McCormick is a “a supporting actor in his own carefully stage-managed production”
PENNSYLVANIA – New reporting on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer is the latest piece detailing how David McCormick has built his campaign on a series of manufactured facades, and examines how the Connecticut hedge fund executive has struggled to sell this fake version of himself to voters.
The piece comes a week after McCormick was savagely attacked by Trump on national television during a rally for Trump’s endorsed candidate, New Jersey daytime TV show host Mehmet Oz.
See below for highlights and read the full piece here:
- McCormick has spent four months and at least $11 million of his own money advertising himself as an “America First” conservative. He aggressively sought Trump’s endorsement, courting the former president’s allies and hiring Trump aides to vaguely defined positions. Trump didn’t buy it.
- Instead he endorsed McCormick’s chief GOP rival, celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz, and lacerated McCormick at a rally Friday in Southwestern Pennsylvania, undercutting the candidate’s core message less than two weeks before the crucial May 17 primary.
- “Dr. Oz is running against the liberal Wall Street Republican named David McCormick,” Trump told the crowd in Greensburg.
- Lumping in McCormick with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) and U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), Trump called him, “absolutely the candidate of special interests and globalists and the Washington establishment.”
- Trump’s rejection crystallized the eye rolls from McCormick’s rivals, who for months have scoffed at a makeover driven by an army of consultants and more than $33 million in spending by McCormick and his wealthy allies. Beneath it all, they argue, has been a campaign grown in a political lab and grafted onto an impressive resume and huge bank account.
- McCormick served Bush, promoting free trade and high-skilled immigration as boons to American businesses. He was an early fund-raiser for Jeb Bush in 2016, traveled to Davos, served on the board of the Aspen Institute, and owns multimillion dollar homes on New York’s Upper East Side and outside Aspen, Colo.
- Under his watch, the hedge fund Bridgewater Associates last year raised more than $1 billion for investments in China (McCormick earned $22.5 million from Bridgewater last year; he says those investments in China were just 2% of the firm’s portfolio). After the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, McCormick penned an open letter to the firm calling for “denouncing and eradicating structural bigotry around us.”
- The attempts to build a Trump image around McCormick have at times left him looking like a supporting actor in his own carefully stage-managed production.
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