Billionaire Koch’s donor network says it opposes Trump’s re-election

The US donor network led by billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has signalled it will oppose Donald Trump’s bid to secure the 2024 Republican presidential nomination in the latest rift between wealthy conservative backers and the former president.

“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter,” Emily Seidel, chief executive of the network’s political campaign group, Americans for Prosperity, wrote in a statement posted online on Sunday. She added the group would support a candidate in the presidential primary “who can win”.

Announcing AFP’s intention to get involved in more primaries, Seidel said the Republican party was “nominating bad candidates who are advocating for things that go against core American principles. And the American people are rejecting them.” This left Democrats free to respond with “more extreme policies”, Seidel said.

Trump formally launched his third bid for the White House just one week after the midterm elections last November, despite Republican candidates he endorsed underperforming expectations in races up and down the ballot.

To date, Trump is the only candidate to have announced a bid for the Republican nomination.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has faced growing calls to throw his hat in the ring after he cruised to re-election as governor of Florida by nearly 20 points in last November’s midterm elections. But he has so far side-stepped questions about 2024 and said he is focused on the upcoming legislative session in Florida, which ends in May.

A YouGov poll, conducted after November’s elections, showed that 42 per cent of Americans who identified as Republicans or leaned towards the Republican party said they would prefer to see DeSantis as their party’s nominee in 2024, compared with 35 per cent who said they preferred Trump.

Nikki Haley, who was Trump’s ambassador to the UN and is admired in Republican circles, has said she would not challenge the former president, but told Fox News late last month that she was “leaning in” to a 2024 bid.

The Koch network joins the Club for Growth, the conservative low-tax group that once backed Trump, and other high-profile Republican donors like hedge fund executive Kenneth Griffin and Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman in opposing Trump’s current campaign.

In its published memo, AFP said it engaged in 22 primaries at the federal level and nearly 200 more in the states last year, winning 80 per cent of the races in which it was involved.