Of all the people who were influential in getting Donald Trump elected, much credit must be given to hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer. Mercer, who is about two pay periods away from being a billionaire, famously poured millions into Trump’s bid for the presidency, and, along with his daughter Rebekah, effectively installed Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway at the top of the campaign when it was floundering last summer. (His data-analysis firm, Cambridge Analytica, also pitched in, for a price.) And now, in an apparent bid to protect his investment, Mercer is opening up his wallet again, this time to rain fire and fury down upon Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who recently had the gall to set himself apart from most of the G.O.P. by being openly critical of Trump.

Politico reports that Mercer, a Breitbart backer who, among other things, thinks the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake and that nuclear incidents are no big deal (how apropos!), is contributing $300,000 to a super PAC working to replace Flake in 2018 with former State Senator Kelli Ward, who is running against Flake in next year’s Republican primary. Though Flake has opposed Trump, in his own wishy-washy way, since the 2016 election—skipping the G.O.P. convention in protest and calling on Trump to withdraw in the wake of P****gate—the senator has been ramping up his attacks of late. His new book, Conscience of a Conservative, explicitly argues that the Republican Party is to blame for handing a madman the nuclear codes.“If this was our Faustian bargain,” he writes, “then it was not worth it.”

We hope the book advance was worth the $300,000 that Mercer just sank into defeating him.

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Investor: Markets not sweating nuclear doom

Yesterday, following Donald Trump’s ad-libbed speech about how he’s going to go after North Korea with “fury and fire,” the Dow broke its 10-session winning streak (an event that the president, who has been giving himself pats on the back daily for stock-market gains, did not mention on Twitter). On Wednesday, the D.J.I.A. closed lower again, as did the S&P, and the Nasdaq composite. According to David Nelson, chief strategist at Belpointe Asset Management, though, the (modest) declines have nothing to do with fear of the president sparking a nuclear war.

“I think [the markets] are focused on the news that matters, and the news that matters is not necessarily North Korea,” Nelson told CNBC. “If I pulled out every time I had a geopolitical event on some corner of the planet, I’d never be in the market.”

That might actually be a reasonable reaction, considering that immediately following Trump’s “fire and fury” comments, White House aides were telling people not to “read too much into” anything the president said, and that inside the West Wing, the language was not taken “too seriously.”

Wall Street has good news for bankers, less good news for traders

In 2012, with bonuses still down significantly from pre-financial crisis levels, Morgan Stanley C.E.O. James Gorman attempted the impossible: convincing bankers that “if you put your compensation in a one-year context to define your overall level of happiness, you have a problem which is much bigger than your job.” Perhaps, he thought, his wisdom would be a wake-up call for Wall Street.

Obviously, this was never going to work. Save for the few people who actually work on Wall Street because they enjoy being verbally abused for inserting an extra space on page 67 of the pitch book they worked on all night, or those who would spend dozens of hours a day on Excel even if they weren’t being paid for it, most go into finance for the pay—and are going to be deeply unhappy if their compensation in any given year does not align with their expectations. All of which is to say that financial institutions are set to have some very happy investment bankers and some very unhappy traders on their hands come next bonus season. Per Bloomberg: