Just What Does the Koch Network Have Against Donald Trump?

The political network founded by Republican billionaire megadonor brothers Charles Koch and the late David Koch endorsed Nikki Haley on Tuesday for the Republican primary, the latest snub in the Koch network’s ongoing (and so far fruitless) campaign against Donald Trump.

Americans for Prosperity Action, the Koch network’s advocacy arm, sent out a memo to conservative grassroots activists announcing its endorsement, as well as a coming multimillion-dollar campaign for pro-Haley online and television ads.

“When we announced our decision to engage in our first ever Republican presidential primary, we made it clear that we’d be looking for a candidate who can turn the page on our political dysfunction—and win. It’s clear that candidate is Nikki Haley,” AFP Action senior adviser Emily Seidel said in a statement.

The Koch network has spent the past year steadily ramping up its strident rejection of Trump. Just Monday, AFP Action sent out leaflets urging voters to “stop Biden by letting go of Trump.”

The network’s efforts to keep Trump from winning another presidential nomination kicked off in earnest back in February, when AFP Action sent out a memo stating that the group wanted to help the U.S. “move on” from Trump. The Koch network launched a wave of anti-Trump digital ads in June, arguing that “Trump can’t win.”

That same month, the Koch network revealed it had already raised more than $70 million to donate to non-Trump political races. Koch Industries and Stand Together each donated $25 million, for a combined $50 million of the total funds raised. David Koch died in 2019, but Charles Koch is a major shareholder in Koch Industries, and he founded the nonprofit Stand Together.

The Koch network is one of the most influential conservative political groups, and yet its efforts to stop Trump have been foiled at every turn. In the months since the Koch network proclaimed that Trump “can’t win,” the former president has established himself as the Republican primary front-runner—by a massive margin. National polls show him with an average of 61.6 percent support. Haley has climbed steadily in recent months, but she’s still sitting in third place with a nationwide average of just 9.8 percent support.

It’s also unclear exactly why the Koch network dislikes Trump so much. While in office, he successfully carried out moves long sought by the organization, including the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency, a single-minded strategy of deregulation to strengthen the hand of private businesses, and tipping the Supreme Court conservative—with a majority that’s proven to be well inclined to favor the interests of big business and the decimation of the administrative state.

Whether or not there is a difference of opinion beyond mere aesthetics, it seems the animosity is mutual. Trump said in 2018 that he never sought the Koch network’s backing because “I don’t need their money or bad ideas.” In September, he once again dismissed the Koch network, calling Charles Koch “highly overrated.”

“Very stupid, awkward, and highly overrated Globalist Charles Koch of the Koch Network doesn’t have a clue,” Trump said on Truth Social. “He said his best years were the four years during the Trump Administration, and now his people are aimlessly throwing away other people’s money.”

Government shutdown is back on the menu. The House GOP has made some ominous omissions from this week’s agenda: the appropriations bills that are meant to forestall—say it with us, once again—the impending government shutdown that is now scheduled to occur in mid-January.

After this week ends, the House will have just 16 legislative days to come up with a solution before the first of a two-part deadline is breached, which will set off a partial shutdown on January 19. Should the House continue to flail after that date, the government will roll into a full shutdown two weeks later, on February 2.

Funding the government for which they work hasn’t been a major priority for House Republicans this year. So far, the caucus has passed two stopgap spending measures, narrowly avoiding shutdowns on crunched deadlines, all while garnering attention for their penchant for toxic infighting, which reached a fever pitch in early October when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted from his leadership position for daring to arrange a bipartisan spending bill to prevent a shutdown calamity.

It has yet to be determined if the man who replaced him, Speaker Mike Johnson, is operating under the same conditions—risking losing the gavel for simply doing what needs to be done to keep Capitol Hill’s lights on.

“We need to show some real guts [on spending cuts],” Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett told The Hill. “That’s what we’ve kind of asked for.”

While the names have changed atop the House GOP caucus, Johnson faces the same predicament as McCarthy—a divided yet rambunctious GOP with a razor-thin majority, set against a Democratic Party with a strong opposition to any cuts.

Conservatives are hoping to get through all 12 of the government’s annual appropriations bills on a case-by-case basis, a strategy that might give them a slight edge in negotiations with the Senate, reported The Hill.

Republican Senator Chuck Grassley said he supported that plan on Monday, noting that he’d prefer to see the bills passed before Congress breaks for Christmas. His Democratic counterparts weren’t so hopeful.

“If you can’t do it by September, then you can’t do it by the middle of November, and you can’t do it by December, why the hell do you think you’re gonna get it done in January?” Montana Senator Jon Tester told Politico. “There’s never any urgency around this place to get shit done.”

However, the appropriation bills are just one part of the puzzle. Congress has several big legislative matters on the near-term horizon, including about a half-dozen major priorities that could touch off showdowns of their own, including a border security bill and contentious foreign aid packages to Israel and Ukraine.

The same time constraints apply in these instances as well. But rather than forging ahead on this long parliamentary to-do list, the House GOP will first have to cope with another salacious story that’s returned to the front and center this week: the proposed expulsion of Representative George Santos, who faces 23 charges related to wire fraud, identity theft, and credit card fraud. And if Santos gets expelled, that thin margin that Johnson is working with to prevent a shutdown and keep the lower House on track will become even more fragile.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer offered Tuesday to have the embattled first son publicly testify in front of the House Oversight Committee, a marked shift in what has, until now, been a much less aggressive strategy.

Biden has until recently made a practice of keeping his head down as he battles multiple legal cases—including federal charges for owning a gun while using illegal drugs, as well as the ongoing House Republican investigation into his business dealings. Led by Oversight Chair James Comer, the probe has accused Biden and his father, President Joe Biden, of corruption. It has yet to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the president.

“Here we are, eleven months into your so-called investigation, and every objective review of your ‘revelations’—including by some of your colleagues—has declared your exploration as one turning up only dry holes,” Biden’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said in a Tuesday letter to Comer, which was obtained by The New Republic.

Comer issued subpoenas in early November to multiple members of the Biden family, including Hunter and his uncle Jim. He has repeatedly demanded that they testify. Lowell accused Comer in the letter of using “closed-door sessions to manipulate, even distort the facts and misinform the public.”

“We therefore propose opening the door,” Lowell wrote. “Mr. Chairman, we take you up on your offer. Accordingly, our client will get right to it by agreeing to answer any pertinent and relevant question you or your colleagues might have, but—rather than subscribing to your cloaked, one-sided process—he will appear at a public Oversight and Accountability Committee hearing.”

Based upon recent reporting, this more tenacious approach to Hunter Biden’s legal defense will become the norm, as his legal team abandons an old strategy that sought to keep the president’s son out of the spotlight. As Politico reported in its Tuesday morning edition of Playbook, Biden attorney Kevin Morris says the rationale behind the shift to a more “bare-knuckled approach” is simple: “We want to go on offense because we know we can win. That’s the whole point.”

In addition to offering to publicly testify, Biden has threatened to sue Fox News for former host Tucker Carlson’s claims that Joe and Hunter Biden were involved in a money-laundering scheme. Biden has sued Rudy Giuliani and his former lawyer Robert Costello for allegedly hacking into and distributing Biden’s data.

Biden has also sued the IRS for allegedly failing to keep his tax information private, and he has attempted to subpoena former Trump Justice Department officials, including former Attorney General Bill Barr.

This new strategy has ruffled feathers at the White House, where officials worry it could hurt the president’s reelection chances, Politico reported Tuesday. But some political experts think the new approach might pay off in a way that benefits the president.

“The American public likes to see people fight back,” Jamal Simmons, a former communications director for Vice President Kamala Harris, told Politico. “People who fight for themselves tend to get the benefit of the doubt from the public. And I actually think that probably does help the president in the long run.”

Something funky is going on at Sports Illustrated—several of their authors don’t seem to exist.

According to an investigation by Futurism, the illustrious sports magazine lately seems to be relying on work produced by artificially generated journalists, who sometimes publish artificially generated articles, as well.

“Drew has spent much of his life outdoors, and is excited to guide you through his never-ending list of the best products to keep you from falling to the perils of nature,” read the bio of Drew Ortiz, one of the publication’s new robot stowaways. “Nowadays, there is rarely a weekend that goes by where Drew isn’t out camping, hiking, or just back on his parents’ farm.”

Ortiz, however, has no social media presence and no publishing history outside of Sports Illustrated. One thing the son of a farmer and allegedly avid hiker does have going for him, however, is a profile picture harvested from a website selling A.I.-generated headshots, according to Futurism’s Maggie Harrison, who confirmed with several sources at Sports Illustrated that Ortiz’s content was fabricated.

Ortiz is apparently not the only digital apparition hard at work in their newsroom.

“There’s a lot,” one anonymous source told Futurism regarding the fake authors. “I was like, what are they? This is ridiculous. This person does not exist.”

Over the summer, Ortiz’s account vanished, and in its wake the author’s byline suddenly redirected to a new A.I.-generated writer with no social media presence, no publishing history, and a profile picture from the same A.I.-photo marketplace: someone named Sora Tanaka.

None of these changes came with editor’s notes or corrections explaining the switch-up. What’s more, Harrison’s inquiry was met with a puzzling response: “After we reached out with questions to the magazine’s publisher, the Arena Group,” Harrison reports, “all the AI-generated authors disappeared from Sports Illustrated’s site without explanation.”

Sports Illustrated is not the only publication that’s gotten caught dipping its toes into the murky, plagiarism-laden waters of A.I.-generated content. In January, CNET was caught red-handed publishing A.I.-generated articles containing what have been charitably referred to as “very dumb errors.” In August, newspaper giant Gannett opted to pause its own A.I. experiments when it became clear their bot had no idea how to describe a high school football game. (It’s still unclear if the national publication is still utilizing A.I. for product reviews.) The U.K.-based publications The Daily Mirror and The Express also began publishing artificially generated content in 2023, though their owner says they’re not looking to fire their journalists anytime soon.

Meanwhile, the media industry cut more than 17,000 jobs in 2023 alone—a record number—thanks in large part to dwindling subscriptions and a slow ad market. Losses were felt at some of the industry’s largest and sometimes revolutionary players, including the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, VICE, Vox Media, NPR, and The Washington Post. We may never know what, if anything, Drew Ortiz thinks about that—or anything else.

Tesla sued the Swedish Transport Agency on Monday, accusing the government office of discriminating against the electric carmaker and gumming up the firm’s ability to provide its customers with new cars. How did the automaker run afoul of the Swedish Transport Agency? Well, first the firm ran afoul of its workers—and then the government agency joined in the conflict, in accordance with a specific labor tradition that’s popular in the Nordic states.

Tesla’s Sweden-based workers have been on strike for five weeks in an effort to win collective bargaining rights. The strike, organized by the union IF Metall, has sparked what are known as sympathy strikes across multiple Swedish industries (and one in Norway). In a sympathy strike, other unions in related or adjacent industries act in solidarity with their fellow laborers, lending their organizing heft to the cause.

One such sympathy strike was launched by the Transport Agency, which is refusing to deliver license plates to new Tesla owners. Naturally, the firm takes a dim view of this: “This confiscation of license plates constitutes a discriminatory attack without any support in law directed at Tesla,” its lawsuit alleged.

There’s one problem: Sympathy strikes are legal in Sweden, so Tesla’s lawsuit doesn’t have much standing there. A district court ruled that Tesla can pick up the plates itself from the manufacturer and then privately distribute them to new Tesla owners while the lawsuit plays out. The Transport Agency has seven days to agree to these terms or be fined one million kroner ($96,000).

“We at the Swedish transport agency now need to analyze the announcement and assess what consequences this has for us and what measures might need to be taken to implement the decision,” Anna Berggrund, director of the Transport Agency’s vehicle information department, told The Guardian. “It is currently too early to say exactly what that would mean.”

Meanwhile, Tesla’s Swedish workforce has been the beneficiary of other sympathy strikes on their behalf, including Swedish dockworkers refusing to unload Tesla shipments, electricians declining to repair charging stations, and cleaning companies withholding their labor, leaving Tesla’s facilities to fend for themselves in terms of cleaning. And the workers’ Norwegian neighbors have gotten into the act as well: Norway’s largest private sector union has said it will block the delivery of Swedish Teslas.

Last week, the Swedish postal union said it will no longer deliver Tesla’s mail, a move that carmaker Elon Musk called “insane.” Tesla’s Swedish subsidiary, TM Sweden, is now suing the postal union over the group’s decision.

“We note that Tesla has chosen to take the long route, starting legal proceedings,” a senior IF Metall official, Veli-Pekka Säikkälä, told The Guardian. “There is a simple and quick way to solve this situation, and that is to sign a collective agreement. As soon as Tesla does that, the conflict ends.”

Even Representative George Santos expects that this may be his last week in Congress, and he’s celebrating by going scorched-earth on some of his Republican colleagues, who he’s spent the last few days referring to as “pussies” and adulterers.

The New York Republican’s time is close to running out after nearly a year of high drama, indelible lies, occasional baby-holding, and constant fraud—capped by a scathing, 56-page report by the House Ethics Committee that found that Santos had lied about his finances and appropriated campaign funds for things such as Botox treatments, luxury clothes, and purchases on the adult content platform OnlyFans.

“I know I’m going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor,” Santos said during an expletive-laden X Space live session on the Friday after Thanksgiving. “I’ve done the math over and over, and it doesn’t look really good.”

But before he’s out, the fabulist congressman has one more lie to weave following months of assertions that he’s not going anywhere: Apparently, he doesn’t care if he’s forced out by his peers.

“I don’t care. You want to expel me? I’ll wear it like a badge of honor,” Santos said. “I’ll be the sixth expelled member of Congress in the history of Congress. And guess what? I’ll be the only one expelled without a conviction.”

So, he’s not mad; do not report that he’s mad.

Santos faces 23 charges related to wire fraud, identity theft, and credit card fraud. He has pleaded not guilty to the first 13 charges announced in May, and has since denied another 10 charges announced in a superseding indictment in October. His trial is set to begin in September 2024.

“At nearly every opportunity, he placed his desire for private gain above his duty to uphold the Constitution, federal law, and ethical principles,” the House Ethics report read. “Santos sought to fraudulently exploit every aspect of his House candidacy for his own personal financial profit.”

The disgraced lawmaker is, in these final hours, taking the opportunity to drag some of his Republican colleagues, including calling the chairman of the Ethics Committee, Representative Michael Guest, a “pussy.” He has broadly accused other GOP members of drinking to excess and cheating on their wives instead of focusing on their jobs.

“I have colleagues who are more worried about getting drunk every night with the next lobbyist that they’re gonna screw and pretend like none of us know what’s going on, and sell off the American people, not show up to vote because they’re too hungover or whatever the reason is, or not show up to vote at all and just give their card out like fucking candy for someone else to vote for them,” Santos said, adding that “This shit happens every single week.”

In his latest, greatest achievement, Elon Musk has managed to do something offensive in three different countries in less than 24 hours.

The X (formerly Twitter) owner has come under fire recently for how much hate speech, antisemitism, and extremist content has flourished on the social network—including from Musk’s personal account. Rather than address a problem that has advertisers rankled anew, he spent the weekend exacerbating these problems.

On Sunday night, Musk weighed in on a new law proposed in Ireland, meant to curtail online hate speech. Irish lawmakers announced they plan to enact a law to crack down on racist hate speech online, a move that would make certain extremist memes and other online content illegal, in response to anti-immigration riots that roiled Dublin last week.

In one particularly harrowing incident, a man attacked five people outside an elementary school on Thursday, injuring at least three children and one woman. Police did not reveal the man’s identity to the public, but rumors began to spread that he was an Algerian national, sparking violent protests in central Dublin.

Naturally, Musk was averse to the efforts to combat hate speech and violent rhetoric. “Language being proposed as law in Ireland means this could literally happen to you for having a meme on your phone,” Musk tweeted, setting off a firestorm of far-right conspiracies in his comments.

This isn’t the first time Musk has felt the need to butt into Irish politics. In September, he opposed the country’s first anti–hate speech law, arguing that it infringed on freedom of speech. But Musk has made clear that his idea of free speech is simply the right to say whatever you want with no repercussions. That is, provided that you aren’t using your free speech to criticize him.

It may be that Musk doesn’t want limits placed on his own social media activity, which in recent weeks has included repeatedly sharing antisemitic content on X. And yet, on Monday, he flew to Israel to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders. While there, Musk toured several areas that had been attacked by Hamas.

His warm welcome is shocking considering that just two weeks ago, Musk endorsed a violently antisemitic conspiracy theory that argued Jewish communities hate white people. Meanwhile, multiple major advertisers have yanked their business from X following a report that the platform has been placing brand ads next to posts that promote Hitler and Nazi beliefs.

All of Musk’s antics are not going over so well in France, however. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo announced Monday that she has quit X because it is a “gigantic global sewer” that is “destroying our democracies.”

In the little more than a year that Musk has owned X, he has decimated the platform’s value. Meanwhile, hate speech has flourished during his reign. This change occurred nearly immediately: The social media research group National Contagion Research Institute found that in the 12 hours after Musk bought X, the use of the n-word increased almost 500 percent.

Musk is often a major source of this hate speech and disinformation. In addition to promulgating aggressively antisemitic posts, Musk has been highly solicitous to neo-Nazi posters on X, habitually shared transphobic content, and repeatedly spread conspiracy theories.

In her recently released memoir, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene suggests she has a bit more on her mind than representing the people of Georgia’s 14th congressional district.

The dedicated MAGA legislator, who has flamboyantly supported Donald Trump’s stances on rejecting the legitimate results of the 2020 election results, as well as his embrace of January 6 insurrectionists as “prisoners of war,” is seemingly gunning to become Trump’s right hand should he retake the White House in 2024.

The new book, simply titled MTG, includes a telling foreword by Trump, praising the conspiracy-mongering lawmaker as “one of the most fierce warriors in Congress for America First and all it stands for.” Over the course of the ensuing 275 pages, Greene makes her (dubious) case for being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Greene has floated the prospect of being Trump’s number two before. In August, she told The Guardian that the topic is “talked about frequently” and that she knows her “name is on a list.” “But, of course, that’s up to [Trump]. But I would be honored and consider it.… I’ll help him do whatever in any way I can,” she told the outlet.

The Trump loyalist does have some competition, however. Kari Lake, a 2024 GOP Senate candidate for Arizona, is also vying for the position. But Greene—who has touted QAnon conspiracy theories and blamed Jewish space lasers for the California wildfires—has insisted that Lake is too unserious to be a legitimate vice presidential pick, snubbing her opponent as a “grifter” who is “riding Trump’s coattails,” according to Rolling Stone.*

In the two short years since she assumed office, Greene has spawned a wild frenzy of headlines over her continually outrageous remarks and her penchant for violent rhetoric. In 2019, Greene was stripped of her committee assignments after it came to light that she had liked a Facebook post calling for Nancy Pelosi to receive “a bullet to the head.” She also posted a campaign poster on social media depicting her aiming an AR-15 toward Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib, touting herself as the “squad’s worst nightmare.”

In recent months, Greene has been at the epicenter of other House spectacles after she grouped Confederate General Robert E. Lee into an argument defending monuments to the Founding Fathers. She’s also gone full throttle against some of her fellow conservatives, even throwing some middle-school trash talk into the mix by calling Representative Lauren Boebert a “whore.”

* This article has been corrected to note the nature of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space lasers conspiracy.

Donald Trump, who has bragged about being the “most pro-life president in history,” now believes that he can convince voters that he’s actually a moderate on abortion rights.

Trump and his team are planning to run the former president as some kind of sensible centrist on the issue during the general election against President Joe Biden, Rolling Stone reported Sunday. The magazine cited multiple anonymous sources close to the Trump campaign, attesting to a plan he’d previously weighed pursuing as a middle path that might appease both Republicans and Democrats.

It would be something of a rapid—and perhaps ridiculous—change in direction, seeing as how Trump had previously touted his anti-abortion commitments. The decision to course-correct comes a little late in the game as well: Trump is currently running ads in Iowa that brand him with his self-bestowed label as “THE MOST Pro-Life President in history.”

It isn’t every day that Trump’s claims match the truth, but he legitimately argues that his anti-abortion bona fides set him apart from previous Republican presidents. One of Trump’s first acts in office was to reinstate and expand the global gag rule, which blocks foreign organizations that receive U.S. health assistance from providing information, referrals, or services for abortion access. He also stripped Planned Parenthood of Title X funding, which makes up roughly half of the organization’s finances.

Naturally, his most celebrated acts against abortion rights were his nominations of three staunchly anti-abortion Supreme Court justices. Their appointments swung the high court firmly to the right and enabled the justices to eliminate the protections abortion seekers previously enjoyed under the court’s landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.

Trump remarked on Roe’s gutting in May, when he claimed personal responsibility for getting rid of the nationwide right to abortion. “I’m the one that got rid of Roe v. Wade,” he bragged on Newsmax.

He doubled down on that boast on Truth Social the following day, writing, “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone, and for the first time put the Pro Life movement in a strong negotiating position.”

Unlike some of the other Republican candidates, Trump has yet to say whether he would back a national abortion ban. The former president has not been compelled to offer what he plans to do next in the reproductive rights arena. According to Rolling Stone, he has privately insinuated that major anti-abortion groups have no “leverage” to force him to adopt a stance on the issue until he is ready. It seems likely that Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee, as he currently enjoys a massive lead in the primary polls, even without the backing of anti-abortion organizations.

Just because Trump hasn’t announced that he has set his sights on an abortion ban doesn’t mean he thinks there shouldn’t be one. His actions in this regard speak louder than words, and throughout Trump’s career, he has taken positions out of the belief that they might confer an electoral advantage—only to renege on his promises when it counts.

As his current campaign is shaping up to be less about a vision of the future and more about meting out revenge on those Trump feels have wronged him, it would not be prudent to trust his coy promises about finding a moderate path on abortion rights.

A pro–Donald Trump nonprofit organization accidentally revealed its top donors. It turns out two of them usually back liberal causes.

The Daily Beast obtained a copy of the 2022 tax statement for the nonprofit American Compass, which is linked to a plan to assemble Trump’s Cabinet for a potential second term. The document includes a list of five donor organizations.

Two of the donors are the Omidyar Network Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Omidyar has donated a total of $500,000 to American Compass since 2020, according to the foundation’s website.

Hewlett has contributed more than one-third of American Compass’s total public support. Hewlett has donated $1,486,000 to American Compass since 2020, including a tranche of $475,000 just in January.

The two organizations’ support for American Compass stands in stark contrast to the causes that they normally back. Pierre Omidyar has donated considerably to Democratic dark money groups and to fighting racism. He also provided the initial funding for the news outlet The Intercept in 2014; Omidyar’s First Look Media continued to fund the organization until it was spun off as a nonprofit earlier this year.

Hewlett has donated to global groups that fight for women’s rights, environmental reform, and the arts. Hewlett is also a longtime supporter of NPR.*

It’s unclear what Hewlett and Omidyar are doing by backing groups that are so ideologically disparate. But their support is dangerous: American Compass is part of a movement propelled by younger Republicans seeking to make Trumpism align with traditional, small-government conservatism.

American Compass is also part of the right-wing think tank Project 2025. Project 2025, one of the drivers behind the growing setup for a second Trump term, is itself a part of the Heritage Foundation. The far-right Heritage Foundation has allied itself closely with Trump and helped shape much of his policy while in office.

Some of Project 2025’s backers include former Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, both of whom are known for their xenophobic and white supremacist beliefs.

* This article originally misstated the amount of funding the organization provided to American Compass as compared to similar contributions made to other liberal organizations.