If you want to see how Donald Trump’s world works, register on his campaign Web site—it’s still active. To help keep tabs on the Trump campaign’s activities, I took this step many months ago, and, since then, I’ve been receiving text messages and e-mails every day, purportedly from Trump and his sons, asking for money. After the election, I thought these fund-raising alerts might stop arriving, but they didn’t. They just changed topic. Instead of requesting donations to help reëlect the President, they asked for money to finance his flailing challenge to the results. In the past few weeks, there seem to be more texts than ever.
“Eric Trump: Almost out of time!” said one that arrived on Monday morning. “Our End-of-Month fundraising Deadline is almost here. Pres Trump activated a 1000% IMPACT for 1 HOUR. Donate.” After I failed to click the accompanying link to the WinRed online fund-raising platform, and become one of the campaign’s “IMPACT” donors, the Trumps kindly gave me another chance. “This is Don Jr.,” said a message that hit my inbox on Monday afternoon. “I spoke with my father & he’s REACTIVATED your 1000% offer for 1 more HOUR!… Donate NOW.” Again, I failed to click the link, but that didn’t get me off the hook. “Pres Trump: I UPPED the stakes & EXTENDED our End-of-Month Election Defense Deadline!” said a text that arrived the following afternoon. “All gifts in the NEXT HR will make a 1000% IMPACT! ACT!”
Alas, I never did make it onto this exclusive donor list. It’s safe to assume, however, that some of Trump’s supporters did. Since the election, according to the Times, the President has raised about a hundred and seventy million dollars by continuing to “aggressively solicit donations.” Trump is no stranger to high-pressure sales tactics, of course. Years before he became President, employees of his Trump University, which wasn’t a university at all, allegedly encouraged people, including the elderly, to max out their credit cards to take courses that many said were worthless. In soliciting donations, his campaign is similarly relentless. On Tuesday morning, I got another message, which said, “FINAL NOTICE! Pres Trump EXTENDED your 1000% Offer. We need YOU to help us stop this CHAOS…Donate NOW.”
After deciding to write this column, on Wednesday, I clicked on one of the fund-raising links. It took me to a WinRed Web page that featured a picture of Trump holding two thumbs up. “President Trump is counting on YOU to DEFEND the Election, so he asked us to EXTEND your 1000% offer,” said an accompanying piece of text. A bit farther down the page, there were a number of boxes with suggested donations, ranging from forty-five to twenty-eight hundred dollars. If I contributed the higher amount, the page said, I could join the “Election Defense Team,” the “Trump 100 Club,” and the “First Family Circle.”
I didn’t cough up any money, of course. But if I had done so, where exactly would it have gone? Below the suggestion boxes, a piece of text said, “Your contribution will benefit Trump Make America Great Again Committee.” That seemed straightforward enough. In the past few years, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee has raised money for the President’s campaigns and the Republican National Committee, both of which have been deeply engaged in his post-election legal battles. Many Trump supporters who made modest donations may have assumed that their money was being passed on to the election-defense fund. But it wasn’t.
The actual destination of the donations was revealed in some fine print located below a blue button marked “Continue,” which was the natural place to stop reading and start transferring cash. Any money donated to the Trump Make American Great Again Committee would be “allocated according to the following formula,” the fine print said: “75% of each contribution first to Save America, up to $5,000 … then to DJTFP’s Recount Account, up to a maximum of $2,800/$5,000…. 25% of each contribution to the RNC’s Operating Account, up to a maximum of $35,500/$15,000.”
It’s not clear how many Trump donors have read this declaration or understood its meaning, which isn’t immediately obvious. What it seems to say is that, for any donation of up to five thousand dollars, not a cent goes directly to the campaign account that is helping pay for Trump’s legal battle—the Donald J. Trump for President Recount Account. Instead, a quarter of the donation goes to the R.N.C., and the other three quarters goes into a new Trump fund-raising vehicle called Save America. What is this entity? The WinRed page doesn’t say, but, in the past few days, some details about the fund have emerged.
Save America is a so-called leadership PAC, which OpenSecrets.org, a Web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonprofit that tracks political money, defines as a “political action committee that can be established by current and former members of Congress as well as other prominent political figures.” In an interview with S. V. Date, of HuffPost, Paul S. Ryan, a campaign-finance lawyer at the watchdog group Common Cause, used more colloquial language. “It’ll be a slush fund,” he said. Whereas the rules governing campaign PACs are fairly strict, the rules for leadership PACs are scandalously lax. OpenSecrets notes that some politicians use such funds to make campaign donations to other candidates in their party. Trump could end up doing this, too, but he also has many other options, including directing some of the donations to himself and his children. “Trump could decide to pay himself $1 million a year out of this fund,” Ryan noted. “That’s legal. He could pay Don Jr. and Ivanka, if he wanted to.”
Is the forty-fifth President that skeezy? “Trump was a grifter before he was in the White House. He was a grifter while he was in the White House. There’s surely no reason to expect him to stop grifting as he leaves and once he’s gone,” Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, another watchdog group, told HuffPost. “The special problem this time is, in conning his supporters, he’s also sowing deep distrust of the most basic institutions of our democracy.”
That he is—and his fund-raising alerts are still going out, many of them virtually repeating the previous ones. “CONGRATULATIONS!” said a message that arrived on Wednesday afternoon. “You won the Trump 1000% IMPACT extension! Pres Trump will look for your name in 1 HOUR, friend. Donate $10 & claim NOW.” Ten bucks doesn’t seem like a lot. But Trump will take everything he can get.
