From Chapter 12 of Mayer's Dark Money, "Mother of All Wars, the 2012 Setback":
While amassing one of the most lucrative fortunes in the world, the Kochs had also created an ideological assembly line justifying it. Now they had added a powerful political machine to protect it. They had hired top-level operatives, financed their own voter data bank, commissioned state-of-the-art polling, and created a fund-raising operation that enlisted hundreds of other wealthy Americans to help pay for it. They had also forged a coalition of some seventeen allied conservative groups with niche constituencies who would mask their centralized source of funding and carry their message. To mobilize Latino voters, they formed a group called the Libre Initiative. To reach conservative women, they funded Concerned Women for America. For millennials, they formed Generation Opportunity. To cover up finger prints on television attack ads, they hid behind the American Future Fund and other front groups. Their network's money also flowed to gun groups, retirees, veterans, antilabor groups, antitax groups, evangelical Christian Groups, and even $4.5 million for something called the Center for Shared Services, which coordinated administrative tasks such as office space rentals and paperwork for the others. Americans for Prosperity, meanwhile, organized chapters all across the country. The Kochs had established what was in effect their own private political party.
Mayer's Dark Money is essentially the story of how the Kochs and others have in fact created their own extremist political party that masquerades as the GOP. (See also this article "The Koch Effect", by Harvard's Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez that makes the same point.) Its ideology is at its core the same as the fringe, deeply whacko John Birch Society, for which the Koch brothers' father was a founding supporter and Charles Koch was for a time a member. Their money bends all GOP candidates, even relatively sane, moderate ones, to their ideology or they get primaried into oblivion. This doesn't work every time, but it works more often than not.
When we talk about how the GOP establishment doesn't want a Donald Trump nomination, we are essentially talking about how these extremist ideologues fear losing control of their party. Charles Koch is a control freak, and Trump is, if nothing else, uncontrollable. He cannot be bought the way, for instance, the more pliable Scott Walker could be or shaped the way the shallow Rubio can be. In addition, Trump is too unorthodox. He's not right-wing enough. He's a loose cannon. Nobody on the establishment Right wants to deal with him.
But that doesn't mean they won't get behind him if he goes on to win the GOP nomination. I assume that's why the Kochs and Adelson haven't jumped in to try to stop him, and they probably won't unless he starts to show a weakness he hasn't shown yet. They don't want to burn bridges. They want to be able to work with him and shape his presidency once he's elected. Trump might be a maverick, but he's captured the base--and the Koch Money Party is nothing without the base--and Trump is, after all, a member of their brotherhood of billionaires. Trump's and their interests align more than they diverge, and once elected, Trump will have to build alliances with former opponents and with the Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are almost all members in good standing of the Koch Money Party. The Kochs have $889 million to commit the Republican presidential beyond what the RNC will provide. From the NYT January 26, 2015:
The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalleled effort by coordinated outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history.
The spending goal, revealed Monday at the Kochs’ annual winter donor retreat near Palm Springs, Calif., would allow their political organization to operate at the same financial scale as the Democratic and Republican Parties. It would require a significant financial commitment from the Kochs and roughly 300 other donors they have recruited over the years, and covers both the presidential and congressional races. In the last presidential election, the Republican National Committee and the party’s two congressional campaign committees spent a total of $657 million.
Trump will find a way to work with that, even if he doesn't publicly admit it.
I think the main concern of the billionaire-run GOP establishment is whether Trump is electable in the general. I think Rubio or Kasich probably are more electable than Trump. They are at least safer bets, the way HRC is the safer bet in the thinking of conventional Dems. But as I've written here in other posts, I question whether the safe bet this cycle is really the safer choice. There is a way in which the educated, culturally liberal types who make up the Democratic Party are in their own echo chamber and are as out of touch with political reality as their right-wing counterparts. Something else is going on this country that cannot be explained within a conventional politics frame, and I suspect, without being able to prove it, that the safe choice this cycle is really the riskier choice.
That being said, it doesn't look good for Sanders, the unsafe bet, at this point. The outsized shaping role of Iowa and NH on the primary process is pretty ridiculous to begin with, but It seems equally ridiculous that solid-red, southern states should play such an important role shaping in the Dems' race so early in the primary process. Who cares about S.C.? It will play no role whatsoever in helping the Dem nominee to win in November. Why, then, should SC voters' choice be an indicator of any significance regarding what the party needs to win then?
But analysts are quite right to point out that if Sanders can't win on Tuesday in Massachusetts, where he's behind now in the polls, it's probably over for him. If MA goes for HRC, it will be a solid indicator that timid Dems want to go with the safe choice. Everybody on the Left will go back to sleep, and the real excitement will be with Trump. In 2012 the GOP put up a candidate that was so clueless and mediocre that no amount of money could save his candidacy. That will not be true this year. Trump is a vain, silly ignoramus with the emotional maturity of a middle schooler, but he is neither clueless nor mediocre in his politics. He will be a formidable opponent in the general. And while I hope I'm wrong, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if the populist excitement for him coupled with the big money that will inevitably come his way from his fellow billionaires will blow the rudderless Clinton out of the water. Hillary might very well turn out to be the Martha Coakley of 2016.