The greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled
On self financing!
Over the weekend, Donald Trump sent this out via Truth Social:
What got all the attention in that statement — at least from the mainstream media — was Trump’s claim that he had $500 million in cash, a direct contradiction of what his lawyers had told a New York judge earlier in the week. (Trump owes $454 million in legal penalties to the state of New York; his lawyers say he doesn’t have that much cash.)
But what stood out to me was not Trump’s claim of $500 million in cash ( I mean that is ridiculous…) — but rather the second part of Trump’s sentence that read: “A substantial amount of which I intended to use in my campaign for president.”
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As in: Trump was planning to dump hundreds of millions of his own money into the 2024 race. But, now he can’t because he has to pay these massive legal fines. Which means, predictably, that if he loses in November, Trump will argue that one of the reasons was that he wasn’t able to spend his hundreds of millions on his campaign.
Which, well:
The latest claims by Trump that he was thisclose to self-financing his 2024 campaign remind me of one of the myths about the billionaire businessman that makes me the craziest: That he has EVER wholly self-financed one of his campaigns.
If you think back to the early days of Trump’s first presidential candidacy, he gave the very strong impression that he would be paying for the entire campaign himself.
In his announcement speech in the summer of 2015, Trump said this: “I don’t need anybody’s money. It’s nice. I don’t need anybody’s money. I’m using my own money … I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”
He would repeat that mantra regularly on the campaign trail. “I’m self-funding my own campaign,” he said in early 2016. “It’s my money.”
And then there was this tweet demanding credit for his self-financing:
Here’s the thing: That was NEVER true.
Which isn’t to say that Trump gave NO money to his campaign. He did! By the time it was all over, Trump had donated $66 million of his own money to his 2016 race. Which is not nothing!
But, two major caveats:
That $66 million was a small amount of the $339 million he raised in the race
As Reuters noted at the time, Trump-aligned businesses (his hotels, his private jet) received at least $11 million from the campaign
Again, $66 million is a lot of money! But the actual total is almost certainly considerably less than that when you consider how much the campaign paid Trump-related entities. And, even if you take that number at face value, which you shouldn’t, Trump still gave FAR less money to his campaign than he promised he would at the start.
In the 2020 race, Trump tried to pull off the same trick. In the face of worries about his fundraising in the fall of that campaign, Trump told reporters this: “But if we needed any more, I’d put it up personally, like I did in the primaries last time. In the 2016 primaries, I put up a lot of money.
Pressed on what that actually meant in terms of dollar amounts, Trump added: “Whatever it takes. We have to win. This is the most important election in the history of our country.”
How much did Trump wind up donating from his own bank account to that race? This is from the Federal Election Commission filing on the race:
Ahem.
What do we know about how Trump’s fundraising so far in the 2024? That a whole lot of donor money is going to pay for his mounting legal bills!
Here’s the Washington Post from earlier this year:
Two of Trump’s committees, Save America leadership PAC and the Make America Great Again PAC, spent $55.6 million on legal bills in 2023, including $29.9 million in the second half of the year, according to the new reports released Wednesday…
…Trump has raised most of his campaign funds from small-dollar donors. In the fine print of his solicitations, Trump’s joint fundraising committee notes that about 90 cents of each dollar is diverted to his campaign committee and 10 cents is diverted to the Save America leadership PAC.
And there was the new joint fundraising agreement Trump announced with the Republican National Committee last week. As the New York Times noted of the deal:
Former President Donald J. Trump’s new shared fund-raising agreement with the Republican National Committee directs a portion of donations to the political account he has used to pay his legal bills before any money goes to the party itself.
The order in which entities will receive funds from big donors through what is known as the Trump 47 Committee was disclosed in the fine print of an invitation to a big dinner next month in Palm Beach, Fla., where top donors are asked to contribute up to $814,600 per person to attend.
The invitation shows that the first $6,600 donated will go to Mr. Trump’s campaign. The next $5,000 will go to his Save America PAC, which paid more than $50 million in legal and investigation-related bills for Mr. Trump in 2023. The $5,000 amount is the maximum that federal rules say can be contributed to Save America by an individual.
This is my surprised face.
To best understand the Trump presidency (and the Trump candidacies), you have to think of them as one long grift.
From Trump steaks to Trump wine to Trump sneakers to foreign nationals spending money at the Trump hotel in Washington, it’s all about burnishing the brand — and making money off of his fame/infamy.
Which is amazing. Because the ENTIRE pitch in the early days of Trump’s candidacy was that he was so rich! That his wealth insulated him from needing to ask for money — and therefore being beholden to special interests if he was elected.
That was bullshit! Always was!
And yet, here we have Trump, yet again, claiming that he is on the verge of writing a really big check to his campaign. Reminds me of this:
Don’t be Charlie Brown, people.
“One long grift.” Not just his campaigns, but really, his entire life. So why do the sheep keep handing it over? #itsacult
Yes, Trump is an abject fraudster. And our woefully inadequate campaign finance laws facilitate his schemes. Consider how crazy it is that he can legally use funds raised for the campaign to pay legal bills unrelated to campaign activities. Citizen's United needs to be reversed and campaign finance laws need to be enhanced as important steps toward getting democracy back on track.