Establishment-backed conservative groups with ties to the Bush family, business interests, and billionaire donors like the Koch brothers are planning an assault on Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz ahead of the Republican debate in Boulder, Colorado, this week.
The groups, including business-supported entities that masquerade as populist Hispanic organizations, will seek to disparage Trump over controversial remarks he made about immigrants and Mexican “anchor babies” earlier this summer, as well as Cruz for his unwillingness to distance himself from the comments, which they’ll portray as tacit approval.
Entities behind the ambush have motivations that extend well beyond simply curbing politically incorrect speech.
As reported by the Washington Post, the Bgroups will warn that the Republican Party must gravitate toward candidates who are more appealing to Latino voters — presumably Marco Rubio.
“We’ll discuss the tone of the primary, comments about the Hispanic community and some of the immigration proposals that have been made,” Alfonso Aguilar, head of the Latino Partnership at the American Principles Project, told the Post.
But the entities behind the ambush have motivations that extend well beyond simply curbing politically incorrect speech. The groups involved, such as the LIBRE Initiative, the American Principles Project and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, have close connections to the billionaire industrialists and establishment Republicans who have been trying unsuccessfully for months to deal Trump a death blow.
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Aguilar, who heads the Latino Partnership’s Latino outreach division, was appointed by George W. Bush as the first-ever head of the Office of U.S. Citizenship.
In the eyes of these organizations, branding Trump and Cruz as cancerous to the Hispanic electorate could be what finally convinces voters and donors to reluctantly embrace more “electable” pro-business and internationalist candidates.
Trump and Cruz are positioned first and fourth, respectively, in national polling, according to a RealClearPolitics composite. Rubio and Bush, the leading candidates running on the establishment end of the Republican spectrum, check in at third and fifth respectively.
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Bush, in particular, needs whatever help he can get right now to revive his hemorrhaging campaign, which announced last Friday a round of across-the-board pay cuts and job restructurings. He was feted last week by the LIBRE Initiative at a forum targeting Latino voters in Las Vegas.
The LIBRE Initiative was founded in 2011 by Daniel Garza, a former Department of the Interior official in the George W. Bush administration, to educate Hispanic communities on economic freedom principles and to counter aggressive efforts by Democrat-allied interests to court Hispanics.
But the group has been attacked by liberals and conservatives alike as being a “Shadow GOP” front group for big business and open border interests.
LIBRE brands itself “as a ‘grassroots organization’ founded ‘to empower Hispanics’ and advance ‘liberty, freedom and prosperity,’ but they are run by Republican operatives and financed almost entirely by the Koch network,” concluded a report by American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research firm.
As of 2013, LIBRE had received $10 million in funding from groups controlled by the Koch brothers, according to tax records. Press reports have noted that LIBRE is part of a broader effort by the Koch brothers to compile a massive voter database that would rival that of the Republican National Committee.
A LIBRE spokesman asserted that its operation was built on a much wider donor base and that it is successfully expanding at the ground level.
“The staff of The LIBRE Initiative has roughly doubled over the last year, to a point where we now have over 60 full-time staffers in 9 states. We’re gratified to have more than a thousand donors who believe in our message of greater prosperity through limited government and free markets,” said spokesman Brian Faughnan.
The American Principles Project did not respond to questions about the composition of its donor base or their grassroots operations. 
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