In what should qualify as the least surprising story of the year, it turns out former President Donald Trump is lying to his own political donors about what he’s using their money for. The ex-president has raised tens of millions of dollars toward the stated goals of challenging the last election and helping Republicans win in the coming midterms. So far, records show, he’s instead using it largely to pay his legal bills and is sitting on the rest. Anyone of any political persuasion who continues giving money to someone with an established con-artist history can’t say they weren’t warned.
Trump is currently perched on a political war chest of about $102 million, more than $80 million of which was raised in the first half of this year. Appeals from Trump’s multiple fundraising committees and affiliated entities ask donors to give, in part, so that Trump can continue fighting to overturn last year’s presidential election.
It’s a dishonest enough pitch in itself, since there is literally zero possibility at this point of reversing the results based on Trump’s persistent lies about mass voter fraud. But the scam is compounded by the fact that the money isn’t even going toward those efforts. For all of Trump’s public encouragement of the clown-show election “audit” underway in Arizona, for example, he has yet to put any of his campaign money where his mouth is and help pay for it.
Ditto with the parallel fundraising appeals in which he claims he will help get Republicans elected in next year’s midterms. Trump still delights in publicly weighing in for or against GOP primary candidates, generally based not on any legitimate analysis of issues but on the simple standard of which ones will engage in the most self-humiliating, lickspittle prostration toward Trump’s ever-ravenous ego. (See, “McCarthy, Rep. Kevin.”)
But as Politico points out in a recent report on Trump’s fundraising disclosure records, “not a single penny” of his sizable mountain of campaign cash has been transferred to other politicians or committees engaged in midterm campaigns.
The records show Trump is instead just hoarding most of that money. What little of it he has spent has gone largely to settling legal bills from his earlier election challenges and from his defense in his post-election impeachment.
That kind of spending is permitted under federal campaign laws, and there is (unfortunately) nothing in the law that requires politicians to use their funds for the purposes they claim to intend to use them for when they send out fundraising appeals.
But make no mistake: Trump continues to prove that he’s still the lifelong grifter he always was, just on a post-presidential scale now. Trump may claim “Make America Great Again” as his mantra, but a more accurate one would be the old adage that there’s a sucker born every minute.
