The people bankrolling the alt right aren’t guys named Bobby Joe who made their millions on Powerball tickets they picked up at Winn-Dixie. They’re a computer science PhD turned billionaire hedge funder from New Mexico and his daughter from suburban New York:
Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.
That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table.
We’ve said it once (or more) before but it bears repeating: the Republican base is well-to-do white people. Plenty of the Neo-Nazis who marched in Charlotte were college students or college graduates. Robert Ritchie isn’t straight out the trailer, he’s straight out the mansion.
If you think all those nice white college-educated upper-middle class people who voted for Trump are going to desert him now, think again.