The powerful network of political groups funded by conservative billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David Koch has announced it is “turning the page” on Donald Trump and looking for another Republican to endorse the 2024 presidential bid.
“To write a new chapter for our country, we must turn the page on the past,” wrote Emily Seidel — CEO of the network’s flagship organization, Americans for Prosperity — in a statement released Sunday.
“The best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 to represent a new chapter. The American people have shown they are ready to move forward, so AFP will help them do that,” he added.
AFP doesn’t name Trump specifically, but its perspective on him and preference for someone “new” is clear.
An associated super PAC — AFP Action — is also “ready to support a Republican presidential candidate who can lead our country forward and who can win,” the memo added. AFP Action spent about $80 million in the 2022 election cycle, according to campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets.
AFP also pointed out that she will no longer run in the primaries, but will become active in the early contests, following the poor overall election performance of Trump-backed Republican extremists in the various primaries. The AFP note said in the note that the Republican Party “nominates bad candidates who stand for things that go against basic American principles.”
AFP was founded in 2004 by oil barons and industrialists Charles and David Koch, who have heavily funded the right-wing “tea party” movement of the Republican Party. David Koch died in 2019.
Charles Koch has since condemned the division of the nation that he sees as harmful to American life and even its economic climate, and says he wants to help heal the rift.
“Boy, I was wrong; what a mess,” he wrote of the stark partisan divide in his 2020 book, “Believe in People.”
Trump criticized the brothers – who supported free trade rather than Trump’s economic nationalism and isolationism – as “globalists” and “total joke.“
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