UH OH: RNC warns candidates and donors to STAY AWAY from the Kochs

by The Right Scoop

Looks like the RNC has adopted Trump’s agenda with regard to the Kochs and is now warning both candidates and donors to stay away from them:

POLITICO – The Republican National Committee is sending a warning shot to major GOP donors not to play ball with the powerful Koch political network, escalating a fight between President Donald Trump’s allies and the Kochs.

The move follows a weekend retreat in Colorado at which Koch network officials criticized the Trump administration, hinted they would work with Democrats, and announced they would not help a Republican candidate in a key 2018 Senate race.

“Some groups who claim to support conservatives forgo their commitment when they decide their business interests are more important than those of the country or Party,” RNC Chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel wrote in a memo to party contributors on Thursday afternoon. “This is unacceptable.”

They are claiming that the Kochs are not supporting the president when it infringes on their business interests, accusing them of putting business over country.

From what I understand, most of the issues revolve around Trump’s trade practices that he’s been pushing lately.

Via the racist NY Slimes:

The back-and-forth between the two men began with threats from Mr. Koch and his top political aides over the weekend to withhold support for Republican candidates who do not help enact the free trade, budget-slashing, government-shrinking policies that have always been at the center of the Koch political philosophy but are of little interest to the president. The Koch network has said it plans to spend up to $400 million on politics and policy in the 2018 election cycle.

In a video released to the media during a Koch network retreat in Colorado Springs on Saturday, Mr. Koch was unsparing in his criticism of the kind of nationalist, protectionist trade policies that the president favors. And while he did not mention Mr. Trump’s name, at times he appeared to be speaking directly about the president and many of his supporters.

Mr. Koch denounced a “rise in protectionism” in which countries, organizations and individuals are “doing whatever they can to close themselves off from the new, hold on to the past, and prevent change.”

“This is a natural tendency,” Mr. Koch added, “but it’s a destructive one.”

And the Koch’s have already put their new plan in action by pulling support for a North Dakota Republican trying to defeat Heidi Heitkamp:

On Monday the Koch political operation followed up with an opening shot against a high-profile 2018 Republican candidate: Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-funded national grass-roots network, said the group would not be supporting Representative Kevin Cramer of North Dakota in his bid to unseat the Democratic incumbent senator, Heidi Heitkamp, in one of the year’s most competitive races.

This was bound to happen and I’m surprised it’s waited this long to surface. Trump is a protectionist on trade and it makes it difficult to support him or anyone else who supports this. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all about Trump getting to the point of free trade, but there’s no guarantee that his high-tariff trade war will result in free trade with all the countries he’s targeted. So we’re likely gonna be in this trade war for a long time unless Trump finally decides to relent, assuming they don’t.

And now the RNC is jumped on his bandwagon and….it looks like we’ve got a mild civil war breaking out.

The rest of the letter revolves around the fact that the Koch brothers have developed a rival data system to that of the RNC, which the RNC explains could inhibit Republicans from winning elections, as it is in competition with theirs. Without knowing much about how these data systems work, that seems to be a more reasonable approach to this argument they are making.

You can read the letter below:

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UPDATE:

Here’s an interesting thread on the Koch brothers fight with Trump that gives a little insight into it from Koch’s point of view. Not taking his side on everything here, especially the idea of supporting Democrats. Just giving you a little more on background:













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