Political power broker Charles Koch is “disappointed” by the current crop of Republican presidential hopefuls and thinks some of Donald Trump’s and Ted Cruz’s policy prescriptions could be disastrous for the U.S.
Koch and his brother David, who run the business conglomerate Koch Industries together, pledged to contribute $900 million this election cycle to Republican candidates. For the most part, however, the billionaire brothers have remained relatively mum on which candidates they support, if any.
“It is hard for me to get a high level of enthusiasm [about the 2016 hopefuls] because the things I’m passionate about, and I think this country urgently needs, aren’t being addressed,” the 80-year-old billionaire told the Financial Times in an interview published Friday.
But two candidates — Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and fellow billionaire Donald Trump — elicited a reaction from the self-described libertarian.
Reacting to Trump’s proposal to temporarily bar non-American Muslims from entering the country, Koch said such a plan would “destroy our free society.”
“Who is it that said, ‘If you want to defend your liberty, the first thing you’ve got to do is defend the liberty of people you like the least’?” he asked the FT reporter.
Koch also criticized Cruz’s plan to “carpet-bomb” territory in the Middle East that’s controlled by Islamic State militants.
“I’ve studied revolutionaries a lot,” he said. “Mao said that the people are the sea in which the revolutionary swims. Not that we don’t need to defend ourselves and have better intelligence and all that, but how do we create an unfriendly sea for the terrorists in the Muslim communities? We haven’t done a good job of that.”
“What are we going to do, go bomb each one of them?” he asserted, noting that 1.6 billion of the world population are Muslims.
While declining to endorse a GOP candidate in the primary, the Koch brothers have previously said they will help the Republican Party financially in the general election.
