The Most Powerful Woman in GOP Politics
politico.com
How Jewess Rebekah Mercer, at the center of the Trump campaign, is reshaping conservatism and the Republican Party.
A New York hedge fund heiress who co-owns a boutique cookie bakery has emerged as one of the most influential figures behind Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and arguably the conservative movement as a whole.
Leaning on the fortune amassed by her father, Rebekah Mercer has steered her family’s rapid rise over the course of just a few years from the conservative fringe to the white-hot center of the most dramatic election season in years. And no matter the results on Nov. 8, the Mercers are positioned to reshape the American right for years to come in their anti-establishment image.
But the family’s rise, facilitated by an increasingly aggressive network of Mercer-backed institutions and operatives, has prompted worry within the GOP about an attempted takeover, and questions from across the political spectrum about what the Mercers intend to do with the influence they’ve purchased.
Efforts to deduce the family’s intentions have focused largely on the family patriarch, Robert Mercer, 70, a pioneer in quantitative trading. But Bob Mercer, as he’s known, is mostly only writing multimillion-dollar checks that fund the family’s political operation; it is his daughter, Rebekah Mercer, 42, who is running the operation, according to more than 15 personal and political associates of the family.
It is Rebekah Mercer, according to these sources, whose frustration with what she saw as the political ineffectiveness of the Koch brothers’ network led her to redirect Mercer money to build a rival operation.
It is Rebekah Mercer who directs a family foundation that, according to tax returns, has more than doubled its giving between 2011 and 2014, donating $34.6 million to 30 conservative nonprofits over which she holds varying degrees of sway — from the Government Accountability Institute, which produced "Clinton Cash," a book that damaged Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, to the venerable Heritage Foundation, where she sits on the board.
It is the same Rebekah Mercer who urges campaigns and clients who want her father’s funding to hire a data firm owned largely by the family called Cambridge Analytica, which now counts Trump’s campaign among its clients.
And it is Rebekah Mercer whose meeting with Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, reportedly set the stage for the Mercers to switch their support to Donald Trump after the family’s first choice, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the race, rather than retreating to the sidelines as so many other big donors did.
Rebekah Mercer now sits at the nexus of Trump’s universe. So influential has she become that her conversation with Trump during an August fundraiser in the Hamptons has been widely credited with spurring the rookie candidate to shake up his campaign team by turning its leadership over to two of her closest confidants.
Pollster Kellyanne Conway, who has worked with Mercer on a pro-Cruz super PAC, became campaign manager, while the new job of campaign CEO went to Steve Bannon, a campaign novice who helped run both the Government Accountability Institute — which has received at least $2 million from the Mercer foundation — and Breitbart News, the intensely pro-Trump nationalist website in which the Mercers have invested. This month, Trump rounded out his newly reconfigured campaign leadership by bringing in yet another operative with whom Mercer has worked — David Bossie, who previously ran both an anti-Clinton super PAC that received $2 million from Bob Mercer in July and an anti-Clinton nonprofit called Citizens United that received $3.6 million from the Mercers’ foundation from 2012 through 2014.
Rebekah Mercer did not respond to requests for comment. Conway, Bannon and Bossie either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. And most conservative insiders approached for this story were loath to speak on the record for fear it might jeopardize their chances of receiving funding from Mercer's intensely private family. Mercer, some said, has scolded allies for calling attention to her — even when it’s been positive.
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