TRUMP BOOTS AUTHOR FROM GOLF COURSE

Donald Trump personally booted the author of an unflattering biography off Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach on Friday. Harry Hurt III, who penned the 1993 biography, Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump, had come to play with billionaire industrialist David. H. Koch, a Trump club member, and two other golfers. Hurt, who has a scratch handicap and plays in colorful knickers, walked over to Trump on the practice range prior to his group’s assigned tee time, only to suffer a tongue lashing from the president-elect. “I said, ‘Congratulations, sir,’ and shook his hand,” Hurt recalls. “Trump said, ‘You were rough on me, Harry. Really rough. That shit you wrote.’” Hurt says he looked Trump in the eye, and said, “It’s all true,” to which Trump rejoined, “Not in the way you wrote it.” Among the juicy tidbits in Hurt’s tome was Ivana Trump’s allegation in a sworn deposition that Trump had “raped” her during their divorce battle. Trump told Hurt it was “inappropriate” for him to play at the club, and had his security detail escort Hurt, Koch, and their playing partners to the parking lot. “David was appalled,” says Hurt. “He branded Trump ‘petty’ and vulgar.’ We played Emerald Dunes instead, which is a much, much better golf course than Trump International.”

Others went further in expressing their discontent: Representatives of Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who helped to bankroll the rise of the tea party, warned the brothers could sit out the presidential campaign entirely — or even back Hillary Clinton.

The Koch brothers have successfully dominated the Republican party’s approach to writing budgets. A recently published study revealed that the vast majority of budgets proposed by Republicans, in over a decade, were influenced by the Koch brothers.

When we add up the numbers, three-quarters (76%) of all of the budgets of GOP-conservative organizations newly created since 2002 turn out to be controlled by Koch organizations. Remarkably, more than four-fifths (82%) of the new budget money attributed to extra-party collective funders belongs to the Koch-affiliated consortia launched after 2002.

This is mind-blowing. These days, the GOP essentially does not write a budget unless an organization owned by the two billionaire industrialists tells them what it should contain.    

The political machine that Charles Koch launched a dozen years ago in a Chicago hotel conference room with 16 other rich conservatives has exploded in size and influence in the past few elections and now eclipses the official GOP in key areas.

Koch and his brother David Koch have quietly assembled, piece by piece, a privatized political and policy advocacy operation like no other in American history that today includes hundreds of donors and employs 1,200 full-time, year-round staffers in 107 offices nationwide. That’s about 3½ times as many employees as the Republican National Committee and its congressional campaign arms had on their main payrolls last month, according to POLITICO’s analysis of tax and campaign documents and interviews with sources familiar with the network. And the staggering sum the network plans to spend in the 2016 election run-up ― $889 million ― is more than double what the RNC spent in the previous presidential cycle.

While rich donors have held considerable sway over the political process in past eras, the Kochs’ network is different. Its mission is in some ways more ambitious than the Republican Party’s ― to fundamentally reshape American public life around a libertarian-infused brand of conservatism ― but it also is encroaching on the GOP’s traditional turf. The Koch network’s data operation is now regarded by many candidates and campaigns as superior to the party’s, and it has invested in efforts to become the leading force on the right for training activists and registering voters. Its biggest group, Americans for Prosperity, plans to place full-time staff in all but eight states by late 2016 and aspires to copy the National Rifle Association’s broad-based membership plan for longevity, according to a POLITICO investigation. It found that the group has even discussed expanding its influence by writing and pushing model state budgets, a technique similar to the one used by the American Legislative Exchange Council to push various state legislative initiatives.