President Donald Trump has lost the financial support on the Mercer family -- one of his major 2016 backers, Vanity Fair is reporting.
Best-selling author Gabriel Sherman, in a story posted Monday night by the magazine, reported that Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah have drastically cut back political donations in recent months and are unlikely to play a major role in 2020.
Sherman attributed the information to six sources.
“It’s like they’ve disappeared,” a former West Wing official said.
Mercer and his wife, Diana, had donated $15.5 million to various organizations to help get Trump elected in 2016. In addition, they donated another $1 million for the inaugural committee.
At one point, the Mercers had even installed their handpicked strategists, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, to run Trump’s campaign.
But Sherman wrote that Trump was never the ideal candidate for the Mercers.
“They never really liked Trump,” one person close to the Mercers said. And Sherman reported that Robert Mercer’s “hatred” of Hillary Clinton was the driving force behind his support for Trump in 2020.
In addition, Robert Mercer’s investment in Cambridge Analytica concerned him after the FBI opened an investigation of the company after revelations it appropriated private data from Facebook profiles, Sherman noted.
The Mercers contributed only $400,000 to the pro-Trump Great America PAC in 2018. And their total political spending dropped to $2.9 million last year.
“Bob views all his political spending as a bad investment,” said one person who knows him.
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