Will the Super-Wealthy Roll Back Trump’s America First GOP?

Those who were hoping the Donald Trump tsunami that swept into American politics in 2015 would re-shape the GOP into a more populist party in touch with its grassroots working- and middle-class voter base have reason to worry. A trend is underway in the Joe Biden years: major GOP candidates for high office appear more plugged into the massive revenue streams of the ruling establishment than the cause of Draining the Swamp.

Glenn Youngkin’s victory in the Virginia gubernatorial race in November has fired the Republican establishment with a belief that a road out of Trumpism may have been opened. Youngkin has deep ties to many of the globalist moneyed individuals and organizations that the Make America Great Again ranks have been critical of, yet somehow, the governor-elect successfully branded himself as a local Virginian out to roll back big government excess.

Back in Business?

Youngkin worked for the ultra-connected private equity group, The Carlyle Group, for 25 years, serving as co-CEO for several years and as a high-ranking executive for more than a decade. In 1993, two years before co-founder David Rubenstein personally recruited Youngkin to join the firm, notorious progressive globalist billionaire George Soros gifted Carlyle with investment funding to the tune of $100 million.

In 2016 the Panama Papers leak revealed that “Soros Capital set up an offshore company in the Cayman Islands for the purpose of investing private equity with the Carlyle Group, alongside members of Saudi Arabia’s Bin Laden family,” Fox News reported at the time.

“Carlyle’s partners include ex-heads of state and former CIA officials,” the Fox report continued. “The private equity partnership specializes in buying and selling weapons manufacturing and intelligence gathering companies with government and military contracts and it also uses secret offshore companies to conduct business.”

Pennsylvania Golden Parachute Game

What has his triumph in Virginia wrought? In Pennsylvania, MAGA backers face the prospect of watching two establishment-entwined mega-millionaires pour money into their own campaigns as they battle for the GOP nomination for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Patrick Toomey (R-PA).

The movement Trump built was all about removing entrenched leaders and replacing them with America First Republicans. That does not appear likely in 2022. Instead, a television medical star and a hedge fund gazillionaire will square off for the right to be the GOP nominee.

Mehmet Oz is a popular TV figure who first rose to prominence via appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. His elevation by Winfrey was surely no coincidence. Oz was an “agenda contributor” at the 2012 World Economic Forum, which only makes sense considering he was named a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” by the organization some ten years earlier.

Oz, who has an estimated net worth of $100 million, has labeled himself a moderate conservative and has cited former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Republican role model.

His all-but-announced main primary opponent will likely be Bridgewater Associates hedge fund CEO David McCormick. Bridgewater has $140 billion in assets. He served as Treasury Department undersecretary for international affairs under former President George W. Bush. His wife is an executive at Goldman Sachs.

Scott Reed, former chief political strategist for the globalist U.S. Chamber of Commerce, was a go-to big-box media quote after Youngkin’s win on Nov. 2. Youngkin “managed Trump perfectly,” Reed told Bloomberg News Service.

“It’s ripe for somebody to parachute in and take it,” Rob Gleason, former chair of Pennsylvania’s Republican Party, told Politico of the Pennsylvania 2022 Senate nomination. Six full years after Donald Trump first went down that escalator in the summer of 2015, it appears that big Swamp money still has the overwhelming advantage over grassroots values in the GOP parachute jump race.

~ Read more from Joe Schaeffer.