Inside Secret AEI Summit: Mrs. Zuckerberg cozies up to the Right

Mark Penn: Since when are Democrats against tariffs?

Welcome back to The Red Letter! As promised, I want to bring you the inside conversation at the highest levels of power, which brings us to the American Enterprise Institute and its secretive conference that has not been reported on elsewhere.

Its annual meeting is notoriously off-the-record and attended by the masters-of-the-universe, as well as the Republican politicians who rely on their deep pockets. To be invited, you must donate at least $50,000 per year to the center-right think tank, and then pay an additional $20,000 for a ticket. It’s basically Club Med for industrialists and founders of asset management firms—but in Sea Island, Georgia.

Of course, I had sources in the room.

This year didn’t have the same star power as prior years when the conference was attended by the likes of George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, and Dick Cheney. MAGA has sucked the life out of most establishment think tanks, but it did present a safe space for tech titans to feel out the Right, like Mark Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Palantir co-founders Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale. While Zuckerberg openly seduces Trump, Chan may be easing herself into the conservative ecosystem. (I’m told that she’s not a donor of AEI and was there to speak about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s work in scientific medical research.) Meanwhile, Karp, in an interview with his co-founder Lonsdale, praised Elon Musk for Starlink’s role in defending Ukraine from Russia. According to a source in the room, Karp said, “We have $37 trillion in debt, why wouldn’t you want the best-of-the-best who created SpaceX, Tesla to fix the government? They’ll make mistakes, but why wouldn’t you want this?” This line was met with applause, I’m told.

In terms of star power, Senate Majority Leader John Thune was skipped to pass the continuing resolution. House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith was mobbed with questions about the tax cuts. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia cut a fine figure in his Patagonia to donors who also speak private equity and don’t want to see the talents of the term-limited governor go to waste. Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was aggressively being pushed to run for Jon Ossoff’s Senate Seat in 2026. In fact, I’m told that he received a commitment of nine-figures from just one donor.

“Everybody in Sea Island was pushing, begging Kemp,” one attendee told me.

“Unlimited amounts of money were pledged to Kemp.”

Karl Rove and Mark Penn amused donors by how much they loathed their own parties. “You couldn’t tell which one was a Republican and which one was a Democrat,” the attendee told me of Rove, a Never Trumper and Penn, a turncoat Democrat who pushed for a third-party contender in the last election.

“I’ve never seen polling like this,” Penn said of the Democratic party. “The people have spoken.”

He also hit on the T-word, which had attendees buzzing after former Senator Phil Gramm, a respected econ professor, made an impassioned plea against tariffs.

“Since when have Democrats been against tariffs?” Penn asked.

There were Obama holdovers in attendance, like his former director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling and former chair of the Economic Council of Advisors Jason Furman.

But most people were clamoring to reach Smith, to press him to bring back corporate inversions, so they can move their companies abroad. So much for America First.

That’s all for tonight. I’ll be back again this week.

Check out my conversation above with Axios’s Alex Isenstadt about his new book, Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump's Return to Power, where he goes into remarkable detail about how President Trump clawed his way from the depths of January 6 to the White House. I promise, the conversation will make you feel like you’re in the room with Trump. It’s packed with juicy details about how Elon Musk convinced Trump to choose JD Vance, why he feared Gavin Newsom, and how Tucker Carlson tracked down Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at an AA meeting to convince him to endorse Trump.