In an interview with the Guardian, Liz Uihlein expressed her dismay at Wisconsin’s handling of the coronavirus crisis

One of Donald Trump’s most fervent billionaire donors is lobbying against strict stay-at-home rules in the election battleground state of Wisconsin, raising troubling new questions about how the president’s rightwing financial supporters may influence the US response to the pandemic.

Liz Uihlein, the billionaire behind Wisconsin’s Uline shipping and packaging company – who with her husband, Richard, has been dubbed the most “powerful conservative couple you’ve never heard of” – is using her clout to try to force Wisconsin’s Democratic governor to relax stay-at-home rules, claiming that the crisis has been “overhyped” by the media.

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Her actions – from lobbying Republican legislators in the state to circulating a petition to employees to have the governor, Tony Evers, removed from office – come as two protests have been organized against the Democratic governor on Friday.

While organizers of both protests have claimed they are part of a “grassroots” movement, another prominent Trump supporter and friend of the Uihleins, Stephen Moore, who compared the rightwing protesters to the civil rights icon Rosa Parks, has said a “large Wisconsin donor” was supporting the protests.

Asked by the Guardian whether the Uihleins were supporting the effort, Moore said he had not disclosed the donor and hung up.

Health experts have warned that premature reopening of the US economy could risk US efforts to control the virus, ensuring that it surges in places where rules on lockdowns are relaxed. Trump, who still appears in daily press conferences with a team of public health experts such as Dr Anthony Fauci, has wavered on the issue. He has urged protesters to “liberate” several Democratic states from their lockdowns and usually appears keen for a swift reopening, but he has also criticized the Republican governor of Georgia for reopening too early.

While the public still largely supports shutdown efforts, the risk, some say, is that disagreements over the pandemic response devolve into another American culture war, like abortion and gun rights.

“Donald Trump is not going to go into this election siding with Dr Fauci against this Tea Party-like movement. If he thinks that this is what his base wants, he will go with them,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative anti-Trump author and broadcaster in Wisconsin.

Critics of Liz and Richard Uihlein say it is impossible to overstate the couple’s influence over conservative politics and that Liz Uihlein’s outspoken criticism of the stay-at-home orders will act like “jet fuel” to accelerate political opposition to policies that have been endorsed by public health experts.

Neither Uihlein has been shy about endorsing rightwing causes – especially anti-union and anti-tax groups – and fringe candidates, like Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate who was accused of sexual assault of minors and lost a special election in 2017.

Like the Mercers and the Kochs, the couple has rarely given interviews.

But reached at home this week by the Guardian, Liz Uihlein – who was one of 36 executives to be invited to participate in a call with Trump last month to discuss the national response to Covid-19 – expressed her dismay at Wisconsin’s handling of the crisis, which she said was devastating the economy.

Of nearly 7,000 employees, Uihlein claimed that her company had seen 15 cases of Covid-19 infection and that six were back at work.

An anonymous employee told the Guardian that the company had previously reported 19 cases in internal communications, and has since stopped sending out alerts.

“It’s overhyped,” she said. “And I don’t wish anybody ill will. You know I don’t wish that, but I think it hurts certain ages in certain places and largely in a lot of parts of the world. In the country it’s not as rampant as the press would have you make it.”

The company, which has remained open because it is considered an essential business, has come under fire for allegedly adopting lax safety practices in the face of the pandemic, including initially discouraging employees from working at home and not providing enough space to the non-warehouse employees who did come to work.

Uihlein said the work-from-home recommendations were dragging on the company and that tasks that would take “five minutes to get done at the office takes two days”.

“We have no choice with a lot of them,” she said.

Uihlein, who said she and her husband “loved Trump” and is believed to have a net worth of about $4bn, laughed off suggestions that she might influence the president.

“You honestly think that money influences Donald Trump, are you kidding me?” she said.

But Uline, she and her husband’s privately held company, has already donated $1.5m to Trump’s Super Pac, America First Action, and $20m to other Republican groups so far in the 2020 election cycle. In the past, their donations topped $90m, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

In her interview with the Guardian, Liz Uihlein, who is 74, repeatedly compared the current crisis to polio outbreaks in the 1940s and 1950s – her own sister contracted the disease when they were children – and suggested Americans then had not “shut down” communities to deal with those outbreaks.

“It was a terrifically scary thing. It hit children and this virus doesn’t hit children. So I’ve got a different view on it. And I don’t think you should live in fear,” she said.

But Elena Conis, a medical historian at the University of California, Berkeley, said comparisons between polio and the coronavirus were not apt in this case. Polio had been ravaging communities for decades before a vaccine was discovered in 1953 and large segments of the population had developed immunity to the virus. When outbreaks occurred, she said, communities did, in fact, shut down to isolate the disease. Those outbreaks also occurred at a time when populations were far less mobile than today.

A spokesperson for the Uihlein family said in a post-publication statement to the Guardian that it was not involved in donations related to protests of shelter-in-place orders.

Do you have more information about this story? Please contact the reporter at Stephanie.Kirchgaessner@theguardian.com