In 2019, a small group of right-wing donors rented a resort near Rockbridge, Ohio, a town of just a hundred people, to hold a secret meeting dedicated to the future of the MAGA movement. The goal was to turn a unique political phenomenon, Donald Trump, into a lasting political alliance, with a stable network of voters, donors, and candidates, that would cement a radical transformation of the Republican Party.
The meeting, convened by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel and then-investor and best-selling author J.D. Vance, was also attended by hedge fund heiress Rebecca Mercer, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson and economist Oren Kass, according to two people familiar with the event. They spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the private meeting had not previously been made public.
But the person who turned out to be key to realizing the group's ambitions was considerably less well-known: Arizona entrepreneur and conservative media commentator Chris Buskirk.
Today, Baskirk leads the Rockbridge Network, a secretive organization that grew out of that weekend gathering and has established itself as one of the most influential forces in Republican politics. Political strategists credit the tight-knit network of businessmen and donors with helping Trump’s reelection campaign last year and the rise of one of its members, J.D. Vance, to the vice presidency.
With significant funding from tech moguls, Rockbridge aims to ensure the MAGA movement survives after Trump. The group has no website or public face, but it has assembled pollsters, data analysts, online advertisers, and even a documentary film department. It is preparing to use its infrastructure in the 2026 congressional elections and the 2028 presidential election, when many Rockbridge members want Vance to be the presidential candidate.
The organization, according to a source familiar with its work, has created an extensive database with detailed profiles of potential voters, using data from non-political associations, such as church and recreational groups.
Bashkirk’s ties to Trump’s inner circle extend beyond Rockbridge. His firm, 1789 Capital, which he founded with investor Omid Malik, focuses on what the partners call “patriotic capitalism” and now counts Donald Trump Jr. among its partners. The two, along with former administration officials and friends, recently launched the “Executive Branch,” an elite club for Trump-supporting business leaders that costs $500.000 a year to join and serves as a networking hub in Washington.
According to Bashkirk's statement, the common ambition of all these organizations is to give business people, whom they consider crucial to the future of the country, a role in shaping government and lasting political power.
Their efforts are based on a controversial theory of social progress: that a select group of elites are best placed to lead the country forward — a view that, according to Baskirk, is not at odds with the populism of the MAGA movement. Empowering industry leaders has been a hallmark of Trump’s presidency, from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to tech mogul Elon Musk, and Baskirk argues that the MAGA movement has inspired a new generation of guardians of the American nation.
His various projects reflect what some on the right call “aristopopulism,” an attempt to build a bridge between wealthy capitalists and the working class they claim to represent. According to Bashkirk and nine of his close associates, the goal is to profitably reindustrialize the country and align the interests of the elite with those of the grassroots.
Baskeik summarizes his project in a simple formula: "Brains + money + base"
“Every society has either an exploitative elite, an oligarchy, or a productive elite, an aristocracy,” Baskirk said in an interview in his office in Scottsdale, Arizona.
In his opinion, many innovative periods in history were driven by precisely such aristocracies, which is the main thesis of his 2023 book, “America and the Art of the Possible.”
“In the classical Greek sense,” he explains, “the term is not derogatory, but denotes the true elite who take care of the land and govern it wisely, so that everyone prospers.”
Baskirk sees himself as a businessman who views the political marketplace through entrepreneurial logic: he identified a gap and took concrete steps to fill it. The right, he says, had a “coordination problem”—on one side, voters who unexpectedly elected Trump, and on the other, a new group of wealthy people alienated from the progressive left. What was missing was the organizational infrastructure to connect them.
Baskerk sums up his project in a simple formula: “Brains + money + base.”
Others, however, describe its influence much more strongly.
"While many still see Trump's support as a 'cult of personality,' there is now a powerful ecosystem behind the MAGA movement," said Oren Kass, chief economist at the conservative organization American Compass.
“Chris is the one who brings that ecosystem together,” he added.
Outside a narrow circle of business leaders and political strategists, Baskirk is a relatively unknown but unusual figure in the role once held by the Kok brothers, deep-pocketed Republican megadonors who have often opposed Trump's trade policies.
He's not your typical MAGA firebrand agitator known for his mimes and public outbursts; friends describe him as a tenacious tactician with a keen sense of strategy.
“He was the first to understand that there would be thousands of wealthy people who would no longer feel at home in the Democratic Party,” said Omid Malik, Bashkirk’s partner and co-founder of 1789 Capital.
J.D. Vance told the Washington Post that Buskirk was an "original thinker" who, "before almost anyone else," saw that "the right combination of ideas, organizing, and funding could ensure the Republican Party's lasting political success."
Beyond electoral politics, the projects led by Baskirk aim to instill unbridled capitalism even more deeply into American life.
As Bashkirk’s network became increasingly intertwined with the Trump administration, the group formed a new circle of Washington’s political elite—a social scene for a new class of powerbrokers. The Rockbridge Semiannual Conference, held in April at the Ritz-Carlton on Key Biscayne, which included themed breathing exercises and yoga, was attended by Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff. Bashkirk’s friend, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attended the Executive Branch Club’s opening ceremony in June.
The people in Bashkirk's network see their growing influence as evidence that the government is finally working to support, rather than stifle, social innovators - unleashing, they say, the economic energy that was suppressed during the Biden administration.
But for critics, organizations like Rockbridge and 1789 Capital represent something far more dangerous — the rise of a group of unelected American oligarchs who are undermining Trump’s promises to help the working class. The Trump White House has introduced a series of new policies favorable to tech entrepreneurs, including lifting restrictions on the export of AI technology and signing executive orders and bills promoting cryptocurrencies.
"Trump's sole goal is to restore prosperity for America's working class, which has brought him back to the White House with a landslide victory," White House spokeswoman Kush Desai said in a statement.
J.D. Vance claims that Baskirk is an "original thinker" who, "before almost anyone else," saw that "the right combination of ideas, organizing, and funding could ensure the lasting political success of the Republican Party."
Since Trump Jr. joined 1789 Capital as a partner in November, the firm has raised hundreds of millions of dollars and now manages more than $1 billion in assets, according to two people familiar with the firm’s operations. This summer, the government dropped two federal investigations launched during the Biden administration into Polymarket, a blockchain-based betting startup in which 1789 Capital invested and on whose advisory board Trump Jr. now sits.
“Generally speaking, what’s good for business is good for America, but I don’t think the people around the president represent American business,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which receives donations from the Koch family’s philanthropic network. “The job of government is to advance the prosperity of the nation, not the prosperity of wealthy individuals, founders and directors.”
For Bashkirk, such criticism misses the point. He says he is determined to bring to Washington the business people he says helped bring Trump back to the White House — even if he doesn't like the city himself. He describes politics as "corrupt" and Washington organizations as "every cliché, squared," adding that the political culture must be rebuilt from the ground up.
“So it’s not a place you want to spend your time, but it’s still necessary,” he said. “Self-management means you have to participate in things you might not want to do.”
“Coordination problem”
If you ask Christopher Buskirk where he spends his days, the 56-year-old father of four could name seven different cities. He divides his time between his family office in Scottsdale, Palm Beach, where 1789 Capital is headquartered, Dallas, San Francisco, Austin and, reluctantly, Washington. He says he’s on his phone from the moment he wakes up until he goes to bed, always finding time for J.D. Vance when the vice president’s schedule allows.
But Bashkirk’s early life was spent almost entirely in Arizona. Although he was born in Germany, on a military base where his father served in the U.S. Army during the Cold War, he grew up in Scottsdale. He spent his weekends working for the family firm that insured homes and small businesses across the state. The family, he recalls, was “patriotic to the extreme” and regularly read the conservative magazine National Review.
As a young man, Baskirk enrolled in a master's degree in political theory and interned at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing organization inspired by the political philosopher Leo Strauss.
However, he gave up both his studies and his work at the institute, finding the academic world too impractical. He returned to Scottsdale and founded an insurance firm, specializing in unusual clients - such as ambulance suppliers. Over the next two decades, he founded and sold four more insurance-related companies.
His family, meanwhile, had distanced itself from politics. In the mid-2000s, the Baskirks canceled their subscriptions to the National Review, disgusted by a Republican establishment they believed had led the country astray. The Iraq war, Baskirk says, was a “smokescreen” that distracted attention from the serious economic problems that were piling up before his eyes.
While visiting relatives in Michigan, he witnessed entire factories being “literally packed up, loaded into containers and shipped to China” after the country joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Americans, he says, began working in low-wage service jobs—for eight dollars an hour at McDonald’s, instead of twenty-five at a Ford factory. Then, he adds, illegal immigrants began taking those jobs.
He complained to friends that the American dream—the idea that you don't have to do anything extraordinary to live a decent life—was rapidly slipping away, but he felt powerless. "I was just some guy from Arizona," he recalls. "What could I do?"
When Barack Obama emerged on the political scene in the late 2000s, Baskirk watched as he moved and inspired American society. In contrast, he believed that the Republican Party, along with its institutions, had slipped into a state of autopilot.
During those years, Baskirk sold the last of the insurance businesses he built with his father. When Donald Trump walked down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his presidential candidacy, Baskirk had more time.
The Arizona entrepreneur was initially skeptical of the New York reality TV host, worried that Trump viewed his presidential bid as a marketing ploy. But when he watched old interviews with him, he heard him repeatedly say that American leaders are not putting the interests of Americans first.
“I thought, ‘Well, he’s been saying the same thing for forty years!’” Baskirk recalled. “That’s when I realized, ‘Okay, he’s real. And those who say he’s not serious are lying.”
In July 2016, Baskirk founded the online magazine American Greatness, which highlighted the “undeniable” need for a new expression of conservatism. The magazine was funded by Peter Thiel, who shocked liberal Silicon Valley with a million-dollar donation to Trump, and was introduced to Baskirk by a mutual friend. “The soil of the conservative movement is exhausted,” the editors wrote in their opening manifesto. “It needs fertilizing, reseeding, and careful tending if it is to flourish again.”
Till then connected Baskirk with his protégé J.D. Vance. Vance and Baskirk became fast friends.
In 2019, Vance and Thiel gathered a dozen people at a rural Ohio inn, not far from the small town that would later give their organization its name. Some of the attendees were ardent pro-Trump supporters, like Bashkirk, while others had their doubts. But they all shared a sense that any gains made during Trump’s tenure could be lost if a Democrat took the White House again, recalled investor Blake Masters, who met Bashkirk that week.
“We spent so much time complaining about how effective the left was,” Masters added. “They had a pretty bad agenda… but they were extremely successful at organizing. The right, by contrast, was just floating around for a long time, and its institutions were starting to crumble.”
It became clear to some in the audience that the MAGA movement had a problem with networking. While right-wing donors like the Kok brothers had spent years building their organizations, the wealthy people who supported Trump and the new right-wing set of ideas he represented “didn’t know each other at all,” Baskirk said. And the people who voted for Trump, including the working class, weren’t organized either.
“There’s no coordination. There’s no management. There’s no plan. It all just kind of happened,” he recalled. “So we thought: OK, these are two problems that, if we solve them, maybe everything else will work better and more efficiently. Let’s tackle that.”
Creating a movement
Baskirk returned from the summit energized and determined to learn about political organizing. He started with the basics, reading “Roots to Power,” a left-wing organizing manual from the 1980s.
Together with Vance, he began to produce case studies of political organizations on the left and right, documenting their failures and successes.
Baskirk doesn't want to go into too much detail about the work of Rockbridge, but he says he basically designed a classic online sales funnel model to attract people to join social media groups based on shared interests. They included small business owners, nature lovers, and religious people.
This, he explains, is the opposite approach to traditional political organizing, where people are tried to be won over by “brute force,” through mass advertising in the run-up to an election. Rockbridge, by contrast, took a more gradual approach: “First you build a relationship of trust and offer people something to do. Only then can you ask them to do something,” says Baskirk.
By April 2022, Vance had launched his first, risky bid for political office. Malik organized a small fundraiser for him at a restaurant in Palm Beach. Both Buskirk and Donald Trump Jr. attended the event.
After that, the group headed to Mar-a-Lago, where Baskirk organized the “Rockbridge” conference.
The men spent the week bonding over a shared anger at what they perceived as online censorship and a sense that innovation was being stifled for the sake of liberal priorities, like sustainability and diversity initiatives.
The impact of Rockbridge and its affiliated super PACs on the 2024 election is still not fully understood. Rockbridge’s affiliated super PAC, Turnout for America, was one of several organizations campaigning in key states on behalf of the Trump campaign, along with Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point Action. According to the U.S. Federal Election Commission (FEC), Turnout for America spent $34,5 million in the 2024 election cycle, significantly less than the $261 million raised by Elon Musk’s AmericaPAC.
Still, internal Rockbridge data suggests a degree of effectiveness, which insiders attribute to years of voter profiling and mobilization. The super PAC identified several million people — low-turnout voters in seven key states — who it believed would vote for Trump if they were given the extra incentive to vote. The group calculated that Trump could win those states if they could get 40 percent of those voters to vote. In the end, Rockbridge’s 3.000 field workers were able to get 50 percent of that group out, according to two people familiar with the internal data.
Today, there is an almost euphoric atmosphere in Rockbridge. Interest in membership has skyrocketed since the election, says Buskirk, and about half of the new members come from the tech industry. Several of the group's members are billionaires, including prominent investors Marc Andreessen and David Sachs.
The group represents a wide range of ages, including a younger generation of members - NextGen, a branch for those under 30, which includes Baskirk's son Kris, who recently graduated from college.
Richard Painter, a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota and former White House chief ethics counsel during the Bush administration, said the surge in interest in Rockbridge, 1789 Capital and Executive Branch creates the impression of a pay-to-participate network, a system in which people pay to gain access to administration officials or members of the Trump family.
Baskirk declined to comment on this criticism.
In a message sent from abroad, he wrote that American greatness can only be achieved by “deliberately nurturing talented, capable people working together in an environment based on trust.”
In his book, he cites historical moments when elite networks drove social progress—from Florence in the Renaissance, to mid-20th-century America, to the English county of Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution. He notes that the Scottish Enlightenment was actually “the work of a few dozen people” who “built long-term friendships” in a private social club called the “Select Society.”
He said that similarities to those highly innovative historical periods are beginning to emerge today, but that “the full flowering of America’s dormant potential” is not guaranteed. “I pray that it will happen,” he said. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
Prepared by: NB
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