Jane Mayer
Jane Mayer
Jane Meredith Mayer is an American investigative journalist who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1995. In recent years, she has written for that publication on money in politics, government prosecution of whistleblowers, and the United States Predator drone program...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth24 November 1955
CountryUnited States of America
hate big-government
[The Kochs] they hate big government.
conservative trade
Donald Trump actually is a pretty big-government conservative. He doesn't see eye-to-eye with them [the Kochs] on trade.
different trade free-trade
They [the Kochs] want free trade and cheap labour. They own the second-largest private company in America, which is a huge multinational corporation. So they are on a different wavelength.
party arguing republican
I would argue that there's been a backlash this year [2016]. They [the Kochs] pushed the [Republican] party too far right. The other thing that the backlash is against is the sense that politicians have been bought and sold.
president accused barack
We would see another president being accused of being illegitimate, and undermined from day one, which is exactly what these donors did to [Barack] Obama.
Money has much more power down the ballot.
office individual
The smaller the office, the more power individuals with big money have.
running country writing
What I write about is how much influence it's had in things like state legislatures and governorships and congressional races. The other thing that's even more important in the long run is that very extreme money has affected the ecosystem of ideology in the country.
thinking people effort
There's been a 40-year effort on the far right to build up think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, to push a particular ideology. That's really where the impact is that people don't see.
fall libertarian free-market
David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.
party people unhappy
This year [2016] we're seeing a really strange upending [of the party]. The money was coming from these super-wealthy donors who were really on the far, hard right, people like the Kochs. So the party and the candidates moved so far to the right that a lot of people who don't share their point of view were unhappy.
hate republican program
So you've got these regular, middle-class voters who don't hate the government as much as the Kochs do. They're Republicans, but they still want government programs. They want Social Security, they want Medicare. They need it.
running song thinking
[Donald] Trump comes along and is singing a different song. He says, "I don't need your money; I'm rich enough on my own to run." And he says, "I think we need these programs." And, lo and behold, a lot of Republican voters liked what he said.
men election politician
One of the oddities of this election is the man that [Donald] Trump chose as his vice-president, Mike Pence, is one of the Kochs' favourite politicians.