erasing government regulation, lower taxes and smaller government, their electoral efforts have been directed toward building a permanent GOP dynasty that can’t be dislodged by voter opposition to its policies. This includes hegemony of state legislatures with computer enhances tools for gerrymandering as well as electoral officials purging voter registries and voter ID laws.  The ultimate goal is a Constitutional amendment banning income tax. A more issue rather than party based approach in the political arena has some interesting implications for future political realignments. The centrist space that had encompassed a range of thought across conservative Democrats, liberal Republicans and independents, has collapsed. Non-Trumpophants disgusted with the GOP are circling for some place to land. Kochtopus is ultra-libertarian, having infused issues like less government regulation, smaller federal government, fewer federal expenditures which encompasses eliminating social welfare programs for the poor into the GOP mainstream. They are less opposed to welfare programs for businesses and large corporations. After all, many of their companies grew exponentially with the help of government  contracts and subsidies. Many of the Republican Party deserters carry these ideas with them though and a Koch strategy to support candidates who are “right” on any one of those issues creates the basis for a new political party that will have to contend with a new Trump Party in the making going forward.

As the Republican Party dominated government has ballooned the federal deficit, these issues will come increasingly to the fore. The RealityTVPresident is likely to break toward whatever makes him popular, like the farm subsidies in the wake of his trade wars and keep him in power. Eventually, the budget is going to be consumed with debt service, particularly as interest rates are beginning to rise and economic growth rate stalls at far lower levels than Trumponomics predicts. The as yet unknown impact of the trade wars may undermine economic growth and dampen consumer spending. That is the opposite direction of true Republican conservatives and Koch. The Kochs have the successful history of creating the Tea Party movement, literally from thin air and a few staged rallies into an electoral force, so nothing is beyond their potential reach, as long as people are still falling prey to their message.