David Axelrod says that David Koch (above) and Charles Koch (below) have embarked on “an extraordinary exercise in rebranding.” Illustration by Matt Dorfman; Source: Andrew Toth / FilmMagic / Getty (Top); Patrick T. Fallon / The Washington Post / Getty (Bottom)

On the night of November 2nd, well-dressed Wichita residents formed a line that snaked through the lobby of the city’s convention center. They all held tickets to the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce’s annual gala, which had drawn thirty-five hundred people. The evening’s featured speaker, Charles Koch, had lived in town almost all of his eighty years, but few locals—even prominent ones—had ever laid eyes on him. Charles, along with his brother David, owns virtually all of the energy-and-chemical conglomerate Koch Industries, which is based in Wichita and has annual revenues of a hundred and fifteen billion dollars. Charles’s secretive manner, right-wing views, and concerted campaign to exert political influence by spending his fortune have made him an object of fascination, especially in his home town. “You never see him,” one local newsman whispered. “He hates publicity.” He paused. “Please don’t quote me on that!”

It was therefore a surprise when Koch made it clear to the gala’s planners, last fall, that he wanted to headline the event. At first, the organizers weren’t uniformly enthusiastic about the idea. In the past, the group had featured such major national figures as former President George W. Bush. But Koch was intent on promoting a book that he’d written, “Good Profit,” about his business philosophy. “They couldn’t really say no,” someone familiar with the arrangements confided to me. “He’s too powerful in Wichita.”

Charles shared the stage with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of the MSNBC cable show “Morning Joe,” whom Koch Industries had chosen to serve as moderators. The audience laughed as Koch recalled such boyhood misadventures as his expulsion from military school. He amiably described early business mistakes, and he pointedly criticized Republicans as well as Democrats. He complained that many Republicans in Congress weren’t doing enough to “hold the lid on defense spending,” because they had been corrupted by having “big military contracts in their districts” for “weapons that the military doesn’t want, like tanks, certain airplanes.” He expressed a general disdain for politics, noting that whenever anyone told him he should run for President he responded, “What did I ever do to make you hate me?”

Starting in 2010, a controversial series of rulings by the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court essentially licensed unlimited political spending by corporations, unions, and individuals. Charles and David—a seventy-five-year-old patron of the arts, who is the wealthiest resident of Manhattan—were unusually prepared to take advantage of this shift. They had set up a broad alliance of donors and advocacy organizations to support conservative candidates who share their “pro-business” opposition to regulation, entitlements, and taxes. This network has since become one of the most powerful political forces in the country: a libertarian advocacy group backed by the brothers, Americans for Prosperity, has directors in thirty-four states. According to Politico, twelve hundred people work full-time for the Koch network—more than three times the number of people who work for the Republican National Committee.

A new, data-filled study by the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez reports that the Kochs have established centralized command of a “nationally-federated, full-service, ideologically focused” machine that “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party.” The Koch network, they conclude, acts like a “force field,” pulling Republican candidates and office-holders further to the right. Last week, the Times reported that funds from the Koch network are fuelling both ongoing rebellions against government control of Western land and the legal challenge to labor unions that is before the Supreme Court.

Onstage in Wichita, Charles barely discussed his political spending. And he did not mention that, for the 2016 election cycle, he has organized a small circle of ultra-wealthy conservatives to spend nearly nine hundred million dollars on campaigns and advocacy—an unprecedented sum. The identities of the circle’s other members have remained secret. This private jackpot is more than twice the sum that was spent by the Republican National Committee in the 2012 Presidential-election race. Most of the leading Republican Presidential candidates have attended gatherings of the donor circle in the hope of winning its financial backing.

The Koch brothers have been widely criticized by Democrats for their systematic attempt to use money to sway elections. In 2014, Guy Cecil, then the executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, declared, “The Koch brothers are spending a fraction of their personal fortune to buy a Senate that is good for them and bad for almost every other family in America.” During the Wichita program, however, Scarborough declared such criticism of the Kochs to be outmoded. “Four or five years ago, the Koch brothers really burst on the national stage and into the national consciousness,” he said. Scarborough recalled that David, who was at the gala, “would give all this money to ballet companies that would allow ‘The Nutcracker’ to be performed, and he would go there and he’d get booed! That’s a kind of strange way to say thank you!” Scarborough went on, “But we started noticing about three years ago that New Yorkers—liberal New Yorkers!—started to feel defensive for David and Charles, and all that they’d not only done for New York but also for the country.”

Scarborough, a former Republican congressman, described what generous philanthropists the brothers had been, noting that “the charity of the Kochs” had funded hospitals in New York and had eased the suffering of people with cancer; without the Kochs, he declared, “you can’t enjoy the arts in Manhattan.” At the gala, the “Morning Joe” hosts, who had secured exclusive interviews with the Kochs for the next morning’s newscast, did not exactly subject Charles Koch to a grilling. Scarborough’s penultimate question was to ask Koch how he had learned such “graciousness.”

Fraser Seitel, the president of Emerald Partners, a public-relations firm, and the co-author of “Rethinking Reputation: How P.R. Trumps Marketing and Advertising in the New Media World,” told me that “third-party endorsements” of the type offered by Scarborough “are what the practice of public relations is based on.” Seitel continued, “You can try to tell people how good you are, but they won’t believe it until a third party acknowledges the goodness of your actions.”

As the Kochs prepare to launch the most ambitious political effort of their lives, they appear to be undergoing the best image overhaul that their money can buy. Last fall, Charles sat down in his office with Kai Ryssdal, the host of public radio’s “Marketplace.” Koch said of his company, “Our attitude is to, in starting any initiative, any business, is to focus on how we can create value for others rather than how we maximize profit.” He chatted about how much he loved the movie “Reds” and noted that his house was “much bigger than I want.” At one point, Ryssdal observed, “You are everywhere lately, right?” He explained that the Kochs, after years of “making an art of not” being known “in the public arena,” had begun appearing on shows ranging from “CBS Sunday Morning” to “The Kelly File.” Koch Industries had even become a sponsor of “Marketplace.” “You guys are in Popular Mechanics, for crying out loud!” Ryssdal exclaimed. “Whoever is doing your P.R. is doing a great job.”