While traditional Republican donors have mostly spurned Donald Trump, one billionaire family has stepped into the void to quietly become one of the most powerful players in conservative politics. In the topsy-turvy world of Trump’s G.O.P., Rebekah Mercer, the daughter of hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer and heir to his billion-dollar fortune, has emerged as the new center of the conservative universe, Politico reports, pouring millions into a sustained effort to bolster the Republican nominee’s campaign and remake the party in his image. “They see the establishment as a very real threat to freedom in America, and they see the need to defeat it,” Brent Bozell, the president of the Media Research Center, told Politico. “They want to blow things up and start from scratch,” another Republican operator remarked.

Yes, some people just want to watch the world burn. But the Mercers’ efforts still face fierce resistance from an old-money mainstay of the G.O.P. world: billionaire brothers Charles Koch and David Koch, who have reportedly redirected their time, resources, and considerable donor network toward building a grassroots army to defend the free-market values and classic conservatism that Trump has cast aside in favor of fervent anti-trade, anti-immigration rhetoric. According to The New York Times, the Kochs’ master plan involves a $3 million investment in their Grassroots Leadership Academy, which launched in early 2015 with backing from the brothers’ Americans for Prosperity Foundation. Offering classes such as “Messaging to the Middle,” the training program is designed to educate the next generation of Republicans, and hopefully save the G.O.P. from extinction in the wake of Trump, the Times reports. “We want a cultural shift of people being able to know what they want and how to talk to the people in their communities, so that in the future, when there are political leaders that want to demagogue free-market issues, they do hit resistance,” Levi Russell, the director of public affairs for Americans for Prosperity, told the Times.

That vision has put the Kochs in direct opposition to the Mercers, who over the past decade have built their own, rival political organization and donor network. Since the controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, the Mercers have donated $73.5 million in disclosed political donations through super-PACs and conservative non-profits, Politico reports. And while the father-daughter team’s contributions pale in comparison to those of the Koch brothers, they are arguably the most influential donors of the 2016 election cycle. After weeks of bad press surrounding Paul Manafort’s questionable business ties in Russia and Ukraine, and following reports that the campaign manager’s efforts to rein to run a tighter ship had rankled Trump, it was reportedly Rebekah who convinced the New York billionaire to replace Manafort with G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway and to appoint Stephen Bannon as campaign C.E.O.

The Mercers—who are also investors in the data firm Cambridge Analytica, which the Trump campaign uses—have abiding ties to both Bannon and Conway. In 2011, the family invested $10 million in Breitbart News, where Bannon was a chief executive prior to joining the Trump campaign, and worked with the media firebrand to turn the book Clinton Cash into a documentary. Before the Mercers began funneling their funds to the Trump campaign, they were staunch supporters of his rival in the Republican primary, Ted Cruz. The billionaire duo donated $13.5 million to the Cruz campaign, during which time they worked with Conway. Now, with Conway in Trump’s corner (and under Rebekah’s thumb), the Mercers sit at the nexus of the Trump campaign current power structure.

The Mercers have not always been at odds with the Koch brothers and other Republican mega-donors. Around 2011, the Mercers began donating at least $1 million a year to the Koch network, Politico reports, before Rebekah took a more prominent role in the family’s political dealings during the 2014 election. Since then, however, the billionaire family, has been thinking bigger. “I don’t think it is about Trump. Trump is just a vehicle,” an anonymous political operative who worked with the Mercers told Politico, suggesting that the Mercers’ shift in allegiance from Cruz to Trump evinces grand ambitions beyond the current election. “It’s about wanting to be a player and wanting to beat Hillary, in that order.”