Fredreka Schouten

USA TODAY

This post has been updated

WASHINGTON – Toby Neugebauer, a wealthy energy investor, likes Ted Cruz so much that he deposited $10 million into a super PAC designed to boost the Texas Republican’s presidential ambitions.

On Wednesday, Neugebauer was in Donald Trump’s camp after the reality TV star’s big win in the Indiana primary Tuesday ended the campaigns of Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

“Today, I am a Trump supporter,” Neugebauer told USA TODAY. “I am excited about the voters he turned up.”

Several Republican donors, including Neugebauer, are moving to unite behind the brash billionaire who vanquished 16 other candidates to emerge as the GOP’s standard-bearer, even as his positions on health care and trade and his harsh rhetoric about women and some immigrants prompted fierce opposition from the party’s establishment wing.

“I am going to do what I can to help him,” said Stanley Hubbard, a Minnesota broadcasting magnate who had contributed money to a super PAC that spent heavily to thwart Trump in early contests. “He wasn’t my first choice, but I think you’ll find he’ll moderate himself” in the general-election campaign.

Other big-money forces in the Republican Party said they will turn their attention to retaining GOP control of the Senate, in an election year that favored Senate Democratic candidates even before Trump entered the race.

Kasich to end GOP presidential bid

The anti-tax Club for Growth, which spent $11 million through its various arms trying to knock off Trump, acknowledged Wednesday that its fight to stop him was over. Its groups “will do what we’ve always done best: fight hard to win congressional elections for true economic conservatives,” spokesman Doug Sachtleben said in an email.

Freedom Partners, the main political arm of the brothers Charles and David Koch, has launched $3 million worth of ads in Senate races this week to help Republicans. Charles Koch, a billionaire industrialist who is one of the biggest conservative donors in American politics, has made it clear that he isn’t inclined to put money behind a Republican presidential candidate, citing the ugly tone of the campaign.

Neugebauer, the son a Texas congressman, said he doesn’t know how much of a role he might play in backing Trump.

Trump makes history and changes politics, GOP

On Wednesday, Trump told The Wall Street Journal he would no longer entirely self-finance his campaign moving forward and would create a "world-class finance organization" for the general-election fight. During the primaries, Trump routinely denounced super PACs and boasted about his ability to plow his own money into his candidacy.Trump, who has dominated media coverage of the presidential campaign, had loaned his campaign about $36 million through the end of March and spent far less than most of his rivals on staff, advertising and other campaign expenses.

Neugebauer, one of three main donors to a family of outside super PACs supporting Cruz, spent little of his $10 million investment during the primaries, sparking a public feud with strategists operating other PACs in the Cruz network.

Neugebauer said they disagreed because he didn’t want to run negative ads: “We needed to make Ted bigger, instead of trying to make Trump smaller.”

On Tuesday night, as Cruz took the stage to end his campaign, Neugebauer said he was talking with the super PAC’s treasurer about dismantling the committee.

It still had nearly $9 million sitting in its bank account at the end of March.