By
When Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination in Cleveland,
some of the most powerful people in the party had a ticket to watch from
Suite 245 in Quicken Loans Arena. Invited to the cushy skybox were
financiers, real estate developers, a supermarket magnate and an
ambassador. Hardly anyone knew it at the time, but the list also
included a pair of political insiders who would soon take control of the
Trump campaign: Kellyanne Conway, a consultant who had spent the GOP
primary toiling for his top rival, and Steve Bannon, the boss of
Breitbart News. Both were guests of a woman named Rebekah Mercer.
Bannon and Conway are hardly the only Republicans who rely on Mercer as a
benefactor. To help pay for the convention, the family foundation
Mercer runs wrote a $500,000 check–pocket change compared with the tens
of millions of dollars it has showered on a sprawling web of
conservative foundations, political networks and research institutions.
That’s not counting the family’s reputed eight-figure investment in
Breitbart, the house organ of the right-wing populist movement that
fueled Trump’s ascent, and in Cambridge Analytica, a controversial data
firm hired by a growing number of GOP candidates. Rebekah’s father
Robert Mercer, a New York hedge-fund executive, has forked over more
than $20 million in the 2016 election, which makes him the single
largest Republican donor this cycle. Before the Mercers backed Trump,
they bankrolled Texas Senator Ted Cruz through a family super PAC that
employed Conway.
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Source: Time Magazine
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