OMG. This is better than chickens coming home to roost. This is more like chickens coming home to peck a miscreant’s eyes out, while going through his pockets. And they’ll find nothing in Donald Trump’s pockets. No Siree, he spends everything he gets his hands on and then goes out and grifts more.
The PAC in question is Save America, and if that’s ringing a bell, you heard about it already this weekend when the Washington Post reported that Trump used $40 Million dollars to pay legal fees alone. Ouch. Save America is out of time to screw around. They need their money and they need it today. It’s July 31 and by the end of business (although if it’s postmarked midnight, it will probably fly) they need to file an obligatory expense statement with the Federal Election Commission. Trump hates the FEC, they’ve got the nerve to ask him what he does with his grift, can you imagine such a thing? New York Times:
That $40 million was in addition to $16 million that Save America spent in the previous two years on legal fees. Since then, Mr. Trump has been indicted twice and has expanded the size of his legal team, and his two co-defendants in the case related to his retention of classified material work for him. The total legal spending is roughly $56 million.
Pause here, just a moment. $40 Million is a lot of sardines. But it comes out of a fund of more than $100 Million, which is the money that Trump grifted from the rubes when he cobbled together the Big Lie and told them that he needed their donations to fight election fraud.
The PAC was the entity in which Mr. Trump had parked the more than $100 million raised when he sought small-dollar donations after losing the 2020 election. Mr. Trump claimed he needed the support to fight widespread fraud in the race. Officials, including some with his campaign, turned up no evidence of widespread fraud.
Mr. Trump used some of that $100 million for other politicians and political activities in 2022, but he also used it to pay more than $16 million in legal fees, most of them related to investigations into him, and at least $10 million of which was for his own personal fees.
Save America began 2023 with just $18 million in cash on hand, which is less than half of what was spent on legal bills this year.
And it gets worse. Even on these facts, somehow, it manages to get even worse.
Campaign finance experts are divided on whether Mr. Trump is even able to continue to use the PAC to pay for his personal legal bills, as he became a candidate last November.
Mr. Trump has long told associates that lawyers and other people contracted to work for him should do so for free, because they get free publicity. And he has told several associates that legal-defense funds are organized only by people who are guilty of crimes, according to people who have heard the remarks.
Work for free, for the publicity. Align yourself with one of the biggest crooks in history and do it for free. Guarantee that you’ll never get a real job again, you’ll carry the Mark Of Trump the rest of your professional life, and live how? Off relatives? Off savings? My God, the hubris is positively of galactic proportions. I don’t think Alina Habba is working for free. I think she’s making bank and might retire when Trump flames out. If she’s got any brains that’s the case.
Earlier this year, Mr. Trump began diverting a larger percentage of every dollar he raised online away from his campaign and into his PAC, which he has used to pay for his lawyers. At the start of the 2024 campaign, Mr. Trump had devoted 99 cents of every dollar raised online to his campaign. But he shifted that formula to now give only 90 cents to the campaign and 10 cents to the PAC, which has served as a sort of de facto legal fund.
Here’s the bottom line. Money is going from the super PAC to the political action committee to cover legal bills. The money is not being spent to support Trump’s campaign. As Chris Christie pointed out, “He’s going to middle class men and women in this country and they’re donating $15, $25, $50, $100 because they believe in Donald Trump and they want him to be president again. They’re not giving that money so he can pay his personal legal fees.”
This love affair with Trump is unrequited. Trump is using MAGA. MAGA loves Trump and gives him money that they don’t have to give and it’s all a sham. It’s like any exploitational romance, you get lied to and taken to the cleaners, but eventually it gets so bad that you wake up. I don’t know what it will take for MAGA to wake up.
MAGA will probably be in a till-death-us-do-part relationship with Trump until the very end. If the rest of the Republican party wants to climb up on the funeral pyre with them, then the GOP will continue to lose until they can figure out a way to purge themselves of this toxin in their party, which is poisoning them, and poisoning the rest of the body politic of America.
Trump has caused losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022. That trend will continue in 2024.
This is schadenfreude-licious. TFG can no longer rob Peter to pay Paul, so this particular PAC is going to be SOL. Bad news for Cheeto Jesus is good news for the rest of us.
It’s pretty funny when you think about it. Like many a businessman or corporation with a large operation that has sub-entities under a big umbrella when in finanicial trouble money starts getting shifted around between divisions. Many a highly leveraged person or corporation stays afloat that way. But sometimes the cash flow problems overwhelm them and the whole thing crashes. It’s looking like the Trump Political “organization” is a replica of the Trump Org. and he’s reduced to doing the same thing with his political operation as the real estate one – moving money around from one division (PAC) to another. Only this time playing fast and loose with some laws won’t be so easy as it is for rich people in the private business world. Now he’ll be trying to skirt some laws in the glare of the Presidential politics spotlight. And he’s already got investigators crawling up his butt!
I wonder if the drop-off of Central American refugees has a tie-in here. If he can’t pay for recruiters to convince people to make that danger exodus, fewer people would be making it…
Then again it is summer and DAMN HOT…
You know, if you’re an actor, it might very well be that there is no such thing as bad publicity. When you are practicing a profession such as law, medicine, engineering, etc. there is such a thing as bad publicity and you do not want to be tarred with that particular brush. In this case, former guy is the brush that tars everything it touches.
How is it that everyone seems to forget that Trump is reeeeally bad at business.
His casinos went bankrupt.
Casinos, where the house always wins.
.
Everything he touches turns to dross.
“Everything he touches turns to” $hit!
There, fixed that for you!
I remember the Special Counsel was looking into the funds collected on the BigLie. That grift may be illegal. I’m not a lawyer but one would think telling a lie to get donations one might be in hot water.
You’d be correct. If funds were solicited for one purpose and used for another it opens up the possibility of wire fraud and perhaps other federal charges. Of course, it boils down to legal language in “disclaimers”, that ole “fine print” that few people read, and if in dense enough language even trained lawyers have to put in some effort to understand. That’s how so many hucksters get away with it. But while it’s boilderplate stuff for the most part some situations require a bit of tailoring to stay just inside the lines of legality and Trump has been under the gun enough and started relying on shall we say less than stellar people (including lawyers) that such details might have left him open to being charged. Only a fool wouldn’t at least take a look, and one thing Jack Smith is not is a fool. So yes, his team is checking.