A network of powerful political groups funded by the conservative billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother, David Koch, has announced that it is “turning the page” on Donald Trump and is looking for other Republicans to step down in the 2024 presidential election.
“To write a new chapter for our country, we must turn the page in the month,” Emily Seidel – CEO of the flagship organization network, America for Prosperity – wrote in a memo released Sunday.
“The best thing for the country is to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter. The American people have shown that they are ready to move forward, so the AFP will help them,” he added.
AFP did not name Trump specifically, but his perspective on him, and his preference for the “new,” is clear.
A related super PAC – Action AFP – is also “ready to support the 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 tracking website OpenSecrets.
AFP also confirmed that it will no longer come out in the primary but will be active in the contest earlier, after the poor performance in the general election of the GOP extremists supported by Trump in various primaries. The AFP memo argued in a memo that the Republican Party “nominated a bad candidate who advocates things that go against America’s core principles.”
AFP was founded in 2004 by oil and manufacturing barons Charles and David Koch, who largely fund the Republican Party’s right-wing “tea party” movement. David Koch died in 2019.
Charles Koch has begun rejecting the divisions in the country he sees as damaging American life and even the business climate — and says he wants to help heal those rifts.
“Boy we messed up; what a mess,” he wrote of the blistering partisan divide in his 2020 book, “Believe in People.”
Trump has blasted the brothers – who support free trade over Trump’s economic nationalism and isolationism – as “globalists” and “total joke.“