Darkness, Darkness-- The Mercers Are Disappointed In Trump

There are plenty of evil families in the Trump orbit. But-- no offense meant to the DeVos/Prince monsters-- none come close to the Long Island billionaire Mercer clan. At least as much as Putin and Hillary, they delivered a victory to Trump in 2016. They gave him Bannon, Kellyanne, Bossie, Cambridge Analytica... a whole campaign. And then once he won, Rebekah, the imperious, ultra-spoiled daughter, called the shots. She was a heavy hitter on the executive committee of the Trump transition team and pushed for Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn and John Bolton and vetoed Mitt Romney.

The father, Robert, pretty much viewed as a complete crackpot by everyone who has ever met him, is obsessed with urine research, revels in the death penalty, Islamophobia and Obama-hatred. He told his co-workers in Setauket that "your value as a human being is equivalent to what you are paid... [and] by definition, teachers are not worth much because they aren't paid much." The crazy daughter has the same bestial ideology as her dad. They "invested" $10 million in Breitbart to spread their crackpot ideas to the kind of mentally-weak people attracted to fascism, xenophobia, racism and generalized hate-mongering, the core of their lives. The Mercers we're merely angling to influence the Republican establishment-- they wanted to obliterate it. Now, according to Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman they're disappointed, complain Trump was a bad investment and are essentially gone from TrumpWorld. And that's a problem because the Trump campaign says it isn't raising enough money from big donors.

With their ties to Steve Bannon, Breitbart, and Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah were superstars last cycle. According to half a dozen sources familiar with the reclusive family’s political activities, the Mercers have drastically curtailed their political donations in recent months and will likely not play a significant role in 2020. “They think that the administration could do so much more. They’ve been very vocal about that to the president,” a person familiar with the Mercers’ thinking told me. “It’s like they’ve disappeared,” the former West Wing official added. “Crickets. They’re gone,” a prominent Republican strategist said.

The numbers tell the story. In 2016, Robert Mercer, the former co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, and his wife, Diana, donated $15.5 million to a variety of different organizations to help elect Trump, and they put up another $1 million for the inaugural committee. They also provided substantial support to Breitbart, which at times seemed to function as an extra arm of the Trump campaign. The Washington Post reported they spent more than $49 million on political activities in 2016 and that year’s election cycle. “The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution,” Steve Bannon said in 2017. In addition to the millions the Mercers pumped into Trump’s election, they spent $10 million on Breitbart News and millions more on Cambridge Analytica, the data firm cofounded by Robert Mercer in 2013.

But in 2018 the Mercers donated only $400,000 to the pro-Trump Great America PAC, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Their total political spending dropped to $2.9 million last year. Sources said the Mercers cut back their spending because they felt scarred by the press scrutiny that followed their association with Trump. Two sources said Rebekah’s divorce from her husband is also motivating her to keep a low profile. “This whole thing did not end up well for them,” former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg told me. “They’ve been destroyed,” a former West Wing official said. A former Renaissance executive said: “Bob views all his political spending as a bad investment.” (The Mercers did not respond to requests for comment.)

Like Trump, the Mercers exploded onto the national scene from seemingly nowhere. Robert, a painfully shy computer scientist who reportedly prefers cats to people, never gave interviews. When I approached Robert at Trump’s 2016 election-night party at the New York Hilton, he smiled and walked away.

At that time, the Mercers had become so influential with Trump that they successfully installed their handpicked strategists, Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, to run Trump’s campaign in the closing months of 2016. After Trump won, Rebekah served as a senior member of the transition team. And in December 2016, Trump repaid their loyalty by making an appearance at Robert’s annual costume ball held at his Long Island mansion known as the Owl’s Nest.

But the relationship was stress tested from the beginning of Trump’s term. In March 2017, the New Yorker published an embarrassing profile of Robert Mercer, depicting him as an eccentric recluse. Five months later, Trump exiled Bannon, which drove a wedge between Trump and the Mercers, Bannon’s longtime patrons. Around the same time, Mercer’s support for Trump and Breitbart was outraging Renaissance employees and the fund’s investors, sources told me. (The hedge fund’s founder, James Simons, is among the country’s biggest Democratic donors.) In November 2017, Mercer was pushed out of Renaissance and he publicly transferred his stake in Breitbart to his daughters. A month later, the Mercers’ relationship with Bannon reached a breaking point when Bannon was quoted extensively in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury criticizing the Trump family. Rebekah issued a rare statement distancing herself from Bannon. “My family and I have not communicated with Steve Bannon in many months and have provided no financial support to his political agenda, nor do we support his recent actions and statements,” it read. “Bob and Rebekah both felt so burned by Bannon and the negative publicity,” a person close to the Mercers told me.

Meanwhile, the Mercers’ investment in Cambridge Analytica was putting them in legal jeopardy. A few months after Robert left Renaissance, it was reported that the FBI opened an investigation of Cambridge in the wake of revelations that the firm appropriated private data from more than 50 million Facebook profiles. Last May, the Mercers shut the company down. “The Cambridge investigation really spooked them,” said the prominent Republican strategist.

Another factor driving the Mercers off the national stage is that Trump was never their ideal candidate, despite the millions they spent helping him, sources told me. “They never really liked Trump,” the person close to the Mercers said. During the 2016 Republican primary, the Mercers put all their cards on Ted Cruz. The source recalled that Robert invited Kellyanne Conway, who was then working for a pro-Cruz super PAC, to his Florida mansion and told her to “beat Trump!” What seemed to be most driving the Mercers was a hatred of Hillary Clinton. “Trump was just Bob’s play against Hillary,” the former Renaissance executive said. “Bob said she and her husband were murderers who would destroy the country. He thought she was an evil person and a socialist.”

Without the specter of a Clinton presidency to motivate them, the Mercers are returning to their pre-Trump private existence. Robert didn’t host a costume ball last year. But the family remains active outside of politics. For example, the Mercers’ foundation continues to donate to the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, whose cofounder, Arthur Robinson, is a pro-nuclear energy climate change skeptic who does research on slowing down human aging. “They’re still supporting us at levels that are comparable to what they’ve been,” Robinson told me.

Robinson is Mercer's urine guy and Mercer keeps funding campaigns for Robinson to run against Pete DeFazio (OR-04). His Concerned Taxpayers of America PAC spent $597,172 bolstering the Pee Guy in 2010 and spent another $438,455 through Mercer's Republican Super PAC in 2012. In 2014 Mercer ponied up $1,750,000 to the Ending Spending Super PAC, $736,712 of which went to Pee Guy. He also ran in 2016 and 2018. Last year DeFazio beat Robinson 208,710 (56%) to 152,414 (40.9%). He's running again this cycle, of course.