On Friday, September 30, 2016, Republican nominee Donald Trump made his fifth campaign visit to Michigan, a battleground state where he was closing the gap with Hillary Clinton. He was scheduled to speak at five P.M. in Novi, a suburb northwest of Detroit. But instead of landing at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, his plane continued another 150 miles west to the city of Grand Rapids. The sun was peeking through the clouds over the skyline, one of the Midwest’s finest, a harmonious blend of steel-and-glass high-rises and lovingly restored old stone and red-brick buildings, when Trump’s motorcade drove through, at 12:30, and pulled up to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, named for the longtime Michigan congressman improbably catapulted into the Oval Office by the crimes of Watergate. Visitors were startled when a familiar figure—in a dark suit and unmistakable orange crown—emerged from his vehicle and placed a bouquet of roses, red and white, at the graves of Ford and his wife, Betty. Schoolchildren came racing across the lawn. A local banker called out, “Make America great again!” View more By the time the motorcade reached the J. W. Marriott hotel, a cylindrical glass tower on the banks of the Grand River, the press, scrambling to catch up, had figured out what was going on. Donald Trump was in town to meet privately with donors—the cream of the city’s business class, manufacturers (Keeler Brass Company) and retailers (Cole’s Quality Foods)—gathered in the Marriott ballroom. Journalists, in the corridor outside, wondered: would the DeVoses be there? In the solar system of elite Republican contributors, Richard DeVos Sr., who died Thursday at age 92—one of the two founders of Amway, the direct-sale colossus—occupied an exalted place, and his offspring did too. Since the 1970s, members of the DeVos family had given as much as $200 million to the G.O.P. and been tireless promoters of the modern conservative movement—its ideas, its policies, and its crusades combining free-market economics, a push for privatization of many government functions, and Christian social values. While other far-right mega-donors may have become better known over the years (the Coorses and the Kochs, Sheldon Adelson and the Mercers), Michigan’s DeVos dynasty stands apart—for the duration, range, and depth of its influence. The last time the county voted Democratic: 1864. Against Lincoln. Start with the think tanks, advocacy organizations, and colleges. In the Grand Rapids area alone there are three conservative academic bastions: Grand Valley State University; Calvin College, attended by several generations of DeVoses, including Rich’s daughter-in-law Betsy DeVos, 60, who is now Trump’s secretary of education; and Northwood University, her husband Dick’s alma mater. The DeVoses are also major backers of Hillsdale, the libertarian-plus-Christian liberal-arts college in southern Michigan. One celebrated alum: Betsy DeVos’s brother, Erik Prince, 49, the swashbuckling military contractor who has come to the serious attention of investigators looking into the Trump team’s alleged dealings with Russia. Other recipients of DeVos largesse: the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Justice, and the American Enterprise Institute—the list goes on. Top, by Mark Wilson/Getty Images; Bottom, by Adam Ferguson. The DeVoses don’t limit their activism to ideas. They have been enthusiastic supporters of Republican presidential nominees—from Gerald Ford to Mitt Romney, who also has deep Michigan roots. But 2016 changed everything. Betsy, the most visible member of the clan, had been close to former Florida governor Jeb Bush; the two shared a passion for remaking public-school education. When Bush dropped out of the race, she switched over to Florida senator Marco Rubio. She also wrote checks for Carly Fiorina, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal—everyone, anyone, but Donald Trump. “I’m hopeful we are going to hear something from our nominee to convince me that I should support him,” she declared at the time. The DeVoses’ preference for “values-oriented” candidates reflect the teachings of the Christian Reformed Church. A small breakaway denomination of its Dutch forerunner, it has some 300,000 adherents in North America, many living in the same western-Michigan towns where their immigrant ancestors settled in the 1840s to pursue a faith that combines Calvinist devotion to the work ethic, prayer, a dedication to family and community—and philanthropy. The DeVoses take this seriously. Quite apart from their political donations, they have lavished millions on worthy charitable projects in and around town and far beyond. They have done all this, however, with a flamboyance unusual for Grand Rapids, stamping the family name, or Amway’s, on many of the city’s most visible surfaces. And now Donald J. Trump, himself a stranger to charity but not to branding, was in DeVos country. When the Marriott meeting ended, and the doors opened, “the one lasting image for me,” one Grand Rapids journalist would later recall, “was seeing Rich DeVos wheeled out of the ballroom to the elevator.” Trump had gotten his audience with the patriarch. Some five weeks later, on November 7, Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, came back yet again for the campaign’s last rally—at the DeVos Place Convention Center. Trump, it turned out, would squeak through, by fewer than 11,000 votes. While the bellwether suburbs outside Detroit certainly helped, Michiganders knew the critical votes that formed Trump’s base had come from the western part of the state. The point was clinched 12 days later, when Betsy DeVos, in a stylish gray jacket and practiced smile, stood with Trump at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey. She had agreed to be Trump’s education chief. The announcement brought “Western Michigan royalty into the Trump fold,” observed The New York Times. (Indeed, when the Senate was split on confirming her, her pal Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote.) In retrospect, it seemed an early token of surrenders to come, as G.O.P. leaders would make their bargain with the interloper Donald Trump. That was one way of looking at it. Another was that Trump was a useful vehicle for advancing nationally the revolution the DeVoses had already enacted in Michigan. There was, for instance, Betsy DeVos’s campaign to undo the state’s public-education system and replace it with for-profit and charter schools that, as she had put it two decades earlier, shared her mission of “defending the Judeo-Christian values that made us what we are, but which are under attack from the liberal elite.” There was also the campaign she and her husband had waged to weaken Michigan’s unions. And there was the DeVos-family-funded gentrification of Grand Rapids, which had erased the haunting images of a once struggling Rust Belt city, though one beset by racial tensions. Those are some of the lessons to be learned in western Michigan—West Michigan, as locals call it, as if to designate a separate state, or at least a state of mind. Other lessons can be found in the pulp-fiction career of Betsy DeVos’s younger brother, Erik Prince, the former navy SEAL who started Blackwater—the mammoth security company, some of whose “civilian soldiers” had gone rogue in Iraq. Prince recently turned over his computer and phones to special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which has no doubt looked closely at his possible involvement in helping establish back-channel communications with Russia for the Trump administration. (Prince denies any wrongdoing.) Behind all this is the story of a family dynasty that has been a driving force on the far right—the Michigan Medicis of Donald Trump’s America.

When people in West Michigan speak of the DeVoses, they mean not one great family but two, joined as the great European noble houses once were—Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Hanover and Windsor. The story actually begins 30 miles west of Grand Rapids, in Holland, a town of some 34,000 on Lake Macatawa that is as reliable a Republican stronghold as any in America. The last time the county voted Democratic in a presidential election? In 1864—against Abraham Lincoln. Betsy and Erik’s father, Edgar Prince, was a Chrysler-Plymouth salesman and then machine engineer who started a die-cast business and also had a tinkerer’s gift for inventions. One, the lighted vanity mirror on the flip-up sun visor (introduced in 1972), helped Prince become one of the wealthiest men in Michigan. Edgar and his wife, Elsa, were members of the charity-minded Christian Reformed Church (C.R.C.). As he got richer, the elder Prince rewarded his hometown handsomely; Prince money has done much to preserve downtown Holland, which remains a 1950s time capsule of Candy Land façades. Elisabeth “Betsy” Prince, the eldest of four (there are two other daughters, Emilie and Eileen), attended Holland Christian, a Reformed high school, and then, like her mother, went to Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, “a kind of finishing school for that system,” says Doug Koopman, who teaches political science at Calvin and has served on the staff of several Republican legislators. Betsy was a freshman in the spring of 1976 when Ronald Reagan challenged the incumbent Jerry Ford in Republican primaries. Reformed Christians have a history of political activism, and Betsy eagerly joined the Ford youth brigade. The C.R.C.’s greatest figure, Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch theologian and prime minister who died almost a century ago, had declared, in words the faithful know by heart: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!” The political message was open to interpretation. Some Calvin grads (including filmmaker Paul Schrader, class of 1968) had protested the Vietnam War. But many others veered right. And when Betsy DeVos later declared that her ambitions with “school choice” were to “advance God’s Kingdom,” she was echoing Kuyper’s teachings. After the 1976 election, religion entered the bloodstream of American politics. The born-again Jimmy Carter was one reason. Another was the rise of the Republican right under Ronald Reagan. Among his most avid supporters were evangelicals who combined free-market gospel with a counteroffensive against what seemed dangerous secularism: abortion, affirmative action, busing, and “the liberalization” of school curriculums. The Princes—parents and children alike—were in the vanguard of the Christian right. Edgar Prince had survived a heart attack in 1972, when he was 42, and the experience awakened him to a more observant religious life at a time when churches were beginning to embrace the culture wars. The enemy was everywhere, and growing: the Equal Rights Amendment, the pro-choice movement, and gay rights. The Edgar and Elsa Prince Foundation would become major donors to two mighty organizations: Focus on the Family, founded by the psychologist and evangelist James Dobson, and the Family Research Council, led for more than a decade by Gary Bauer, the Christian Zionist who, in 2000, made a stab at the presidency. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God,” Bauer wrote about the man he referred to as his “mentor.” By Robert Kanavel/The Holland Sentinel.

The Princes and DeVoses—with neighboring homes in Holland—had effected a merger thanks to the 1979 marriage of their firstborn, Betsy Prince and Dick DeVos, then in their 20s. “Bible-reading jet-setter” was the description in a Detroit Free Press profile of Betsy published once she emerged as a kingmaker in the state Republican Party. She invited friends over to read Scripture; she also enjoyed road trips to watch the Orlando Magic, the N.B.A. franchise her father-in-law had purchased for $85 million, appointing Dick president. (Betsy DeVos has not responded for comment despite repeated requests to her office.) To be a DeVos was to live large. Betsy and Dick own a 22,000-square-foot mansion on Lake Macatawa, with a large infinity pool. (Betsy was a competitive swimmer in her teens.) They also have a place in Vero Beach, Florida. The scale of the DeVos clan’s wealth became a source of national wonderment this summer, and a punch line for Stephen Colbert, after news accounts described how vandals had set adrift their $40 million, 163-foot yacht, the SeaQuest, which had been docked on Lake Erie. (It turns out the family, reportedly, owns 10 boats.) Seen from the snobbish heights of Grand Rapids, the young auto-parts heiress, by becoming a DeVos, had made a brilliant leap into the gilded lap of the super-rich. The facts are more complicated. Prince Corporation, with its die-casting machines, was a classic Rust Belt factory. But the DeVos family business, Amway (short for American Way)—which recruited people to sell soap and household cleaning products—was very different, a kind of high-pressure cult, replete with tent-style rallies, as disillusioned ex-Amway sellers began to say. The Federal Trade Commission had spent four years investigating Amway. Its “multi-level marketing” approach—in which descending tiers of home-operating “distributors” purchased Amway products and made money selling them, as well as by recruiting new members—appeared very similar to an illegal pyramid scheme. In the end, the F.T.C. ruled that Amway was legal, because its entry requirements were modest, and distributors were not compelled to buy unnecessary inventory. But Rich DeVos and Amway co-founder Jay Van Andel were also told to stop fixing prices and to clean up their sales pitch, which exaggerated the potential riches. And yet the company kept growing. As DeVos would later note with satisfaction in his Trumpishly titled memoir, Simply Rich, “Just four years after the F.T.C. brought the suit, our reported sales at retail more than tripled—to $800 million.” (In 1983, however, DeVos and Van Andel pleaded guilty to criminal tax fraud in Canada. They paid fines of $25 million; the charges were dropped.) Today the company’s biggest market is China, with its legions of go-getters, though authorities there are now giving Amway and other multi-level marketing firms a hard look. There was more to this than slick salesmanship. DeVos and Van Andel were students of Dale Carnegie, the business and self-improvement pitchman, and, especially, of Norman Vincent Peale, the charismatic pastor at Marble Collegiate, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. (He was also a trustee at Hope College, a Reformed school in Holland.) Peale’s radio sermons reached millions in the 1950s and early 60s, when the Soviet Union appeared to be winning the Cold War. The confident declarations in Peale’s best-seller The Power of Positive Thinking—”attitudes are more important than facts”; “never doubt the reality of the mental image”—infuse Amway’s own liturgy. Peale’s politics were congenial too. He extolled Republican candidates and shrewdly made himself into a media brand with his books, magazine, and radio and TV shows. DeVos and Van Andel created a similar empire. In 1977 they purchased the Mutual Broadcasting System radio network, paid Bob Hope to do promos, and hired Norman Rockwell to render their portraits in ads in The Saturday Evening Post. Behind all this was an ideology neatly suited to the moment. Just as American manufacturing began a decline, Amway offered the promise of self-sufficiency. Instead of going off with your lunch pail or briefcase to be bossed around by someone no smarter or better than yourself, you were in charge—with your inventory and customers. “Selling America,” Rich DeVos’s signature motivational speech, included a tirade against softheaded college grads conned by liberal do-gooding dogma to “work for the welfare of others.” Nonsense, DeVos sneered. “We provided more welfare than anybody else. We provide employment for 72 million.” Seventy-two million? It was pure fiction. But it was also true that within a few years Michigan’s Big Three auto companies began to slip, while Amway profits were soaring. A fellow pitchman, for General Electric, had been speaking Rich DeVos’s language: the actor turned California governor Ronald Reagan. He, too, had delivered silken odes to free enterprise mixed with warnings about the evils of big government. When Reagan got the presidential nomination in 1980, DeVos and Van Andel were two of the biggest donors to the Republican Party and conservative organizations. DeVos became finance chair of the Republican National Committee, though he didn’t help the G.O.P.’s image when he called the 1982 recession a “beneficial” and “cleansing process” and later said, of calls to increase the minimum wage, “If it’s too small, I have a suggestion for you. Get two eight-hour jobs.” The family has been a driving force on the far right—Michigan Medicis. By this time, some began to notice how much of Reaganism was coming not just from California but also from West Michigan. In addition to DeVos and Van Andel, there was the conservative author Russell Kirk, the “sage of Mecosta,” who lived an hour north of Grand Rapids. He had been arguing since the 50s that federal programs, including school lunches, were a “vehicle for totalitarianism.” Kirk’s wife, Annette, served on Reagan’s education commission and helped slip language into its famous report, A Nation at Risk, that created an opening for vouchers and tuition credits. Reagan failed in his true objective, to eliminate the Department of Education, but Annette Kirk, who became an adviser to the DeVoses, persevered. Today, about 80 percent of Michigan’s charter schools are privately operated. Another target was labor unions. Amway and the Prince Corporation had no use for them. Now the family waged a public fight. After Dick DeVos was routed when he ran for governor of Michigan in 2006, he blamed his defeat, in part, on Michigan’s unions and began to push for a right-to-work law (weakening the unions’ economic power and political clout, a pillar of the state’s Democratic Party). In 2012, the bill got through, and Michigan—headquarters to the United Automobile Workers, no less—became yet another of the country’s right-to-work states. Betsy was waging a parallel battle against the public-school system and its unionized teachers. Her weapon was “school choice.” A state law rewarded so-called educational management organizations, which grabbed up public money to start private, for-profit schools. According to a year-long investigation by the Detroit Free Press, rampant abuses followed. (Some educators point to charter-school success stories in other states, where there has been more strict regulation and accountability.) In her present job, DeVos has raised school choice to a national cause. She has effectively shut down Obama-sanctioned investigations of fraudulent for-profit colleges even as she has gone about hiring staffers from that world, including a former associate dean at one such school that settled a $100 million F.T.C. lawsuit for offering its students hollow promises of post-grad success—à la Amway and Trump U. During her 20 months in office, DeVos has pursued the unrealized quest of the Reagan years—championing charter and religious schools, and, in effect, dismantling the Department of Education from within. Through it all, DeVos has maintained the composure of “West Michigan nice,” though many Michiganders are not surprised when the mask drops and something harder shows through—entitlement commingled with Calvinist certitude. Briskly touring Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, after the horrific shootings there, DeVos avoided giving specific answers to questions, even from student journalists. In June, she told Congress that firearms would not be a topic studied by her own school-safety committee, created post-Parkland. “So you’re studying gun violence,” remarked Democratic senator Patrick Leahy, incredulously, “but not considering the roles of guns.” DeVos is too busy fighting her own war. “[Among] her big ‘accomplishments,’” says Diane Ravitch, the N.Y.U. professor and respected education historian, “have been reversing civil-rights enforcement for kids with disabilities, putting administrators from for-profit colleges in charge of monitoring for-profit colleges . . . stabbing in the back young people with heavy debt for their college education, and being a constant critic of public schools.” One saving grace, Ravitch contends, is that DeVos has gotten very few of her budget proposals through Congress. There is a method here—or, more precisely, a mission. Samuel Abrams, director of Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, says that DeVos has used her position as a “bully pulpit” to advance the belief that “society doesn’t exist; only individuals and families. We accordingly should not be surprised that she has pushed for minimum standards at public school and cut funds for everything from career and technical education to teenage pregnancy prevention. For libertarians, she’s a godsend. For the rest of us, she’s a wrecking ball.” ©Detroit Free Press/Zuma Wire.

The election of Donald Trump has given us a new Gilded Age of privatization, profiteering—and self-dealing. Witness the administration personnel feeding greedily at the public trough: among them, Health and Human Services czar Tom Price and E.P.A. administrator Scott Pruitt (both now gone), not to mention Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—who last year made at least $82 million in outside income while serving as White House senior advisers. But the most ambitious privatizer in Trumpworld—with the largest vision—has been Betsy’s brother, Erik Prince. Strong-featured and blond, like his sister, Erik was devoted to his father, who doted on him. He played four sports at Holland Christian and was the proudly straitlaced kid who, without being asked, put away the soccer balls after practice. Prince enrolled in the U.S. Naval Academy in 1987 but was shocked by the frat-house atmosphere—too much for a junior culture warrior who’d been an intern at the Family Research Council. After three semesters, he transferred to Michigan’s Hillsdale College. Today Hillsdale, under its president, Larry P. Arnn (former head of the Claremont Institute, a citadel of far-right ideology), is known as a feeder school for the Trump administration, including Betsy DeVos’s chief of staff, Josh Venable. In May, the week Vice President Pence gave the commencement address there, Politico called it “the college that wants to take over Washington”—citing many alums who are now D.C. power players. (The school has received a great deal of DeVos and Van Andel money.) “We’re rolling in dough,” says Mickey Craig, a political-science professor at the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship. In the early 90s, Craig taught Erik Prince, and came to know him well. “He had that seriousness,” Craig says. “It was clear that he just worshipped his father.” At the time, father and son, like so many dedicated conservatives, were losing faith in President George H. W. Bush, a moderate. In 1989, Erik had been invited to a “youth” inaugural ball for Bush—and there had met Joan Keating, the woman who would become his first wife. Prince even worked as a Bush White House intern. “I saw a lot of things I didn’t agree with,” he later said. “Homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kind of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns.” He left that job for another, in the office of California congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who has often been called Vladimir Putin’s top Capitol Hill asset, so valued, the Times has reported, that he was given a Kremlin code name. Then, in 1991, after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Prince, at 21, joined a group of prominent conservatives who traveled through the Baltic states. One member of the tour was Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon speechwriter and right-wing commentator, who was eyeing the presidency. “I was very impressed by Pat’s convictions and knowledge,” Prince says in an e-mail. “I was drawn to his campaign for a wide range of issues from . . . trade to taxes (seeing Bush cave on ‘Read my lips’ [rescinding his vow not to introduce new taxes] was appalling).” In 1992, Buchanan challenged Bush for the nomination on a platform combining ethno-nationalism with cultural conservatism. His slogan, MAKE AMERICA FIRST AGAIN, was an early taste of Trump. Both Edgar and Erik Prince were on board. “I volunteered for the Buchanan campaign,” Erik Prince recalls, adding that he was a “district chair as well.” Buchanan now remembers him as “one of the most impressive young guys I have ever met. He drove me around Indiana, spoke at my rallies, seemed a principled and tough-minded conservative. That he became a navy SEAL did not surprise me.” Prince spent four years with the SEALs in the early 90s but moved on after his wife was diagnosed with cancer and his father, aged 63, died of a heart attack. The elder Prince left behind a business with 4,500 employees. The family sold it for $1.3 billion, and Erik, at 25, now had a sizable inheritance. A short time later, Prince had a big idea: a new spin on the private-contracting business. “I saw how bureaucratic the entire D.O.D. was,” he recalls of the Department of Defense, “and wanted to provide a better capability for units that needed it.” One of Prince’s instructors in the SEALs, Al Clark, was also looking to set up a security-and-defense training company. Prince had money to invest. Out of this came Blackwater, which began as an instruction facility for law enforcement, the military, and special-ops squads in Moyock, North Carolina. In its first years customers were scarce. “This was the time of the peace dividend,” Prince explains. “Soviet Communism had collapsed, and all was supposedly right in the world.” And then, in 2000, a navy destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, was attacked in a Yemeni harbor, and 17 Americans died. Members of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, were blamed. Soon Blackwater got its first serious long-term contract, teaching American sailors how to fire M14 rifles. Next came September 11, 2001. The Bush administration drew up plans to strike back, but on the cheap, with some operations outsourced to private companies. In the process, Blackwater secured lucrative government contracts (ultimately, about $2 billion in total), promising to train and send teams and supplies to Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. At around the same time, as Vanity Fair would report, Prince was “working as a C.I.A. asset,” hiring ex-spooks in a clandestine program to “find, fix, and finish [off] al-Qaeda members.” At its peak, Blackwater processed some 30,000 trainees a year, a special, swaggering breed, some acting like vigilantes. “I had a lot of friends who were P.M.C.’s”—private military contractors—one former Prince business associate says, “and they would come back from Iraq, and they’d tell me, `My God, we know Erik’s your friend, but Blackwater is so fucked up over there.’” In 2004, four Blackwater contractors were ambushed and killed in Fallujah. In 2007, a Blackwater contingent opened fire on unarmed civilians in Nisour Square, in Baghdad, killing 17. Three Blackwater operatives were convicted of manslaughter and a fourth of murder; after appeal, the three had their lengthy sentences voided (they are set to be re-sentenced), while the fourth is being re-tried. (A mistrial was declared in September.) The Bush administration had begun to see Blackwater as a liability: Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s secretary of state, singled out the firm for special monitoring. Prince rebranded the company under different names and finally sold it off, relocating to the United Arab Emirates, where he got close to the ruling family and began a new venture, Frontier Services Group, which marketed its security services to foreign states. For a time, he even pondered a run for the Senate, from Wyoming, where his family has a vast ranch.