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Sunday, July 17, 2022

"The big rip-off." Who would you guess that refers to? Do we need to actually follow the money to have a good idea where most of a quarter of a billion dollars in chump money went/will go? Fools gave it to Trump. So guess.

 A fool and his money are soon parted?

Forbes, Jan 31, 2021:

Trump Raised $250 Million Since Election To Challenge Outcome—Here’s Where Most Of The Money Will Actually Go

Jemima McEvoy

 Key Facts

[...] As noted by The New York Times, Trump and the RNC raised over $2 million every day on WinRed from the election until Dec. 14, the day of the Electoral College vote, pulling in an average of $2.9 million in the two weeks leading up to that vote. 

The number dipped after the Electoral College voted to make Joe Biden president, and then spiked again at the end of the year, as Republicans rallied around the (false) claim that Biden’s win could be overturned when Congress voted to certify the Electoral College’s results on Jan. 6. 

Fundraising then dropped off after the deadly Capitol attack when Trump largely stopped soliciting money from his supporters to support his election fraud claims.

Key Background 

CNN calculated that during the first month of Trump’s post-election battle, the president’s political operation sent out 414 fundraising appeals via email and 132 by text message. Hundreds more were sent before Jan. 6, with many directing supporters to an “Election Defense Fund,” according to a tracker of the emails. Though the pitch in many of the messages was to help finance Trump’s unfounded—and ultimately unsuccessful—legal challenges to the election outcome, it’s unclear yet how much of the money actually went toward this cause. Bloomberg reported that as of Dec. 4 the total spent on overturning the election by the Trump campaign was $8.8 million. The fine print at the bottom of some emails disclosed that large portions of the donations would go to Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America, which was created in the days after the election. Unlike contributions to a regular PAC, money in leadership PACs can be used “to fund basically anything,” explains the Washington Post’s Philip Bump. 

Crucial Quote 

“The money in the Save America PAC, unlike money contributed to a standard campaign committee, can be used to benefit Trump in innumerable ways,” wrote Bump. “Memberships to golf clubs. Travel. Rallies. Even payments directly to Trump himself, as long as he declares it income.” 

Surprising Fact

The Republican National Committee will also take a chunk out of the fundraising sum, according to The New York Times, which reports that roughly 25% of the funds raised through Trump’s email and texting operations will go to the RNC

Presumably RNC mailing lists were made available to Trump in exchange for a cut of the haul. For those snail-mailing cash to the grift, tearing up dollar bills and flushing them down a toilet would have saved a stamp. The money then going to a better cause.

 

More recently, NY Post, July 13, 2022

Former President Trump and his die-hard allies raised $250 million off their claims the 2020 election was stolen — but most of the funds went toward his newly created Save America PAC rather than to pay for various challenges to Joe Biden’s victory, the House select committee probing last year’s Capitol riot revealed Monday.

In a video presentation near the end of the committee’s second public hearing in five days, the panel’s senior investigative counsel, Amanda Wick, said the 45th president’s campaign “pushed false election claims to fundraise, telling supporters it would be used to fight voter fraud that did not exist.”

According to Wick, more than $100 million alone was raised in the first week after Election Day.

[...] The video included screenshots of emails imploring Trump supporters to donate to an “Official Election Defense Fund.”

“The select committee discovered no such fund existed,” said Wick.

The committee also played audio of Trump 2020 campaign digital director Gary Coby agreeing with an interrogator who suggested the fund was merely a “marketing tactic.”

The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot revealed Trump's fraud on Monday.
The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot revealed Trump’s fraud on Monday.
Reuters

Most of the money, Wick said, went to entities that directly benefited Trump’s family and friends rather than “election-related litigation.”

Among the outlays Wick cited from Save America PAC were $1 million each to a pair of pro-Trump think tanks — the Conservative Partnership Institute and the America First Policy Institute — as well as more than $200,000 to the Trump Hotel Collection and $5 million to Event Strategies, the firm that helped put on the Jan. 6, 2021 ‘Stop The Steal’ rally that precipitated the Capitol riot.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), accused Trump and his backers of swindling supporters who donated in good faith to help the former president’s legal cause.

[...] “Small-dollar donors use scarce disposable income to support candidates and causes of their choosing, to make their voices heard, and those donors deserve the truth about what those funds will be used for,” she said. “Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for.

“Not only was there the big lie, there was the big rip-off,” Lofgren added. “Donors deserve to know where their funds are really going. They deserve better than what President Trump and his team did.”

Deserve better than what President Trump and his team did? A skeptic could conclude those rabid "Fight Back" donors got precisely what they deserved. And they're still there. A suggested slogan, "Fight the Steal, wheel and deal, pluck that teal." (A teal half-plucked means more plucking is feasible. Until all you've got left in the course of time is a fully butt-naked dead wild duck. Getting what it deserved.)