It's 2015, and Koch network operatives are reportedly not working with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as its operatives go to work for the Donald Trump campaign.
It's 2016, and Koch network operatives are staffing Donald Trump's presidential transition team, and the Trump administration.
It's 2017, and Koch network operative Mike Pence is Vice President under Donald Trump.
It's 2018, and Koch network operatives are attacking the idea of more inclusive climate policy, and denying even their own anti-climate lobbying.
It's 2019, and Koch network operatives are reframing themselves as climate champs, and rebranding as “Stand Together,” while lying about the Green New Deal and denying the climate consensus. "
It's 2020, and a Koch network operative admits anyone who fell for the prior rebrand ruse is "going to be surprised" because the plan is "to go bigger than ever before." Ten months later, a Koch network operative, Charles “Chuckie” Koch gives an interview about the network's less-partisan rebrand, even as he sets up a new disinfo center at Tufts and spends over $1 billion helping Republicans in the 2020 elections.
It's 2021, and Koch network operatives are lobbying against EPA regulations, using hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to inject disinfo into schools and universities.
It's 2022, and Koch network operatives are telling media they're going to figure out who's behind all this polarization, as though they're not the ones spreading fake news attacking their clean competitors, defending doing business in Russia, spending over $50 million on climate disinfo, buying a Supreme Court majority, and sending errand-boy Mike Pence on an ill-fated anti-ESG crusade potentially robbing taxpayers of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.
It's 2023, and Koch network operatives are claiming to rebrand as less partisan and separate themselves from Donald Trump, not on ideological grounds, but because they want someone "who can win." Semafor, the newest entry in the access-driven DC press world, takes this as an opportunity to prove once again that it puts a greater priority in appeasing fossil fuel sponsors and billionaires who, like them, claim to want to reduce polarization, than it does on doing actual journalism.
It's like Semafor's David Weigel read Popular Information's February explainer on "how Koch manipulates the media" and decided it was his turn to write the same exact sort of story that hacks have run about Koch and Trump since 2016, with a headline wondering, "Did Donald Trump break the Koch machine for good?"
No.
For the past eight years, at least, Koch network operatives have played supposedly-savvy DC reporters for saps, pretending to oppose a political operation even as they staff it.
It's a testament to the perverse incentives of some Beltway press that—despite the obvious duplicity of these constant supposed rebrands—Koch network operatives keep finding success in running the same obvious disinfo play, even at outlets that, just days earlier, covered that playbook!