Some of the biggest names on the right are jockeying for power in President-elect Donald Trump’s nascent operation, but one of the lowest-profile figures is arguably among those wielding the most clout — a press-shy hedge fund heiress who co-owns a boutique cookie bakery.

Rebekah Mercer, a 42-year-old who homeschools her young children, rarely visits Trump Tower and has a relatively narrow official portfolio in Trump’s transition effort. Her influence comes instead from her close relationships with the people and groups carrying out the day-to-day work of building Trump’s administration and political apparatus, some of whom have been the beneficiaries of millions of dollars of funding from her family.


Mercer’s influence in Trump’s transition effort — detailed here for the first time — calls into question Trump’s campaign trail boasts that his own fortune, which he used to partly fund his campaign, would make him independent from deep-pocketed donors and special interests he railed against on the campaign trail. And the entanglement of connections between Trump’s aides and Mercer’s big-money political operation has prompted complaints from campaign finance watchdog groups, and grumbling from Republican operatives who contend that Mercer has too much control over Trump’s GOP.

“It would be difficult to overstate Rebekah’s influence in Trump world right now,” said one GOP fundraiser who has worked with Mercer and people in the campaign. “She is a force of nature. She is aggressive, and she makes her point known.”

Mercer has a coveted seat on the Trump transition team’s 16-member executive committee. Her work, which she does mostly from home, includes collaborating with conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and Federalist Society — to which she has steered a combined $4.7 million or more — to recruit appointees for positions at the undersecretary level and below, according to a transition team source.

But three people close to the Trump transition say Mercer also has lobbied forcefully against prospective Cabinet secretaries she deems too liberal, while pushing for others she sees as true conservatives, including former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton for secretary of state. They say she was a leading advocate inside Trump’s inner circle for the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions as attorney general and the appointment of retired Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn as national security adviser.

Even before Trump stunned the world by defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in this month’s presidential election, Mercer had left an imprint on the rookie politician’s team that rivaled that of almost any other member of Trump’s inner circle, save for Trump’s adult children and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Beyond Mercer’s own direct line to Trump, she played a pivotal role in persuading him to bring into his inner-most circle several close allies whose efforts her family has financed to the tune of tens of millions of dollars, including incoming White House senior counselor Steve Bannon and top campaign officials Kellyanne Conway and David Bossie.

Conway and Bossie did not respond to requests for comment, while Bannon declined to comment.

Mercer, who is known to friends as “Bekah,” is the middle of three daughters born to Robert and Diana Mercer. The Mercer girls were raised middle class in suburban Westchester County, New York, before Robert Mercer, who goes by Bob, became fabulously wealthy while working at — then eventually becoming co-CEO of — Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds.

In 2006, Rebekah and her sisters bought and took over the popular bakery Ruby et Violette in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of midtown Manhattan. They later shuttered its storefront and now sell solely from a website that invites customers to “seduce someone” with sweets.

The family's political spending is funded by Bob Mercer's hedge fund fortune. But he has entrusted Rebekah — who is tall with long, brown hair and an assertive conversational style — with handling the family’s political portfolio. She has grown it in such a way that it distinguished the Mercers as major players on the right even before they became Trump's biggest and most influential donors.

Most people contacted for this story refused to discuss Rebekah Mercer for attribution, pointing out that she is intensely private and has scolded people for calling attention to her — even to praise her. Additionally, Mercer is known within the conservative movement for harboring grievances against people with whom she disagrees on tactics or ideology, or who merely rub her the wrong way.

For example, Mercer was seen as frowning on the possibility of fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski being tapped as chairman of the Republican National Committee, according to three people close to the Trump transition. They said Mercer was displeased with Lewandowski’s unwillingness early in Trump’s campaign to pay for the services of a data company called Cambridge Analytica, which is owned largely by her family.

Lewandowski, whose prospects of landing a top job on Trump's incoming team have been diminished by opposition from several influential players questioning his temperament, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Three GOP digital strategists say Mercer used her influence in Trump’s circle to ensure that Cambridge Analytica, which also counted Bannon as a board member, would be brought on board by Trump’s campaign team after Lewandowski was fired. And they say Mercer has signaled her interest in seeing the company awarded the data and analytics contracts for both the RNC and an independent pro-Trump vehicle currently being planned.

One of the strategists said Mercer is seen as the “patron saint” of Cambridge Analytica.

An operative familiar with Mercer’s involvement with Cambridge Analytica and interactions with Trump’s team said “it’s not about the money at all. She doesn’t want to make money, she doesn’t care about money. It’s all about controlling the apparatus of the Republican Party to enforce ideological purity.”

Representatives for Mercer and the Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment, while spokesmen for Cambridge Analytica and Bolton declined to comment.

But a close associate of Mercer rejected the notions that she ever lobbied against Lewandowski for RNC chair or for Cambridge Analytica to win any work with the RNC or Trump’s post-election political operation. “Rebekah Mercer considers Corey Lewandowski a friend,” said the associate, adding that Mercer “is friends with Gen. Flynn and Ambassador Bolton and holds Sen. Sessions in very high regard.”

The associate said that Mercer’s involvement on Trump’s transition team, which represents her first formal foray into government, “is based on her love of America and her belief that we’re in a serious situation and that people's freedoms are being eroded. She supports Mr. Trump’s mission to make America great again, and in particular to drain the swamp, and this is a great opportunity for some of the smartest and most thoughtful leaders to be represented in the Cabinet.”

The Mercer family in recent years has given more than $48 million to campaigns, committees or companies run in part by top Trump allies or advisers, according to a POLITICO analysis of filings with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, combined with interviews with people familiar with the Mercers’ political spending.

That includes a previously unreported investment of $5 million or more in Cambridge Analytica, according to a knowledgeable person, as well as a reported $10 million investment in the pro-Trump website Breitbart News.

It also includes donations by the Mercer Family Foundation, which is run by Rebekah Mercer, of $1 million to the Heritage Foundation (where she sits on the board) and $3.65 million to the Federalist Society, whose executive vice president Leonard Leo met with Trump last week.

Other Mercer Family Foundation beneficiaries include groups that had been helmed by Bannon and Bossie before they joined the Trump campaign, both of which inflicted significant damage on Clinton’s campaign. At least $3.55 million went to the Bossie-run nonprofit Citizens United, which successfully sued to force the release of emails related to Clinton’s tenure at the helm of the State Department. Another $2 million or more went to a Bannon-founded nonprofit called the Government Accountability Institute, which produced the book “Clinton Cash.” The book drove attention toward overlaps between Clinton’s State Department and her family’s personal and charitable finances. Mercer also served on the board of the institute.

Before they became immersed in all things Trump, the ideology behind the Mercer family’s political involvement was eclectic and tricky to pin down.

The family has poured at least $1.4 million into organizations that cast doubt on climate change science, but also has donated $2.9 million to the American Museum of Natural History, according to a POLITICO analysis of tax filings by the Mercer Family Foundation.

The foundation has given money to conservative movie studios, as well to the nonprofit that publishes The New Criterion literary magazine ($300,000). Rebekah Mercer’s mother and sister donated $8,400 to Hillary Clinton’s 2006 Senate reelection campaign, but the family foundation has given more than $3 million to the George W. Bush Foundation. And the family has given to entities that espouse non-interventionist foreign policies (more than $25 million to the Koch brothers’ network and $300,000 to the Cato Institute), but also more than $4 million to groups associated with Bolton, the hawkish former diplomat who has called President Barack Obama "one of the most narcissistic individuals to ever hold that job" and who suggested that the Obama administration might "reinstitute blasphemy laws" to limit criticism of Islam.

In recent years, though, associates say, a unifying theme increasingly emerged behind the Mercers’ political involvement — a deep and abiding antipathy for the political establishment, including the elites who have run the Republican Party for decades.

The Mercers “see freedom as having been dramatically eroded since Ronald Reagan,” Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, told POLITICO in September. Rebekah Mercer has served on Bozell’s board, and her family’s foundation has donated at least $10.8 million to his group, which calls out what it sees as liberal media bias.

While it’s accurate to characterize the Mercers anti-establishment “in the shorthand,” Bozell said “it is a much, much deeper philosophical belief than that.” Rebekah and Bob Mercer “see the establishment as a very real threat to freedom in America, and they see the need to defeat it,” Bozell said, adding that “in all the causes that they have supported … my guess is that you won’t find any of them who have said that they asked for anything. And how many donors can you say that for?”

A handful of GOP digital operatives argued that there are strings attached to groups that receive Mercer cash — they are expected to retain Cambridge Analytica, a relative newcomer to the GOP tech scene that specializes in building nontraditional “psychographic” modeling of voters and donors, and even debate opponents.

The company was paid $17.2 million during the 2016 race by a handful of campaigns or committees funded partly by the Mercers, including Bolton’s super PAC, Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign (which the Mercers backed before switching to Trump), as well as Trump’s campaign and a family-run super PAC that similarly supported Cruz, then Trump.

In fact, the Cruz-then-Trump super PAC, which became known as Make America Number 1, was run by Conway and later, Bossie, before each decamped for Trump’s campaign and Mercer took the helm herself.

Make America Number 1 paid more than $950,000 to Conway’s polling firm, including payments issued after Conway began working for Trump’s campaign, though she told POLITICO last month: “There was no overlap for me, even though that would have been legally permitted.”

Nonetheless, the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, in a complaint to the FEC, flagged the work by Conway’s firm for the super PAC and the Trump campaign, as well as a $15,000 payment by Make America Number 1 to a video production company owned by Bannon called Glittering Steel and the payments by the super PAC and campaign to Cambridge Analytica.

The complaint, on which the FEC has yet to publicly act, alleges violations of the rules barring big-money super PACs from coordinating their spending with — or subsidizing the operations of — campaigns.

Noting a campaign profile that said Mercer “exemplifies a new breed of activist donors,” the complaint asserted that the Mercer family’s super PAC was “inextricably intertwined with the Trump campaign.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized John Bolton’s views on Islam.