Wait, The former president* is roaming the landscape, scamming his campaign donors out of money and hanging ten on the massive wave of money unleashed a decade ago when the Supreme Court legalized influence peddling in Citizens United v. FEC? He's making promises he will have no ability to keep? Simply unpossible. From The Washington Post:
Another businessman...had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”
Find me another context in which the defendant in a criminal case can ask for $25 million and get it. Politics are a very strange land.
The former president was once reluctant to call donors and decried the role of big money in politics. He also often railed about having to take pictures — berating advisers for scheduling too many “clicks” — and sought to cast himself as an outsider who was not beholden to the traditional moneyed interests that shape Washington. “He didn’t want to make fundraising calls,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. On the 2020 campaign, he would reluctantly participate in fundraisers, advisers said, seeing them as an unpleasant necessity.
I don't believe a word of this. The former president* has not drawn a breath in his life when he wasn't looking for money he could get his grubby little mitts on. The idea that he shied away from shaking down the rubes over the phone certainly conforms to his basic cowardice, but I can't believe that overrode his hunger for the grift.
Trump sometimes makes requests higher than his team expects to receive, sometimes surprising his own advisers because he is asking for so much money. By frequently tying the fundraising requests within seconds of promises of tax cuts, oil project infrastructure approvals and other favorable policies and asking for sums more than his campaign and the GOP can legally accept from an individual, Trump is also testing the boundaries of federal campaign finance laws, according to legal experts.
To test the boundaries of anything, you have to accept that those boundaries actually exist. He doesn't. And maybe, for all practical purposes, they don't.
Also, even if presented with evidence Trump might have gone over the line, multiple prominent campaign finance lawyers said, the Federal Election Commission, which is gridlocked with three Republicans and three Democrats, is unlikely to investigate any of Trump’s fundraising in an election year.
Another splendid testimony to the glories of bipartisan government. Oh, and as an added bonus, the former president* has also entertained the big cash daddies with his own special combination of barefaced non-facts and naked lunacy.
Oftentimes, his comments at the events are about foreign policy and topics he discusses at rallies, such as inflation and immigration. For example, at one event, he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan, surprising some of the donors.
And what a campaign it is. The parts that aren't based on pure greed are based on rank dishonesty, and the ones that aren't based on greed and rank dishonesty are monumentally dangerous.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
