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Why the Koch Brothers Don’t Support Donald Trump

Christopher Leonard on Kochland, plus Joan Walsh on Indivisible.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

September 5, 2019

Charles Koch, chief executive officer of Koch Industries.(AP Photo / David Zalubowski, File)

How the Koch brothers transformed an obscure oil company based in Wichita into a $110 billion colossus, and reshaped the Republican Party—but failed to prevent Trump from becoming president: Christopher Leonard on Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

Also: Indivisible, the big network of local Democratic Party activists that sprang up after Trump’s victory, faces a big challenge: whether to endorse a candidate in the Democratic Primaries. Joan Walsh reports on the conflict between the Washington headquarters of the organization and the hundreds of grassroots groups.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


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