The Mercers: The Most Dangerous-- And Toxic-- Family In America

Rebekah, Kellyanne and Bannon (missing from the photo: Satan)

Man, do I have the coolest Twitter followers! I threw out some real red meat in a poll yesterday: Bannon, Kushner-in-law, Jeff Sessions. "Who do you most want to see the FBI drag off in handcuffs over Putin-Gate?" But, by far, most readers knew exactly who the FBI should be locking up-- the father/daughter team trying to turn America into a fascist shithole: Robert and Rebekah Mercer, billionaires in search of a guillotine. And, yes, they're far worse than the Kochs.

Tuesday evening New York Times reporters Nick Confessore and David Gelles reported that the hideous Mercer monsters are (finally) in trouble. "Last month," they wrote, "a friend of the wealthy conservative donor Rebekah Mercer arrived at Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters. His task: Find out what-- if anything--could repair relations between Facebook, the world’s biggest social media company, and Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling firm co-founded by her father and used by the Trump campaign." Mercers' company, Cambridge Analytica has been banned by Facebook... and remains banned.

The revelation last month that Cambridge Analytica improperly acquired the private Facebook data of millions of users has set off government inquiries in Washington and London, plunging Facebook into crisis. But it has also battered the nascent political network overseen by Ms. Mercer, 44, and financed by her father, Robert Mercer, 71, a hard-line conservative billionaire.

Ms. Mercer’s standing in Mr. Trump’s circle had already declined following the departure last year of Stephen K. Bannon, her family’s former adviser and President Trump’s former chief strategist, according to Republicans with close ties to the president’s political operation. A pro-Trump advocacy group controlled by Ms. Mercer has gone silent following strategic disputes between her and other top donors. Plans to wage a civil war against the Republican establishment in the 2018 midterms have been derailed.

And last month, after reports on Cambridge in the New York Times, The Observer of London and The Guardian, Facebook banned the company from its platform, a major blow to any political or commercial targeting firm. Not a single American candidate or “super PAC” committee has reported payments to the company since the 2016 campaign, according to federal records.

Several Republicans in Ms. Mercer’s orbit or with knowledge of Cambridge’s business said that fallout from the Facebook scandal-- combined with widespread doubts about the accuracy of Cambridge’s psychological profiles of voters-- had effectively crippled the firm’s election work in the United States.

“They’re selling magic in a bottle,” said Matt Braynard, who worked alongside Cambridge on the Trump campaign, for which he served as the director of data and strategy, and now runs Look Ahead America, a group seeking to turn out disaffected rural and blue-collar voters. “And they’re becoming toxic.”

The Mercers have made no public statements about Cambridge Analytica’s troubles. Through a spokeswoman, Ms. Mercer declined to answer questions about her role in Mr. Trump’s circle or the Facebook meeting about Cambridge Analytica.

But the effort by Ms. Mercer’s friend to help mend fences with Facebook hints at both Cambridge’s importance to her family’s political ambitions and the perils posed by Facebook’s ban.

Although a Cambridge spokesman last month downplayed Ms. Mercer’s role at the company-- saying she had a “broad business oversight” role and no involvement in its daily operations-- she serves on the company’s board and in the past has worked to drum up campaign business for Cambridge, according to Republicans who have worked with or competed against the firm. Former Cambridge employees said she was close to Alexander Nix, the company’s chief executive, who was suspended last month after reports on Cambridge’s harvesting of Facebook data.

...In recent years, the Mercers have become among the most prominent and highly scrutinized political donors in the United States. In the early years of the Obama administration, they began doling out tens of millions of dollars to an eclectic array of conservative groups — many of them outside Washington’s mainline Republican establishment. Mr. Mercer invested $10 million in Breitbart News, the nationalist website, bringing on Mr. Bannon as chairman, while Ms. Mercer joined the boards of leading conservative think tanks.

The Mercers were critical of the Republican Party’s existing data apparatus, which was controlled by the party officials and consultants they hoped to disempower. Mr. Mercer bankrolled Cambridge Analytica in 2014, and Ms. Mercer encouraged candidates and PACs that took the family’s money to also hire the family’s data firm. Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Mercers backed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, putting millions of dollars-- and Cambridge Analytica-- behind him.

But after Mr. Trump prevailed in the primaries, the Mercers switched candidates. In summer 2016, Ms. Mercer helped orchestrate a shake-up that put Mr. Bannon at the head of the Trump campaign. After Mr. Trump won the presidential election, he attended a costume ball at the Mercer estate on Long Island.

Ms. Mercer secured a slot on his transition team and prime seats at his inauguration. As Mr. Trump took office, she sought to take a leading role in America First Policies, a nonprofit formed to back the president’s agenda. Last spring, Ms. Mercer and her father attended the Time 100 black-tie gala, where she was feted as one of the country’s most influential people.

But her insistence on using Cambridge to provide the Trump group with voter data, and other clashes over strategy, alienated other donors and Trump allies, according to other Republicans. Ms. Mercer formed her own group, Making America Great, and hired Emily Cornell, a Cambridge executive, to run it.

Yet after an initial splash of spending in 2017 to promote Mr. Trump’s policies on environmental deregulation and other issues, Making America Great appears to have gone quiet. Ms. Cornell said she was no longer affiliated with Making America Great and could not comment on the group.

In November, Mr. Mercer stepped down from the helm of Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, as some investors began expressing dismay over his alliance with Mr. Trump.

The family is likely to retain significant influence in broader conservative circles thanks to its vast fortune, which finances donations that many political organizations and candidates are eager to accept. The family foundation handed out about $20 million to more than two dozen conservative think tanks, charter school groups, watchdog outfits and other nonprofit organizations in 2016, according to its most recent tax return.

Ms. Mercer remains a trustee of the Heritage Foundation, a prominent Washington think tank that has provided the Trump administration with grist for a range of initiatives. The foreign policy hawk John R. Bolton, whose super PAC the Mercers lavished with cash and whom Ms. Mercer once lobbied the White House to make secretary of state, was recently tapped to become Mr. Trump’s national security adviser.

The family has also donated $4.5 million to Republican candidates and super PACs during the 2018 election cycle, putting the Mercers among the top 20 donors in the country. And the father-daughter duo still inspire fear: Virtually no Republicans were willing to speak on the record about the family’s troubles.

“I would not confuse silence with them being out,” said Dan K. Eberhart, a Colorado drilling-services executive who is active in America First Policies, now the lead pro-Trump political advocacy group. “I think they’re very strategic, and I think they’re quiet folks.”

Any contributions the family gives directly to candidates and super PACs will be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission. But their contributions to ideological nonprofit groups like the Heartland Institute, which disputes the scientific consensus on climate change, may become less visible in the future. In 2016, when the Mercers’ backing of Mr. Trump subjected the family to intense public scrutiny, the Mercer foundation’s largest contribution was to DonorsTrust, an advisory group for conservative givers.

That grant, the Mercer foundation’s first recorded contribution to DonorsTrust, could herald a shift in the family’s philanthropic strategy. DonorsTrust helps wealthy conservatives obtain charitable tax benefits while-- if so desired-- shielding their giving from public view. The donor records a contribution to DonorsTrust and recommends potential recipients, while grantees receive a donation from DonorsTrust charitable vehicles. In 2016, DonorsTrust disbursed more than $66 million worth of such grants.

“Donor-advised funds offer you any level of privacy you’d like from the receiving organization,” states a promotional pamphlet available from the DonorsTrust website. “A donor can ask the fund provider to share their full name with one favored grantee and keep their identity private from other.” Such privacy can be useful to donors who “may be supporting a sensitive or personal cause that could endanger familial or professional harmony,” according to the pamphlet.

Such mechanisms, which are legal, are used by many donors on the right and the left. Ms. Mercer declined to answer questions about whether she intended to shift more of her family’s future political philanthropy into intermediaries like DonorsTrust. A 2017 tax return for the Mercer foundation is not yet publicly available.

“Ms. Mercer is a private person,” her spokeswoman said in a statement. “And she does not intend to discuss with the media either the conversations she has with her close friends or her philanthropic and charitable giving.”

Lawson Bader, the president of DonorsTrust, referred questions to the Mercers. “I do not discuss DonorsTrust accounts real or imagined,” he said in an email.

The Facebook scandal has hit just as the Mercers appear to be expanding their business in the world of big data. Public records show that Ms. Mercer, her sister Jennifer and Mr. Nix serve as directors of Emerdata, a British data company formed in August by top executives at Cambridge Analytica and its affiliate, SCL Group, according to British corporate records.

Incorporation documents state that Emerdata specializes in “data processing, hosting and related activities.” An SCL official told Channel 4, a British television station, that Emerdata was established last year to combine SCL and Cambridge under one corporate entity.

Exactly what ambitions the Mercers, who joined the Emerdata board last month, have for the company is unclear. Another Emerdata director, Johnson Ko Chun Shun, is a Hong Kong financier and business partner of Erik Prince-- the brother of the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and founder of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater. Mr. Ko, who declined to comment, is a substantial shareholder and deputy chairman in Mr. Prince’s Africa-focused logistics company, Frontier Services Group.

Mr. Ko and Mr. Prince have links to the Chinese government: Another major Frontier investor is Citic, a state-owned Chinese financial conglomerate that for decades has employed the sons and daughters of the Communist Party’s elite families.

Emerdata has a second Hong Kong-based director, Peng Cheng. Little public information about Ms. Peng, a British citizen, is available. But a woman with the same name is the chief executive of a publishing and online game company located in the same Hong Kong office tower as Frontier Services. In 2016, Mr. Ko’s brokerage company said it would buy a stake in Ms. Peng’s company, Culturecom.

While in Hong Kong in September to speak at a conference, Mr. Nix told Bloomberg that Cambridge Analytica was looking into China for commercial ventures. “We’ve been scoping this market for about a year,” he said. “We see huge opportunity to bring some of these technologies to advertising and marketing space brands.”

Can One Family Of Psychotic, Fascist Billionaires Turn 250 Years Of American History On Its Head? Meet The Mercers

Because I was asked to share a dais honoring us both, I've been covering the Mercer family-- dangerous American fascists-- longer than most. I persuaded our hosts to have two seperate ceremonies so I never got a chance to meet Mercer in person, probably a mistake. At the time he was the biggest single donor to the Ted Cruz presidential campaign-- bad enough-- although he soon took over the Trumpanzee circus and started calling all the shots at his campaign through family vassals Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Patrick Caddell, Jeff Sessions and David Bossie, as well three nefarious far right firms he controls-- Breitbart News, Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center, and, most importantly, the dark data firm Cambridge Analytica.

American mainstream media hasn't given the Mercers nearly the exposure they deserve, primarily because the Mercers are media phobic and refuse to do interviews. This week, Keith Boag, for Canada's biggest media outlet, the CBC, asked the question about Mercer's ultimate goal in helping to place Trump in the White House. David Magerman is a former employee of Mercer’s hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, and he's suing Mercer. He told Boag that "If the world knew what [Mercer] was trying to do, they wouldn’t stand for it."

Seen from a distance, Mercer can appear like a Bond movie villain. A computer scientist-turned hedge fund billionaire, he is reclusive and taciturn. He does not do interviews. He stays out of sight sailing the world in his luxurious, high-tech super yacht, Sea Owl, or holed up in his Long Island estate, Owl’s Nest, while plotting the political transformation of America.

But when he backed Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 and helped install Bannon to run it, people began asking more seriously, “Who is this man?”

Mercer barely talks to anyone. Trump once joked at a party that the longest conversation he’s ever had with “Bob” was just “two words.” That’s an anecdote from Jane Mayer’s 2017 profile of Mercer in the New Yorker, which, like most of what’s been written about him, was based on evidence from people such as Magerman.

Magerman is a multi-millionaire-- the lower nine-figure range, he said-- who, like many employees at Renaissance Technologies, became rich through his relationship with Mercer. Unlike most of them, Magerman is not afraid to be publicly critical of how Mercer has used his money in politics.

“People weren’t aware of what was going on [in 2016]. It looked like some eccentric billionaire was giving money to political causes the way people normally do,” Magerman said. “I knew that he was actually trying to do something different than that.”

Mercer’s fortune and Bannon’s media instincts combined with a shared ideology to produce the anti-liberal, anti-Clinton ecosystem that includes Breitbart, the conservative non-profit Citizens United, the book Clinton Cash and much more. Together, they oversaw the data analysis company Cambridge Analytica, whose impact on the UK’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 U.S. election remain troublesomely murky.

For a long time, even Magerman didn’t know about Mercer’s political interests or his ultra-libertarian, minimalist-government goals.

“When I read all that, I felt not only did I have to do something,” Magerman said, “but I’d been negligent in not doing something earlier.”

...Magerman thinks Mercer has bought special access to impose “extra-societal” views on the Trump administration.

Magerman, who now spends much of his time at his sprawling estate in the wealthy Philadelphia suburb of Merion Station, is uncommonly thoughtful about the impact on U.S. political life of rich people like himself, and especially the ones he calls “the instant billionaires,” like Mercer.

“The ultra-wealthy of today differ from the ultra-wealthy in past eras in that they have, a lot of them, no stake in the infrastructure of society,” Magerman said. He’s seen that their wealth does not depend on the health and stability of the country. In fact, they get rich on volatility and instability.

Organizations that track who spends money in politics have noted the same thing. Sarah Bryner, research director at the Washington-based Center for Responsive Politics, said “hedge fund wealth is a sort of recent phenomenon, at least in the campaign finance world.”

“It’s not like you’re working for [big banks such as] Chase or Wells Fargo, in a very well-regulated and huge industry” with obvious policy aims.

High net worth individuals aren’t like that at all, she said. “With Mercer, we don’t really know much about why he’s getting involved.”

...The problem that Renaissance Technologies faced trying to predict market behaviour is, he said, essentially the same problem that Cambridge Analytica faces in voter analysis and persuasion.

Data analysts are largely skeptical that Cambridge Analytica could have had a decisive impact on the 2016 U.S. election or the Brexit referendum, but Magerman brushes that off with a reminder that so-called experts were also skeptical that computer algorithms could predict financial markets.

“They said there is no way they can do that with the data available,” he said. And yet, there’s Medallion [Renaissance Technologies' big money-maker, open only to employees], with its unheard-of nearly 80 per cent annualized returns. There's Cambridge Analytica, on the winning side of two political upsets.

And there is Mercer, a brilliant scientist at the helm of both companies.

In January 2017, before Trump’s inauguration, Magerman called Mercer to chat about politics and the new administration. He wanted to persuade Mercer to withdraw support from Trump.

They talked about Obamacare and the social safety net and disagreed about Trump’s positions on those issues. Then, Magerman says Mercer made a series of comments on U.S. society:

• The United States began to go in the wrong direction after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s;
• African-Americans were doing fine in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s before The Civil Rights Act;

 • The Civil Rights Act “infantilized” African Americans by making them dependent on government and removing any incentive to work;

 • The only racist people remaining in the U.S. are black; and

 • White people have no racial animus toward African-Americans anymore, and if there is any, it’s not something the government should be concerned with.

Magerman felt he couldn’t keep that to himself.

“I really thought I was just going to let people know what I know and that would be the end of it,” Magerman said of his decision to do an interview with the Wall Street Journal, which amounted to a warning flare about Mercer to anyone paying attention.

The story quoted Magerman saying that Mercer has contempt for the social safety net and that he now wants to use the money Magerman helped him make to “shrink government to the size of a pinhead.”

But the most sensational part was what Magerman relayed that Mercer had said to him on the phone one day. “I hear you’re going around saying I’m a white supremacist. That’s ridiculous.”

Magerman, having cleared his conscience in the Wall Street Journal, expected to go back to work at Renaissance Technologies. Instead, he was suspended.

“If they hadn’t suspended me, I think the story would have kind of died quickly,” he said, but that’s probably not true. After the article appeared, Magerman continued to talk to the media.

He wrote a piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer in which he said that, during the presidential election, Mercer “was effectively buying shares in the candidate” and “now owns a sizable share of the United States presidency” and that “Mercer has surrounded our president with his people, and his people have an outsized influence over the running of our country simply because Robert Mercer paid for their seats.”

After that, Magerman’s suspension was made permanent and he sued his boss for wrongful dismissal.

...Mercer was the third-largest Republican donor ($25.5 million) in the 2016 presidential race. In the New Yorker profile, a “high-level Renaissance employee” is quoted as saying, “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the president’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it all to fall down.”

I asked Magerman if he was the anonymous employee behind the quote. He said he couldn’t remember saying it, but it certainly sounded like something he would say.

Of course it does. One of Magerman’s cautions about “instant billionaires” is that they really don’t understand what the government is for. They didn’t get rich by providing the goods, services and infrastructure that bring people into direct contact with their community and its interests-- they got rich in financial markets, making money for the sake of it.

Often cited among the accomplishments of the Trump administration’s first year are the number of regulations that have been eliminated in the name of freeing businesses to create jobs. But the real shrinking of the role of government has been in Trump’s choice of cabinet members, whose aim seems to be to assail the policy goals of their departments.

Thus, the secretary of energy is someone who once campaigned to get rid of the Energy Department; the Secretary of Education has advocated against the public schools system; the Environmental Protection Agency director has a record of repeatedly suing the EPA; and the Attorney General has a reputation for opposing the expansion of civil rights.

Other departments are reportedly withering from neglect, as key positions are filled by unqualified people or not filled at all. The tax cut bill passed in December is forecast to add about a trillion dollars to the federal deficit, forcing further restraint on future governments.

It’s hard to imagine that Mercer would be unhappy about any of that given his thoughts about the size of government and the observation that he “wants it all to fall down”-- and especially since his daughter Rebekah was part of the transition team that helped Trump choose his cabinet.

Robert Mercer’s Trade of the Century

The Beautiful People, The Beautiful People

I went to school at SUNY, Stony Brook in the 1960s and I used to dream when I grew up I would be a caretaker for a small park in the town next door, Setauket, that had a beautiful, peaceful little pond. The last time I saw either the little park or Setauket was in 1968. I moved to Europe after college and when I returned it the U.S. in the mid-70s I lived in California. I hadn't been back to Stony Brook in many decades when they decided to honor me with an awards dinner-- me and guy who was a principal at Setauket's most valuable company, Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies, America's most profitable hedge fund. I knew who he was because he was, at the time, Ted Cruz's biggest single contributor, $13,000,000 if I remember correctly. I asked the folks at the campus to read a little about my politics and his politics and to see if they thought it would be that wonderful of an idea to have us both on the same dais or at the same table. They eventually decided two separate dinners would work better. That was lucky because by then, Mercer was not just Trump's biggest donor (unless you want to count in-kind services from Vladimir Putin, the world's richest man). Trump's biggest donor and the man who gave Trump Kellyanne Conway, Steve Bannon and the world zany world of both Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica, both of which he surrepticiously owns, each of which being part of the nuclear triad (with Putin) that handed Trump the election.

There are two huge Mercer exposés to consider this weekend, one by Vicky Ward about Mercer and partner-in-crime, daughter Rebekah, The Blow-It-All-Up Billionaires, and one by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, The Reclusive Hedge-Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency-- How Robert Mercer exploited America’s populist insurgency. Although neither comes right out and explains that Mercer is a dangerous sociopath who needs to be in a position where he can't do further harm to the society and the nation, both essays are excellent and worth reading. Let's start with some excerpts from Ward's. "When politicians take money from megadonors," she wrote, "there are strings attached. But with the reclusive duo who propelled Trump into the White House, there’s a fuse." The imperious, ultra-spoiled daughter was calling the Mercer shots after the unexpected win the Mercers helped engineer. 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. She backed, forcefully, everything that would destroy America and when she didn't get her way, she went ape-shit and threw her (father's) weight around. She went bonkers when Trump had Romney’s niece, Ronna Romney McDaniel, appointed to be chair of the RNC, who, to the Mercer psychos say that "McDaniel personified the very GOP establishment that her family had worked so hard to cast out."

Her father, 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 her 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 and said to be even more dangerous. 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. "[U]nlike other donors," wrote Ward, "the Mercers are not merely angling to influence the Republican establishment-- they want to obliterate it... In 2012 the Mercers recognized Bannon as an ideological ally." It was Bannon who persuaded Mercer to switch his allegiance from Cruz-- in whom he had invested $13.5 million-- to Trump. And it was Rebekah who persuaded Trump to dump Manafort and replace him with Bannon (as well as Kellyanne and little Nazi shit David Bossie).

In the end, Rebekah Mercer’s mistake was that she thought she could upend the system and then control the regime she had helped to bring to power. Helping to elect a president wasn’t enough: She wanted the machinery to shape his presidency. Instead, the chaos simply continued. An administration full of insurgents, it turns out, functions in a near-constant state of insurgency.

Bannon is said to be exhausted and stretched. He is largely responsible for the relentless pace of initiatives and executive orders in the early weeks of the administration, because he doesn’t expect to be in the White House forever. “I’m expecting to be fired by the summer,” he has told friends, likening himself to Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, who was instrumental in enforcing Britain’s Reformation but ended up being beheaded by his boss. A source close to Bannon says that he may have “joked about being fired,” but disagreed that Bannon is tired: “I don't think he even thinks in those terms. He is used to an intense schedule.” His focus, the source says, “is working for the president to deliver on the promises to the American people for the first 100 days and then beyond on the overall agenda of Making America Great Again.” Bannon returns Rebekah’s phone calls when he can. But, according to someone who knows both well, “relations are strained.” Another person who works with both of them says, “I think Bannon, once he finally built a relationship with Trump, didn't need Rebekah as much … and he doesn't care about that. He only cares about the country.” The source close to Bannon says that Rebekah and the chief strategist remain “close friends and allies.”

As this piece was going to press, several sources warned me not to count Rebekah out. She still has a stake in Breitbart, which holds tremendous sway over Trump’s base and has recently gone on a no-holds-barred offensive against the GOP health care plan. And on March 13, Politico reported that some Trump officials were already disillusioned with America First, which they felt had been slow to provide much-needed cover for his policy initiatives. There was talk of turning instead to a new group being launched by Rebekah Mercer. And so she may yet get another chance to realize her grand ambitions. “She’s used to getting everything she wants, 100 percent of the time,” says another person who knows her well. “Does she like getting 90 percent? No.”

In the other piece, which isn't bad but not nearly as compelling or informative as Ward's, Jane Mayer interviewed Nick Patterson, a former senior Renaissance employee who claims that Mercer’s "influence has been huge. 'Bob has used his money very effectively,' he said. 'He’s not the first person in history to use money in politics, but in my view Trump wouldn’t be President if not for Bob. It doesn’t get much more effective than that.'" Patterson, who originally recruited Mercer for Renaissance from IBM says he always found "his susceptibility to conspiracy theories" strange. He was always babbling on about how the Clintons murdered people-- hard core fringe craziness. No one likes to talk about it but Mercer is an unadulterated racist scumbag, unaware he's a racist scumbag. Steeped in incredible ignorance, Mercer is also an aggressive climate change denier.

She noted that another ex-Renaissance employee, David Magerman told the Wall Street Journal that "Mercer’s political opinions 'show contempt for the social safety net that he doesn’t need, but many Americans do.' He also said that Mercer wants the U.S. government to be 'shrunk down to the size of a pinhead.' Several former colleagues of Mercer’s said that his views are akin to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Magerman told me, 'Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.' Magerman added, 'He thinks society is upside down-- that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.' He said that this mind-set was typical of 'instant billionaires' in finance, who 'have no stake in society,' unlike the industrialists of the past, who 'built real things.' Another former high-level Renaissance employee said, 'Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.'"

Mercer's fortune has allowed him and his family to indulge their wildest material fantasies. He and Diana moved into a waterfront estate in Head of the Harbor, a seaside community on Long Island, and called the property Owl’s Nest. Mercer, a gun enthusiast, built a private pistol range there. (He is also a part owner of Centre Firearms, a company that claims to have the country’s largest private cache of machine guns, as well as a weapon that Arnold Schwarzenegger wielded in “The Terminator.”) At Owl’s Nest, Mercer has installed a $2.7-million model-train set in his basement; trains chug through a miniature landscape half the size of a basketball court. The toy train attracted unwanted tabloid headlines, such as “boo-hoo over 2m choo-choo,” after Mercer sued the manufacturer for overcharging him. (The case was settled.)

Mercer retains a domestic staff that includes a butler and a physician; both accompany him whenever he travels. But this, too, has sparked bad publicity. In 2013, three members of the household staff sued to recover back wages, claiming that Mercer had failed to pay overtime, as promised, and that he had deducted pay as punishment for poor work. One infraction that Mercer cited as a “demerit” was a failure to replace shampoo bottles that were two-thirds empty. This suit, too, was settled.

Mercer has bought several spectacular yachts, including the Sea Owl, which is two hundred and three feet long. A 2013 photo shows the gates of the Tower Bridge, in London, raised high to allow it to proceed up the Thames. The Sea Owl has a crew of eighteen, and features a hand-carved “tree” that twists through four levels of decks. Designed, in part, as a place where the extended Mercer family can gather, the yacht has many fanciful and didactic touches for the Mercer grandchildren, such as frescoes that allude to the discoveries of Darwin and Newton. There’s a self-playing Steinway, a spa pool, and an elevator.

Mercer has given major credit to his family for the yacht’s special details, telling Boat International that they are “endowed with both exceptionally good taste and exceptionally strong opinions.” The Mercer daughters are indeed forceful. When a Manhattan bakery that the sisters loved, Ruby et Violette, threatened to close, depriving the Mercers of their favorite cookies, they bought it. In a Fox News interview, Heather Sue recalled telling the others, “We are going to buy a bakery!” The Mercers still own the business, although it is now online-only.

After graduating from Duke, Heather Sue began competing in high-stakes poker tournaments; she is admired on the circuit for her cool manner. When Mercer insisted that Heather Sue take a security guard with her, Santavicca said, “they became friends, then they became whatever, and now they’re married, with two beautiful daughters.”

Jenji has a law degree from Georgetown, but she has pursued an interest in horses instead. In 2008, the Mercers bought a horse farm in Wellington, Florida, for $5.9 million. Jenji and Diana regularly attend the Winter Equestrian Festival, in Palm Beach. They are investors in an equestrian center in North Carolina, and have announced plans to open one in Colorado. Diana is also listed as the owner of Equinimity, a horse stable in Florida. According to the stable’s Web site, it specializes in Equine Facilitated Learning, a system that teaches “non-verbal leadership and interpersonal communication skills through non-predatory horse-inspired wisdom.”

Rebekah worked for a few years at Renaissance after graduating from Stanford. A former colleague recalls her as smart but haughty. In 2003, she married a Frenchman, Sylvain Mirochnikoff, who is a managing director of Morgan Stanley. They had four children and bought a twenty-eight-million-dollar property-- six apartments joined together-- at Trump Place, on the Upper West Side. Now forty-three, she is divorcing Mirochnikoff. She homeschools the children, but in recent years she has become consumed by politics. “She is the First Lady of the alt-right,” Christopher Ruddy, the owner of the conservative outlet Newsmax Media, said. “She’s respected in conservative circles, and clearly Trump has embraced her in a big way.”

Amity Shlaes, the conservative writer and the chair of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, where Rebekah Mercer is a trustee, told me, “In the dull crowds of policy, the Mercers are enchanting firecrackers.” She likened the Mercer sisters to the Schuylers-- the high-spirited, witty sisters made famous by the musical Hamilton. Shlaes went on, “The Mercers have strong values, they’re kind of funny, and they’re really bright. Their brains are almost too strong.” Rebekah, she noted, supports several think tanks, but grows tired of talk; she “is into action.”

After the Citizens United decision, in 2010, the Mercers were among the first people to take advantage of the opportunity to spend more money on politics... In New York, reporters discovered that Robert Mercer was the sole donor behind a million-dollar advertising campaign attacking what it described as a plan to build a “Ground Zero Mosque” in Manhattan. The proposed building was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero. The ads, which were meant to boost a Conservative Party candidate for governor, were condemned as Islamophobic.

In Oregon, the Mercers gave six hundred and forty thousand dollars to a group that attacked Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, with a barrage of negative ads during the final weeks of his 2010 reëlection campaign. This effort also failed—it didn’t help when DeFazio announced that a New York hedge-fund manager and his daughter were meddling in Oregon politics.

Press accounts speculated that Robert Mercer may have targeted DeFazio because DeFazio had proposed a tax on a type of high-volume stock trade that Renaissance frequently made. But several associates of Mercer’s say that the truth is stranger. DeFazio’s Republican opponent was Arthur Robinson—the biochemist, sheep rancher, and climate-change denialist. The Mercers became his devoted supporters after reading Access to Energy, an offbeat scientific newsletter that he writes. The family has given at least $1.6 million in donations to Robinson’s Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Some of the money was used to buy freezers in which Robinson is storing some fourteen thousand samples of human urine. Robinson has said that, by studying the urine, he will find new ways of extending the human life span.

...In 2011, Bannon drafted a business plan for the Mercers that called for them to invest ten million dollars in Breitbart News, in exchange for a large stake. At the time, the Breitbart site was little more than a collection of blogs. The Mercers signed the deal that June, and one of its provisions placed Bannon on the company’s board.

Nine months later, Andrew Breitbart died, at forty-three, of a heart attack, and Bannon became the site’s executive chairman, overseeing its content. The Mercers, meanwhile, became Bannon’s principal patrons. The Washington Post recently published a house-rental lease that Bannon signed in 2013, on which he said that his salary at Breitbart News was seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Under Bannon’s leadership, the Web site expanded dramatically, adding a fleet of full-time writers. It became a new force on the right, boosting extreme insurgents against the G.O.P. establishment, such as David Brat, who, in 2014, took the seat of Eric Cantor, the Virginia congressman. But it also provided a public forum for previously shunned white-nationalist, sexist, and racist voices. One pundit hired by Bannon was Milo Yiannopoulos, who specialized in puerile insults. (He recently resigned from the site, after a video of him lewdly defending pederasty went viral.)

In 2014, Bannon began hosting a radio show that often featured Patrick Caddell, who effectively had been banished by Democratic Party leaders after years of tempestuous campaigns and fallings-out. On the air, Caddell floated dark theories about Hillary Clinton, and often sounded a lot like Bannon, describing “economic nationalism” as the driving force in American politics. Under Barack Obama, he said, America had turned into a “banana republic.”

By 2016, Breitbart News claims, it had the most shared political content on Facebook, giving the Mercers a platform that no other conservative donors could match. Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics.”

The Mercers’ investment in Breitbart enabled Bannon to promote anti-establishment politicians whom the mainstream media dismissed, including Trump. In 2011, David Bossie, the head of the conservative group Citizens United, introduced Trump to Bannon; at the time, Trump was thinking about running against Obama. Bannon and Trump met at Trump Tower and discussed a possible campaign. Trump decided against the idea, but the two kept in touch, and Bannon gave Trump admiring coverage. Bannon noticed that, when Trump spoke to crowds, people were electrified. Bannon began to think that Trump might be “the one” who could shake up American politics.

...Until Election Day in 2016, Mercer and Hanley-- two of the richest men in America-- paid Caddell to keep collecting polling data that enabled them to exploit the public’s resentment of élites such as themselves. Caddell’s original goal was to persuade his sponsors to back an independent candidate, but they never did. In 2014, Caddell and two partners went public with what they called the Candidate Smith project, which promoted data suggesting that the public wanted a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” figure-- an outsider-- as President. During the next year or so, Caddell’s poll numbers tilted more and more away from the establishment. Caddell’s partner Bob Perkins, an advertising executive and a former finance director of the Republican Party, told me, “By then, it was clear there wouldn’t be a third-party candidate. But we thought that a Republican who harnessed the angst had a real chance.” At one point, Caddell tested all the declared Presidential candidates, including Trump, as a possible Mr. Smith. “People didn’t think Trump had the temperament to be President,” Caddell said. “He clearly wasn’t the best Smith, but he was the only Smith. He was the only one with the resources and the name recognition.” As Bernie Sanders’s campaign showed, the populist rebellion wasn’t partisan. Caddell worried, though, that there were dark undertones in the numbers: Americans were increasingly yearning for a “strong man” to fix the country.

Caddell circulated his research to anyone who would listen, and that included people inside the Trump campaign. “Pat Caddell is like an Old Testament prophet,” Bannon said. “He’s been talking about alienation of the voters for twenty-five years, and people didn’t pay attention-- but he’s a brilliant guy, and he nailed it.” The political consultant and strategist Roger Stone, who is a longtime Trump confidant, was fascinated by the research, and he forwarded a memo about it to Trump. Caddell said that he spoke with Trump about “some of the data,” but noted, “With Trump, it’s all instinct-- he is not exactly a deep-dive thinker.”

Rebekah’s father, meanwhile, can no longer be considered a political outsider. David Magerman, in his essay for the Inquirer, notes that Mercer “has surrounded our President with his people, and his people have an outsized influence over the running of our country, simply because Robert Mercer paid for their seats.” He writes, “Everyone has a right to express their views.” But, he adds, “when the government becomes more like a corporation, with the richest 0.001% buying shares and demanding board seats, then we cease to be a representative democracy.” Instead, he warns, “we become an oligarchy.”

Two faces of pure and unadulterated evil-- on Long Island

An aside unrelated to the Mercers: when Democrats think "a big tent" means encouraging inherently corrupt conservative careerists-- think Pat Caddell, Rahm Emanuel or Debbie Wasserman Schultz, think the Blue Dogs and New Dems and the "ex"-Republicans-- to take leadership positions in the party, the results are INEVITABLE: the Party sinks into a wretched and unsupportable pool of shit, which is where we find it today-- the other reason for the rise of Trumpism, beyond Putin, beyond Comey, beyond the Mercers.

You Think It Was All Putin? Meet Robert Mercer-- The Billionaire Behind Trump's Ratty Curtain

Strange and elusive Long Island hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer was the "thread between a seemingly random cast of actors" who turned Trump's foundering campaign around-- Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, David Bossie and Cambridge Analytica. Mercer and his equally contemptible daughter, Rebekah, had been eyeing Señor Trumpanzee ever since their first choice, right-wing fanatic Ted Cruz, dropped out of the primaries. Cruz and Trump don't have much in common but the Mercer's felt they could easily mold Trump into what they wanted by surrounding him with their own people and taking over the campaign. Mercer invested $15.5 million in Trump's campaign, making him Trumpanzee's single largest donor.

In 2015, Mercer had single-handedly catapulted Cruz to the front of the Republican field, throwing more than $13 million into a SuperPAC he created for the now failed candidate. But with the Trump campaign faltering and struggling for support, there's a second chance for the Mercers to make a big bet. The Trump campaign is well aware of this. In fact sources within Mercer's SuperPAC would later tell Bloomberg News that shortly after Cruz drops out of the race, Ivanka Trump and her wealthy developer husband, Jared Kushner, approached the Mercers asking if they'd be willing to shift their support behind Trump. The answer is an eventual but resounding yes.

In the months leading up to Trump's presidential win, the Mercers would prove a formidable force, Beginning after the disastrous Republican convention in July, they would furnish the Trump campaign with millions of dollars and new leadership. They would also furnish it with something more: a vast network of non-profits, strategists, media companies, research institutes, and SuperPACs that they themselves funded and largely controlled.

...The Mercers' political infrastructure is so entrenched that Rebekah Mercer herself sits on the 16-person executive committee of Trump's transition team. Mercer's foray into the White House may seem to have been born partly out of luck especially with Trump instead of Cruz as his stalking horse, but his rise to power was systematic and it was years in the making. The web of connections Mercer's built over the last decade is vast and complex. It includes efforts to dismantle tax law and weaken the IRS. It's about funding quack scientists and conspiracy theorists who blame the government for, among other things, for playing role in the San Bernardino massacre. Or of colluding with the United Nations and using Climate Change as an excuse to implement environmental laws meant to depopulate America's Midwest.

...Casino capitalism-- [with a healthy dose of tax fraud, to the tune of billions of dollars]-- has given people like Robert and Rebekah Mercer riches and power beyond most peoples' imagination. But the role of activist billionaires in American politics isn't new; it's just become stronger as wealth is concentrated in fewer hands. With the top 1% of Americans today holding onto 40% of the country's wealth and with much of that increase taking place in the finance and energy sectors of the economy, the rise of people like Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers reflects how billionaires have gradually taken more direct control over politicians and the state.

...In the end, there are no workers or little guys on the Trump team, only the allies of rainmakers Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the billionaires whose political hedge pushed Donald Trump into the White House.

Right-Wing Crackpots Robert And Rebekah Mercer: "We Are Completely Indifferent To Mr. Trump's Locker Room Braggadocio"

Rebekah Mercer, Long Island billionaire (center), doesn't care whose pussy Trump grabs

I don't think of myself as a philanthropist; in fact, it never crossed my mind until I sat down to write this post. But recently I gave a 7-figure endowment to a university, earmarked specifically to a program for kids from extremely poor families. About a year ago the school decided to honor me with a dinner and ceremony on campus. I was very flattered... until they told me who my fellow honoree was to be. It was none other than Ted Cruz's biggest single campaign donor, Robert Mercer, the far right extremist hedge fund operator. Since then, he's become Trump's biggest single campaign donor. But back then, he had already given Ted Cruz SuperPAC, Make America Number 1, $15,500,000. Uh oh. That's not likely to make good dinner convo. And he's a really big donor-- not some meager endowment, but whole buildings and programs. Fortunately someone at the university read DWT and figured out it was an unfortunate pairing and decided on two separate ceremonies instead.

So... I never met the guy. I know he's a urine fanatic, a poker fanatic and a right-wing fanatic and that he cheats his employees out of their miserly wages, by docking their pay if they forget to close a door, allow a picture on the wall to shift downward or restock his shampoo. He would keep score of each employee with his own demerit system. Someone could lose $20 if a bottle of shampoo get below a third full, for example.

Unlike Trump, Mercer is both an ideologue and an actual billionaire. He's the man behind the curtain in the Trump campaign and, although, he wouldn't be caught dead inside Trump Tower himself, he controls the operation through three of his employees, Steve Bannon, the campaign CEO, and KellyAnne Conway, the campaign manager and David Bossie, vicious, rabid attack dog. He placed all 3 miscreants inside the campaign, presumably after they proved themselves by keeping the shampoo bottles at Mercer Manor topped off.

Anyone who held out a glimmer of hope that Mercer might pressure Trump to step out of the race and let Cruz or Pence run in his place, were disappointed yesterday when Mattea Gold at the Washington Post reported that the Mercers are still as enthusiastic about Trump as ever. She wrote that "GOP mega-donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, two of the most influential figures in Trump's orbit, said Saturday that their support for the GOP nominee has not faltered in the slightest after a tape revealed crude remarks he made about women a decade ago."

Either the Trump Tower statements about this were written at Mercer Manor or the Mercer Manor statement was written at Trump Tower. Here it is in all it's full right-wing lunatic fringe glory:

If Mr. Trump had told Billy Bush, whoever that is, earlier this year that he was for open borders, open trade, and executive actions in pursuit of gun control, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. If he had admitted to Mr. Bush that he had profited privately by allowing the sale to Russia of 20% of US uranium deposits or that he had amassed his personal fortune not by hard work in the private sector but by selling favors to foreigners on the American taxpayers' dime, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. If he had argued that he needed both a public and a private position on issues facing the American public, we would certainly be rethinking our support for him. And finally if Trump had serially terrorized and silenced the victims of violent sexual assault whom he feared could damage his political career, we would most definitely be rethinking our support for him.

Donald Trump's uncensored comments, both old and new, have been echoed and dissected in the media repeatedly in an effort to kindle among his supporters a conflagration of outrage commensurate with the media's own faux outrage. Can anyone really be surprised that Mr. Trump could have said to Mr. Bush such things as he has already admitted saying? No. We are completely indifferent to Mr. Trump's locker room braggadocio.

The same media that resolutely looked away when the most powerful man in the world, a sitting U.S. president with multiple violent sexual assaults to his credit, snared an impressionable young intern in his web and ruined her life, now expects us to gasp with revulsion at Mr. Trump's irreverent comments. America is finally fed up and disgusted with its political elite. Trump is channeling this disgust and those among the political elite who quake before the boombox of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on November 8th. We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it. We, and Americans across the country and around the world, stand steadfastly behind Donald J. Trump.

A source close to Rebekah Mercer told us just minutes ago that she is beside herself with rage, claiming Bannon wrote "that trash" and fed it to the press without getting her permission to release it. What goes around, comes around, as they say-- the Mercers paid to bring those poor tormented props who accuse Bill and Hillary Clinton on sexual assault to the debate last night. The Mercers paid their airline tickets, hotels and all their expenses. It turned out to be very remunerative for the accusers.


UPDATE: Other Republican Donors...

Although the crazy Mercer family is doubling down on their investment Trump and Breitbart, CNBC reported that two major Republican donors who sent money to Trump, want their money back. Both are "mortified" to have discovered Trump's sick, predatory attitude towards women. ""I cannot support a sexist man," wrote one. "I have three young children and will not support a crude sexist man," the second donor wrote. "I expect a refund of my donation. Please process immediately and I thank you for your help." Both are not just donors but "bundlers" and one of them raised over a million dollars for Trump.

The World's Second Most Evil Billionaire-- After Putin-- Put Trump In The White House... What Else Does He Have In Mind?

Two faces of evil-- pure evil threatening planet earth

The State University of New York at Stony Brook, my alma mater, proposed having a dinner honoring me and one of their major donors, someone who didn't go to the school but who lived a stone's throw from the Long Island campus. I recognized the name. At the time he was the single biggest contributor to Ted Cruz's presidential campaign-- far right crackpot and hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. I suggested they check out DWT more closely and re-think their plans. It didn't take long before there were two dinners on two separate evenings.

Mercer and his lunatic fringe daughter, Rebekah, came on my radar considerably before the media put the two nuts into the public consciousness... and I've been warning this community about them since 2012. Many people, though, are still discovering the family that is probably the biggest threat to American democracy in the entire world. Yesterday the New York Daily News let their readers know about the monsters in the castle just up the road. Reporter Adam Edelman accused Mercer-- not Putin-- of being "the man behind the millions of Twitter bots President Trump counts on as followers who could be employed to target voters with misleading or fake news on social media... [T]he scheme relies on the quiet guidance of Robert Mercer, a reclusive Republican mega-donor and staunch Trump supporter." Yeah, I forgot to mention, Mercer went from being the world's biggest Cruz contributor to the world's biggest Trump contributor. Staying behind the curtain, he and the daughter also hooked Trump up with-- and paid-- Bannon, Bossie, Kellyann Con-man and several of the other monstrosities who run Trump's White House, as well as with Cambridge Analytica, which, along with Breitbart News, Mercer owns. So who is this guy destroying the world?

He’s a former computer scientist who, decades ago, helped build the technology at IBM that the computer giant would later use to create its Watson super-computer. He also helped other companies like Apple form the basis for its Siri platform.

Trump, meanwhile, has accrued among his 30 million Twitter followers — 15 million of which are actually bots that experts have told the Daily News could be “weaponized” to spread fake and misleading news stories that favor the White House or distract from the scandals it now faces.

But with the subtle introduction of advanced technology, by individuals familiar with artificial intelligence, their effectiveness as it pertains to targeting users and interacting with them could escalate rapidly.

“Fooling humans into doing things in the electronic realm turned out to be really easy,” said Simon Crosby, the chief technology officer at a firm called Bromium, pointing to well-documented campaigns that are thought to have influenced the 2016 presidential race and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom.

“But with a few extra steps that seem available in the right circles, it could get even easier,” he added.

Some of the technology that’s part of Watson, explained Crosby and two other computer scientists who preferred to keep their identifies private, can “quickly build, test and deploy bots or virtual agents across mobile devices or messaging platforms to create natural conversations between apps and users.”

That technology is even built to understand a user’s personality, tone and emotion and interact naturally with people.

“You have arbitrary and ridiculous information spread very quickly, and now to targeted user more susceptible to believing it and spreading it, and we now know that it influences people. We saw it in the election, with Brexit,” he said.

“Ultimately, the problem is that anybody can talk to anybody, especially if ‘anybody’ is a bot on Twitter or Facebook who knows a lot about you.”

All of the scientists were keen to point that such efforts would not be employed by Watson, an entity owned and patented by IBM.

Rather, they indicated, it would appear to make sense for a man familiar with its inner workings to draw on his own expertise to help hone a bot-operation for a political candidate.

While pretty much any one computer scientist with the right motives could help someone in the Trump camp do such a thing-- most AI technology at this moment is open source and freely available online if one knows where to look-- the proximity of Mercer to the Trump camp, in particular, raises questions.

Long before making his fortune at Renaissance Technologies, his current hedge fund, Mercer, 70, worked at IBM, where his name appeared on several patents and on in many publications and studies about “Brown clustering,” which the computer giant used to create its Watson Artificial Intelligence systems.

As usual, Mercer refused to answer any questions about his involvement with Trump and with Cambridge Analytica.

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.