In DC Speech, Charles Koch Speaks of ‘the Mess' He Sees the Country In

Time​ Magazine

02-05-2025

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Charles Koch never uttered his name, but it was mighty clear that President Donald Trump was on his, and everyone else's, mind Thursday night at a glitzy gala that might have as well have been Koch Con.
'With so much change, and chaos, and conflict, too many people and organizations are abandoning these principles and turning to power to solve problems,' said the 90-year-old billionaire industrialist behind some of the most formidable organizations on the political Right. 'But we know from history, this just makes them worse.
'People have forgotten that when principles are lost, so are freedom and progress,' he added at the gala convened in his honor by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank he founded.
Charles Koch has long been a foe of protectionism and an evangelist for free markets, competitive advantage and mutual benefit. In fact, the remarks he delivered Thursday evening —just a few minutes of efficiently coded winks and nods sprinkled with quotes from philosophical favorites Friedrich Hayek and Frederick Douglass—could just as easily have come a decade ago or a decade later.
But they came in May 2025, at a moment when Trump and his economic team are engaging in some of the riskiest and costliest brinksmanship over global trade in a generation. And when the owner of the second-largest private company in the United States speaks, there's an oracle-like aura that demands parsing.
'You can see why we're in the mess we are today,' Koch said. The 'mess' was as explicit as he was willing to get in regard to a pursuit of power at all costs that led to the long-building Trump's movement and what has unfolded in the first months of his second term. The President marked his 100th day in office this week with a report from his Commerce Department that showed the economy shrunk in his first quarter. His trade war has shifted buying patterns, shaken U.S. consumer confidence, and rattled the stock market. Consumers are already starting to notice costs rising from Trump's tariff strategy, which has been all over the map: adding some here, delaying them there, canceling them here, upping them there.
It is, to those who share Koch's worldview, government intervention run amok.
Koch and free-market ideals have long been wed. Charles, along with his late brother David Koch, has been a force in conservative circles for a half century, funding and fueling dozens of efforts to help small-government causes. Americans for Prosperity—a conservative powerhouse of volunteers, ads, and door-knockers—is one of the backbones of the grassroots efforts that have bolstered Republicans for decades—and AFP's partner groups targeting veterans, young voters, voters of color, and women have all proven efficient investments for the Kochs and their circle of high-dollar pals.
But it has always been a mistake for Republicans to assume blind political fealty from Charles Koch and his lieutenants. Koch-linked groups helped muscle through Trump's first-term tax cuts and they were back in the field trying to push their extension even before Trump came back to Washington. Trump also worked with the Koch orbit on a massive rewrite of the criminal justice system and Koch-minded activists cheered on Trump-era efforts to let terminally ill patients access medical treatments that had not yet fully cleared FDA vetting.
Yet the Koch groups were patently against Trump's ban on migrants from countries with Muslim majorities, objected to his hardline view of immigration, and fought for legal status for Dreamers.
In fact, the Koch orbit did its best to ignore Trump, sitting out the 2016 general election after flirting with other potential nominees who came up short. Shunned by the ultra-rich circle, Trump claimed he had turned down their invitation to join a closed-door summit that summer, but it was clear an offer had never been extended. In 2020, the Koch universe went to ground on the White House race, too, saying their focus was the Senate. And four years later, their collection of groups spent $42 million to unsuccessfully keep Trump from becoming the nominee for a third time. Its flagship political arm, Americans for Prosperity, dumped almost $160 million into political and policy advocacy in the last cycle without lifting a penny to help Trump.
Despite his recent setbacks on the political stage, Koch and his fans are not shying from the fight. When a hype video played before his speech, the crowd laughed when criticism from Bernie Sanders, Tucker Carlson, and Lou Dobbs played on the screens—a nod to the fact that Koch is reviled by those who otherwise share zero in common, yet has not backed down. And judging from the applause in the room when Cato president and CEO Peter Goettler said explicitly what Koch merely waved at, the feistiness is not fading.
'We will always oppose when a policy is moving in a direction that contradicts these principles,' Goettler said. 'When the President disappears people without due process, or enacts extra-legal tariffs that threaten business and prosperity around the world, or targets individual law firms for retribution and calls into great danger to the rule of law, we'll stick to our principles, speak out, push back, and oppose it.'
The free-market fanboys and libertarian aficionados have spent almost a half century decrying the exact meddling that Trump is now engaging in. A hands-off-the-market approach has been sacrosanct for these wonks. Lost on no one was the fact that Koch was in town—a rare visit, really—to accept the 2025 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, named in honor of the economist who was pretty strident in his opposition to tariffs.
Tariffs that have come to define Washington over the last few weeks.