Waaait A Minute, You're Telling Us The Trump Campaign Is A GRIFT?

This horse is out of the barn and halfway across the continent.

If you are still donating to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with the expectation or even hope that your money is ending up going towards actual campaign activity and not directly into the pockets of former President Fuckbrain and his retinue of sociopathic remoras, well, we don’t know what to tell you. And if you are writing impotent opinion columns for The New York Times demanding some sort of accountability for where all those donations are going, then we really don’t know what to tell you. Other than we’ll happily hold your wallet while you check the text history on your wife’s phone.

And yet that is the premise of this piece by Juleanna Glover, a “corporate consultant” last seen in these pages trolling both Democrats and Republicans by suggesting Joe Biden and Mitt Romney run in 2020 on some sort of “unity ticket.” Glover is big concerned because the Trump campaign seems to be repeating its actions in 2020 when many of the donations it brought in “went into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates.” Followed by this:

Donors big and small give their hard-earned dollars to candidates with the expectation they will be spent on direct efforts to win votes. They deserve better.

Fact check: If they are giving money to lifelong grifter Donald Trump, they do not in fact deserve better. In fact, they deserve whatever giant hole in their bank accounts with no return on their investments they are getting.

All but 18 of the 150 largest expenditures on a Trump campaign’s 2020 F.E.C. report went to A.M.M.C. None of the expenses were itemized or otherwise explained aside from anodyne descriptions including “placed media,” “SMS advertising” and “online advertising.” 

AMMC is America Made Media Consultants, an entity incorporated in Delaware in 2018 that kept the identities of the people running it a secret. But its president was rumored to be Lara Trump, wife of Eric, daughter-in-law of Donald, and defiler of the memory of Tom Petty. Glover recounts that in 2020, over half a billion of the $780 million the Trump campaign took in went to AMMC, and no one seems to know who spent that money or what they spent it on.

In fact, it was former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale steering $94 million to his own digital strategy firm that reportedly convinced the Trumps to keep AMMC completely family-controlled, because if there is one thing Donald Trump hates — okay, one of many, many, many things — it is people making money off of him.

Lara Trump is now the second-in-command at the Republican National Committee, which is fundraising jointly with her father-in-law’s campaign and prioritizing steering funds to a PAC that pays Donald Trump’s innumerable legal bills.

Trump Campaign Lagging In State Resources, Will Make It Up In Thievery

Lara Trump Takes Over RNC, Looting Of Its Bank Accounts Sure To Begin Soon

Glover recounts a couple of other mystery companies that are hoovering up money and sending it back out to who knows where. She frames this all as a problem of lax campaign finance laws, which it is. But, again, if you are a donor throwing money at Donald Trump without doing enough due diligence to turn up all the information noted above (all of which is public), that sounds like more of a you problem.

Because none of this is new. We even wrote in May about how state Republican parties were flipping the hell out because the Trump campaign was taking in all this money, and little to none of it was going back out to build up any sort of campaign infrastructure — state offices, get-out-the-vote operations, all that stuff.

Glover goes on to complain about the impotence of the Federal Election Commission, which she says seems incapable of performing “its most basic enforcement role.” Which might be is definitely the case. But it is more than a little grating to hear all this from a woman who has long been a Republican power broker in Washington, given how much her own damn party has done to make agencies such as the FEC completely toothless.

Your party sold out to a grifter almost a decade ago and now you are complaining the government you have spent years disparaging is incapable of stopping the grifting. It’s almost Shakespearean, if Shakespeare had been an enormous idiot.

[New York Times]

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