Those who do not accurately present historical context are doomed to misinterpret political shifts. With the recent enhancements to Donald Trump’s campaign team there’s a great deal of erroneous reporting and various opinion articles that are disconnected from historical accuracy
The addition of Kellyanne Conway (campaign manager) and Steve Bannon (campaign CEO) to the Trump campaign caught many people off guard, CTH included. The connective tissue between Bannon and Conway is billionaire Robert Mercer, and to a slightly lesser extent his daughter Rebekah.
Mercer purchased an $11 million stake in Breitbart Media, essentially becoming the financial backbone for the enterprise. Mr. Mercer also took out a large stake in Cambridge Analytica, a data firm. Cambridge Analytica set up a Presidential Preference poll on the Breitbart website to gather the information of visitors and political followers.
Steve Bannon is Chairman of the Breitbart Media group, and as such he was responsible for managing the intent of Mercer’s investment. To facilitate this objective Breitbart Media took on the role of promoting Pro-Cruz media almost exclusively.
As more and more people came to the Breitbart website (2014-2015), those who took the presidential preference poll became part of the collected data of Cambridge Analytics. After approximately a year of this data gathering, Breitbart Media and Ted Cruz began soliciting donations for the Cruz campaign using the captured content and using the Breitbart Banner in their email requests for contributions.
Simultaneously, Robert Mercer had also established over $10 million into a Super-PAC (Keep The Promise) to benefit Ted Cruz. Steve Bannon managed the pro Cruz investment in Breitbart, and eventually Kellyanne Conway was in charge of Keep the Promise Super-PAC.
This is the factual political structure put in place by billionaire Robert Mercer, before Donald Trump was even a consideration.
There have been numerous outlines into the motives Mercer held therein, however history -and events during the GOP primary- provide us with an ability to understand.
♦ One of the key events which delivers a greater understanding of who, what and why, can be found if you simply revisit the Sea Island Georgia meeting of high ranking politicians and billionaire political donors.
The Sea Island meeting itself was entirely “anti-Trump”, the gathering was almost exclusively discussions about how to rid the primary process of the outside insurgency that was Donald Trump.
A few of the billionaires and representative for the billionaire class included: Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google co-founder Larry Page, Napster creator and Facebook investor Sean Parker, Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, Arthur Sulzberger publisher of the New York Times and billionaire Philip Anschultz who owns Sea Island.
It is critical to accept who the political attendees were – including: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), political strategist Karl Rove, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), Republican Sens. Tom Cotton (AR), Cory Gardner (CO), Tim Scott (SC), Rob Portman (OH) and Ben Sasse (NE).
There were many more “#NeverTrumper’s” including: Energy and Commerce Committe Chairman Fred Upton (Michigan), House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA), Representative Kevin Brady (TX), Cathy McMorris-Rogers (WA), Budget Chairman Tom Price (GA), Financial Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (TX) and Rep. Dianne Black (TN).
Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, also attended. In an emailed report from the conference, he wrote:
“The key task now … is less to understand Trump than to stop him. In general, there’s a little too much hand-wringing, brow-furrowing, and fatalism out there and not quite enough resolving to save the party from nominating or the country electing someone who simply shouldn’t be president.”
What you see from this meeting is the neo-conservative (war-at-all-costs) / interventionist segment of the UniParty aligned against Donald Trump. No-one who attended this meeting could ever be considered as trustworthy for a Trump administration or Trump legislative agenda.
Now, go back and look at the names again, and you will see how each one also evolved to become a member of the #NeverTrump movement (openly, or through deceptive undermining).
These are the same aligned voices behind the various GOP groups who are currently speaking out against candidate Trump’s foreign policy, “America’s interests first”.
♦ How does all of this connect?
As soon as the mid-term 2014 election was over a web-ad appeared. The graphic might even be familiar to you as it was placed quite extensively into multiple media platforms. It was a simple question and a graphic which directed the reader to a data collection site:
Look familiar? Probably because it was widespread in 2014 through the spring of 2015. If you don’t understand or accept the DC UniParty the next part might be challenging to understand.
Much like the Breitbart Presidential Preference Poll, this Clinton/Bush web ad was being used to capture information on behalf of the political financial class, i.e. Wall Street.
The people who put this ad into place are the same people who designed the original “splitter strategy” to carve up the GOP party electorate and give Jeb half of the presidential nomination with only 20% support. (Hillary Clinton is the other approved half)
Billionaires, the same people who attended the Sea Island Georgia meeting, the same people who fund the UniParty, the same people who create Washington DC’s legislative priorities, were constructing a Clinton/Bush win-win scenario.
However, a few billionaires, notably Robert Mercer (for this example), wanted a different legislative approach and so he (they) chose to target the religious/social conservative elements around a Ted Cruz candidacy. [*Note* even with candidate Cruz it’s still UniParty, but with a different emphasis on the legislative outcomes.]
Robert Mercer is more libertarian-minded than the electorate base he was targeting/funding on behalf of Cruz, but the political ends justify the means…. or so it was going.
Until Cruz went off the deep end with the religious right, snuggled up in bed with Looney Glenn Beck, and became an unelectable candidate whose only path was reduced to proselytizing as an electoral strategy.
As soon as whacko Beck began telling everyone that God had anointed Ted Cruz to be the savior of America, things went way, W.A.Y, off the rails. All of the historical re-writing of history by Mark Levin (et al) won’t change that reality.
Ted Cruz became the personification of the batshit crazy religious loon the left side of the UniParty loves to talk about.
Cruz’s preachy campaign echo-chamber only made matters worse.
Mercer (both Robert and Rebekah) apparently couldn’t bring themselves to authorize Kellyanne Conway to spend any of that Super-PAC funding on a religious nut; they knew it would be a futile endeavor. History shows, their hunch was correct.
♦ How Mercer Evolved To Trump
From mid-year 2014, through all of 2015, and into the spring primary of 2016 Breitbart Media was in an evolution from “Rabidly Pro-Cruz”, to “heavily Pro-Cruz”, to “Pro-Cruz” and eventually to “ambivalent for Cruz” – each phase lasting approximately three months beginning in July 2015. [The total Cruz period was about about 20 months +/-].
The final phase saw many of the secondarily funded Cruz advocates leave the Breitbart enterprise. (Wilks Brothers funding The Daily Wire for Shapiro, Salem Communications funding almost all others – Super-PACS paying for #NeverTrump via Ad Revenue etc.)
Candidate Donald Trump announced in June of 2015, almost a full year into Mercer/Breitbart’s endeavor to create candidate Ted Cruz. Essentially during the height of the “rabidly pro-Cruz phase”.
There were indications early in the 2016 primary race that Mercer (both) saw Trump as a more likely candidate to win the entire contest.
There were also indications that Trump was talking to Robert and Rebekah Mercer (wouldn’t be too challenging with Rebekah living in Trump Tower).
As stated, Robert Mercer is more aligned to a libertarian outlook, so there’s a connective tissue to Trump’s more pragmatic political perspectives which would be favorable to Mercer – who appeared to be operating within the UniParty structure (vis-a-vis Cruz) only because there was no alternative to Clinton/Bush.
Well over a year later and this graphic still factually captures the entire status of the presidential race in 2016:
The remaining vestiges of the #NeverTrump are what they have been all along: (1) neo-conservative foreign policy interventionists who want endless wars and the profiteering therein, and (2) the far-right ‘moral-authority-wing’ who hide under the auspices of labeling themselves “conservative” while ultimately also supporting endless wars so long as the nation state of Israel is placed as the first consideration in all U.S. policy and objectives.
The useful UniParty ideology of both group¹ and group² was carried by the people who attended the aforementioned Sea Island Georgia meeting. Their collective interests are directly tied to Wall Street’s corporate interests, including the media; and as a direct consequence their preferred legislative outcomes are more in alignment with a Hillary Clinton presidency.
