Trump’s War With the Koch Brothers Makes No Sense
After Charles Koch criticized President Trump’s trade war and budget deficit, Trump lashed out, calling the Koch brothers’ vast conservative money machine “overrated.”
It’s plausible to dismiss the current feud between Donald Trump and the mogul Charles Koch as merely an alpha-male ego-fest—in the words of the journalist and Koch-watcher Jane Mayer, “a plutocratic pissing match” for control of the Republican Party. Trump turned up the heat last week when he tweeted that the scion of the conservative donor network was “overrated,” which may be the first time that a president has used the same word to insult Koch and Meryl Streep.
But seasoned Republicans recognize that the feud is symptomatic of broader tensions within the party—Trump’s trade wars clash with the Koch network’s traditional free-market support for open trade—and that the last thing than their Democratic challengers.
