@maxkutner
THUMBS UP: Trump slammed a primary opponent for being backed by Mercer’s super PAC, but gladly accepted its largesse when Mercer decided to back him.
EVAN VUCCI/AP
ROBERT MERCER seemed uncomfortable. It was 2014, and the billionaire had just stepped behind the podium to accept a lifetime achievement award from the Association for Computational Linguistics. He warned his audience that speaking for the required hour or so was “more than I typically talk in a month” and that he was no longer in their field of work. “I left IBM Research 20 years ago, and I really have not paid any attention to the world of linguistics or to IBM since then. And I can’t really talk about what I do now.”