David Koch, center, is reportedly flummoxed by the toxic rhetoric of Donald Trump, but he and his brother have their own history of fearmongering and racial intolerance. Photograph by Stephen Crowley / The New York Times / Redux

The big donors in the Republican Party are reportedly flummoxed by the toxic rhetoric of Donald Trump. The billionaire political industrialist Charles Koch has warned that Trump’s proposed registry of Muslims in the U.S. would “destroy our free society.” After pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting their right-wing libertarian views over the past four decades, and budgeting some eight hundred and eighty-nine million dollars to spend in the 2016 election cycle, he and his brother David Koch, and their donor circle, are apparently disappointed that they have bought so little control over the Republican Presidential candidates. “You’d think we could have more influence,” he lamented to the Financial Times. But, in fact, the influence of the Kochs and their fellow big donors is manifest in Trump’s use of incendiary and irresponsibly divisive rhetoric. Only a few years ago, it was they who were sponsoring the hate.

Over the July 4th weekend of 2010, I attended the fourth annual Defending the American Dream Summit, in Austin, Texas, which served in part as a training session for local Tea Party activists. The summit was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, which purported to be a nonpartisan grass-roots political-advocacy group devoted to the cause of small government, free markets, and liberty. It was in fact an organization that had been founded and heavily funded by the Kochs, whose early activism was entwined in fearmongering and racial intolerance.

The Kochs’ father, Fred Koch, the founder of Koch Industries, the hugely profitable private oil-and-chemical company that his sons inherited, was one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the ultra-conservative group that accused political opponents of treason and was at its core segregationist. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of desegregating America’s public schools, in 1954, the Birchers launched a nationwide crusade to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. In 1960, Fred Koch wrote a self-published book describing welfare programs as a secret government plot to lure rural blacks into cities so that they could foment “a vicious race war.” Before George Wallace declared his Presidential candidacy in 1968, Fred Koch also supported an unsuccessful effort to recruit Ezra Taft Benson, the former Secretary of Agriculture and a leader of the Mormon Church, and Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator, to run on a platform calling for the restoration of segregation. The Birchers’ radicalism was so extreme, and delusional, they claimed that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist agent.

It’s not fair to visit the sins of the father on the sons, but Charles and David have their own dubious record of involvement with racist institutions. They themselves belonged to the John Birch Society, and, in the late sixties, Charles was a trustee at a place called the Freedom School, outside Colorado Springs, which had no black students because, its director explained to the Times, “it might present a housing problem because some of his students are segregationists.” The Freedom School was a font of extreme anti-government ideology, teaching a revisionist version of American history in which it was argued that the Civil War should not have been fought, the South should have been allowed to secede, and slavery was a lesser evil than military conscription. Charles Koch was so enthralled with the Freedom School that he got his three brothers and many friends to attend. He had hoped to expand it into an accredited university, but instead it ran aground financially. It was, however, the first step in the Kochs’ lifelong crusade to use their vast fortune to reshape American academia and politics along the lines of their own ideology.

That was long ago, and, of course, many people’s views on race have evolved during the decades since. In more recent years, the Kochs have made large donations to the United Negro College Fund. But, in a 2011 interview with The Weekly Standard, David Koch echoed specious claims, made by conservative gadfly Dinesh D’Souza, that Obama was somehow African rather than American in his outlook. He claimed that Obama, who was born in America and abandoned by his Kenyan father as a toddler, nonetheless derived his “radical” views from his African heritage. “His father was a hard core economic socialist in Kenya,” Koch said. “Obama didn’t really interact with his father face-to-face very much, but was apparently from what I read a great admirer of his father’s points of view. So he had sort of antibusiness, anti-free-enterprise influences affecting him almost all his life.” In Koch’s view, Obama “just shows you what a person with a silver tongue can achieve.”

The effort to attack Obama, not as a legitimate and democratically elected American political opponent but as an alien threat to the country’s survival, was very much in evidence at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Austin during the summer of 2010. Peggy Venable, who was then the director of the Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity, and who has been on the payroll of various Koch-run groups since 1994, presided over the summit. There the Texas branch gave out its Blogger of the Year award to a woman named Sibyl West, whose work described Obama as the “cokehead-in-chief” and as suffering from “demonic possession (aka schizophrenia, etc.).” The Republican donor class may now disown vile language, but six years ago they were honoring it with trophies.

The luncheon speaker at the summit was Ted Cruz, who was formerly the solicitor general of Texas. The Kochs may now be dismayed at Trump’s rhetoric, but, at the time, no one objected when Cruz said that Harvard Law School, which he and Obama both attended, had been infiltrated by communists. “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than communists,” Cruz said. “There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the communists overthrowing the United States government.” Obama, Cruz said, “would have made the perfect president of Harvard Law School.” He continued, “He’s a true believer. He’s committed to taking over our economy and our lives.”

The same incendiary style characterized the big donors’ fight against the Affordable Care Act. Rather than respectfully debating Obama’s health-care plan as a policy issue, the Kochs and their allied donors poured cash into a dark-money group called the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which mounted a guerrilla war of fearmongering and vitriol. Television ads sponsored by the group featured the claim that Obama’s plan was “a government takeover” of health care, which PolitiFact named “the lie of the year” in 2010. Meanwhile, Americans for Prosperity spun off a group called Patients United Now, which organized some three hundred anti-Obamacare rallies across the country, including one where protestors unfurled a banner depicting corpses from Dachau, implying that Obama’s policies would result in mass murder. At another Patients United Now rally, a Democratic congressman was hanged in effigy. Traditional town-hall meetings, at which local congressmen met with their constituents, were overtaken by angry mobs. Sean Noble, a Republican political operative who was on contract to the Kochs, later acknowledged, “We packed these town halls with people who were just screaming about this thing.” As he told National Review in 2014, “We knew we had to make that summer absolute hell.”

At one “Kill the Bill” protest on Capitol Hill, Tim Phillips, the head of Americans for Prosperity, accused Obama of “trying to cram this two-thousand-page bill down the throat of the American people.” Days later, at a second Capitol Hill rally, riled-up crowds spat on a passing Democratic congressman; mocked Barney Frank, the gay congressman from Massachusetts, as a “faggot”; and shouted racist epithets at three black congressmen, John Lewis, Emanuel Cleaver, and Jim Clyburn.

If the big donors in the Republican Party are now recognizing that such discourse isn’t just ugly but also potentially dangerous, as the outbursts of violence at Trump’s rallies demonstrate, then that’s a welcome change. But for the same donors who poured gasoline on the flames, when the winds were blowing the way they wanted, to now complain that Trump’s campaign is out of control is, well, for want of another word, rich.