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Tag: donald trump campaign

  • Donald Trump’s Massive Legal Bills Are Nearly Bankrupting His Major PAC

    Donald Trump’s Massive Legal Bills Are Nearly Bankrupting His Major PAC

    Former President Donald Trump’s sprawling criminal cases are draining the coffers of Save America, his leadership PAC, limiting the amount it can spend on his re-election campaign.

    According to a report filed with the Federal Election Commission on Saturday, Save America spent nearly $3.7 million on Trump’s legal fees in March—just about the same amount as the presumptive GOP nominee’s official campaign committee spent on his re-election bid during the same time period. The legal spending accounted for nearly three-quarters of the money the PAC collected that month, CNN reported.

    Slightly under one-third of the $3.7 million went to Blanche Law and NechelesLaw LLP, the two law firms representing the former president in his hush money trial in New York, where opening statements are expected to get underway on Monday after jury selection wrapped up last week.

    In addition to the hush-money cases, Trump faces three other criminal cases that have yet to go to trial as well as a nine-figure judgment in a civil case.

    Overall, Save America has spent nearly $60 million on Trump’s legal cases since the beginning of last year, Politico reported.

    In order to remain solvent, the leadership PAC has been taking refunds from a Trump super PAC called MAGA Inc., which Save America helped bankroll with a $60 million cash infusion. MAGA Inc. has sent Save America $5 million refunds every month for nearly a year, though that source of cash is drying up: the super PAC has already given over $57 million back to the leadership PAC, and won’t be able to contribute more refunds once it reaches the $60 million mark.

    The FEC filing comes as Joe Biden‘s campaign is far out-raising and out-spending its GOP counterpart. The president’s campaign spent nearly $30 million in March—including $22 million on an advertising spree—and still ended the month with $85 million in cash on hand, nearly double Trump’s $44 million.

    As the general election campaign heats up, both candidates have been looking to boost their war chests with high-profile fundraisers. In late March, the Biden campaign raked in $26 million at a star-studded soiree at Radio City Music Hall New York, in which the president appeared alongside Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, while an early April Trump event in Florida netted him over $50 million, a significant boost that will be reflected in a future campaign finance filing.

    Jack McCordick

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  • ​​Congress Looks Like Just Another Trump Campaign Arm

    ​​Congress Looks Like Just Another Trump Campaign Arm


    Even Donald Trump understands the economy is getting better under Joe Biden—so much so that he’s taking credit for it. The stock market is surging, he recently said on Fox Business, “because they think I’m going to be elected.” While the president’s poll numbers don’t reflect the improved state of the economy, it’s getting harder to see how Trump can run effectively on the issue in the general election. However, Trump, who campaigned the first time around on building a wall on the southern border, will undoubtedly seize on immigration, which his loyalists in the GOP seem determined not to reform before November.

    Trumpism takes a page from tea party nihilism, essentially; Michele Bachmann walked so Donald Trump could run. “By the 2010s—just before Donald Trump emerges—the tea party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don’t-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction,” Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol told Politico after right-wingers ousted Kevin McCarthy for not letting the debt ceiling expire and crashing the economy. That removal, she said, “is where it leads.”

    Today’s burn-it-all-down GOP caucus has a vested interest in the federal government failing because it proves its thesis that government is bad. In this election year, those in the caucus also have a vested interest in making Biden look bad—and so, by acting almost as an arm of the Trump campaign, they appear willing to torpedo any compromise that could be perceived as helping the president’s reelection chances. Republican congressman Troy Nehls admitted as much last week during a video interview. “Why would I help Joe Biden improve his dismal 33%, when he can fix the border and secure it on his own?” he asked. “He can do it on his own through executive order.”

    But Republicans, who talk endlessly about the southern border, have at least pretended in the past to want to craft legislation to address it. Last December, Republicans who were not anxious to allocate funding for Ukraine—presumably because they knew it would irritate their guy, Donald Trump—decided to tie aid to the country—something that the Biden White House desperately wanted—to border security.

    It looked like an impossible task; America hasn’t passed any meaningful immigration reform in 20 years. It was so unlikely to happen that Republicans decided to run with it. Kansas senator Roger Marshall told NewsNation, “At the end of the day, Republicans aren’t budging [on Ukraine] until we secure the border. That’s the question that all America is asking Joe Biden right now: Why do Republicans have to beg Joe Biden to secure the border? That’s part of his job.”

    Of course, Congress controls the money that Biden would need to secure the border; last year he requested almost $14 billion for the border, to be used for things such as hiring border patrol agents, immigration judges, and asylum officers. But House Republicans, who last month posed for photos at the Texas-Mexico border, seemed determined not to provide resources to fix a problem they’re fixated on. That’s because a crisis at the border provides something for Trump to run on, something for Fox News pundits to obsess over, and something for the news media to cover exhaustively in the midst of a presidential race.

    But what Republicans didn’t count on was the ability of this White House to lean on Senate Democrats to negotiate a border bill. Democratic senator Chris Murphy, independent senator Kyrsten Sinema, who caucuses with the Democrats, and Republican James Lankford were able to agree on something. The $118 billion bipartisan border-security bill unveiled Sunday night includes support for Ukraine ($60 billion) and Israel ($14.1 billion), as well as humanitarian aid for civilians in Ukraine, Gaza, and the West Bank ($10 billion). Biden, majority leader Chuck Schumer, and minority leader Mitch McConnell have also expressed support for the measure.

    It didn’t take long for the MAGA chorus to reject it, with Donald Trump Jr. quickly denouncing the “RINO-Dem immigration deal” and Representative Elise Stefanik saying the “Joe Biden/Chuck Schumer Open Border Bill is an absolute non-starter.” But Trump and company were already bashing the bill before they knew exactly what was in it, with the former president last month calling the compromise a “bad bill” and a “betrayal of America.” And House Speaker Mike Johnson, before seeing the text of the bill, declared it “dead on arrival.”

    You’ll remember that Johnson really does serve at the pleasure of Donald Trump, with the congressman having acted as one of the legal architects of his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Johnson’s election denial and fealty to Trump helped propel him to the Speaker’s job, whereas the former president targeted another Republican contender, Tom Emmer, who didn’t try to block the certification of Biden’s victory. Given that just one member can call for a motion to vacate, Johnson is largely controlled by whoever is the most disruptive—and in this case, it’s his party’s right flank.





    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Trump Insiders Say His 2024 Campaign Is More Disciplined: “This Time, He’s Not Talking to Randos”

    Trump Insiders Say His 2024 Campaign Is More Disciplined: “This Time, He’s Not Talking to Randos”

    With polls showing Donald Trump on track to handily win next week’s Iowa caucuses, the 2024 Republican primary is looking like a repeat of the 2016 race. GOP rivals like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis have spent months attacking one another instead of rallying around a candidate with the best chance of beating Trump one-on-one. But the 2024 cycle has been starkly different in one respect: The Lord of the Flies–esque chaos and infighting that plagued Trump’s prior campaigns have been tamed. “This campaign is locked down,” a Republican close to Trump said.

    Republicans close to Trump said there are multiple reasons Trump is running a competent campaign. First, his tight inner circle is made up of veteran operatives Susie Wiles, Chris LaCivita, Jason Miller, and James Blair, who don’t play their agendas through the media. “You have experienced people who don’t leak,” Roger Stone told me. In previous cycles, Trump populated his campaigns with huge egos like Stone, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Corey Lewandowski, and Brad Parscale, among others. (In August 2015, I wrote a piece headlined: “The Trump Campaign Has Descended Into Civil War—Even Ivanka Has Gotten Involved.” The tumult followed Trump to the White House, or rather, “the Westeros Wing.”)

    While Trump continues to stoke controversy with his baseless January 6 claims, incendiary rants, and authoritarian promises, his 2024 team is smartly keeping a low profile. “Everybody is mature enough that they want the president to win. The thinking is, let’s be organized, let’s get him in,” a veteran of Trump’s 2020 campaign said. This team has also been able to curb Trump’s habit of self-sabotage. Trump has committed fewer unforced errors like his indefensible decision to host white nationalist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago in the fall of 2022.

    Secondly, Trump trusts his senior team members to do their jobs. In prior cycles, Trump worked the phone constantly, soliciting advice from a wide circle of friends, family, Manhattan business associates, and media personalities. Trump’s style of pitting staffers against one another created an incentive to leak. “The side whose opinion lost would run to the media,” the 2020 veteran explained. “This time, he’s not talking to randos.” That said, Trump hasn’t totally quit his phone habit. According to sources, he speaks with Stone, Lewandowski, and 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort. (Trump pardoned both Stone and Manafort before leaving office.)

    Finally, Trump is disciplined because the stakes of this campaign are existential. Trump faces 91 felony counts across four criminal cases, the outcome of which could send him to jail for the rest of his life. Trump’s best chance at protecting his freedom is to win the presidency.

    Gabriel Sherman

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  • Trump Is Dropped From Maine Primary for “Insurrection” But Remains on California Ballot

    Trump Is Dropped From Maine Primary for “Insurrection” But Remains on California Ballot

    Maine became the second state to bar Donald Trump from its primary election ballot on Thursday after the state’s secretary ruled that the former president’s attempt on January 6, 2021 to overturn the legitimate 2020 election made him ineligible to hold office.

    Just hours later,  California — which has 54 electoral votes, and where election officials have limited power to remove candidates — signaled that the GOP frontrunner would remain on the ballot, bucking pressure from several top Democrats in the state (though the state’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had opposed removing him.)

    In her ruling, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who is a Democrat, acknowledged that a president had never been barred from an election based on the insurrection clause of the 14th amendment, which prohibits anyone from holding the office who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the government. But, she wrote, “no presidential candidate has ever before engaged in insurrection.”

    Bellows wrote that the January 6 attack was “violent enough, potent enough, and long enough to constitute an insurrection.” Trump, she added, “used a false narrative of election fraud to inflame his supporters and direct them to the Capitol to prevent certification of the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power.” 

    Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said Thursday night that both rulings were “partisan election interference efforts” and amounted to “a hostile assault on American democracy.” Cheung attacked Bellows in particular as a “former ACLU attorney, a virulent leftist and a hyper-partisan Biden-supporting Democrat,” and said that the Trump campaign would appeal the ruling.

    The two decisions contribute to what has become a growing checkerboard of divergent opinions regarding whether the insurrection clause permits Trump to remain on both primary and general election ballots in 2024. Colorado’s supreme court ruled last week that Trump had engaged in insurrection and would be removed from the primary ballot, while secretaries of state in Michigan and Minnesota have, like their counterparts in California, decided to keep Trump on the ballot.

    In total, lawsuits seeking to keep Trump from running have been filed in 30 states, though only 14 are currently active, according to the legal website Lawfare. The next state likely to rule on the question is Oregon. The swing states of Nevada and Wisconsin are two of the states with pending suits. Ultimately, the question is likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court, as the decisions have created pressure for the highest court, which is dominated by conservatives, to create a general standard and avoid a situation in which Trump only appears on some states’ ballots.

    In his comments last week opposing removing Trump from the ballot, Newsom admitted that “there is no doubt that Donald Trump is a threat to our liberties and even to our democracy,” adding, “But in California, we defeat candidates we don’t like at the polls. Everything else is a political distraction.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • Trump Campaign Is Quietly Working on a GOP Primary Insurance Policy: NYT

    Trump Campaign Is Quietly Working on a GOP Primary Insurance Policy: NYT

    Despite his fifty-plus point lead over the GOP 2024 primary field, former President Donald Trump has often seemed aloof from day-to-day campaigning, especially as he faces 91 felony charges, four indictments, and at least two civil trials. And yet, his campaign has quietly wielded his overwhelming influence over the Republican Party to reshape election rules in several crucial primary nominating contests, generating a kind of electoral insurance policy in case the race tightens over the next few months.

    Trump and his team “have spent months working behind the scenes to build alliances and contingency plans with key party officials, seeking to twist the primary and delegate rules in their favor,” The New York Times reported Saturday in a major review of these efforts,

    In no state have they had more success than Nevada, which Trump won by over 20 points in 2016. In September, the state GOP enacted new rules that restrict super PACs from sending speakers or campaign literature to caucus sites and keep them from acquiring data from the party. That move dealt a massive blow to the campaign of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, which is relying heavily on its well-funded super PAC, Never Back Down.

    Nevada’s state GOP chair, one of Trump’s fake electors in 2020, was part of a group of several state party officials who Trump brought to Mar-a-Lago in March.

    “They’ve rigged it anywhere they thought they could pull it off,” said Ken Cuccinelli, a former Trump official and founder of Never Back Down. “No one has tried to rig the rules like Donald Trump has been doing here, at least in a very long time…And no one has ever done it who, in other circumstances, complains about the rules being rigged.”

    “I don’t think they play fair,” added DeSantis campaign manager James Uthmeier. The Florida Governor’s campaign has not said whether DeSantis will apply to the Nevada ballot in February.

    “Not only is it a strategic victory, but it’s also a moral defeat for” the DeSantis PAC, said Alex Latcham, who oversees Trump’s operations in early primary states, in an interview with the Times. Latcham described the DeSantis campaign’s criticism of the primary changes as “sour grapes on behalf of less sophisticated candidates or their organizations who were outworked and outmaneuvered. I mean, the reality is this is politics.”

    Another state where recent delegate changes heavily favor the Trump campaign is California, where state officials recently adopted a winner-take-all rule for the primary, which favors the former president. Never Back Down responded to the new rule by effectively abandoning its efforts in California, including a mammoth door-knocking operation that had already hit over 100,000 homes throughout the Golden State. The Times reported that the Trump campaign was in direct contact with several of the state party’s executive committee members.

    “It gives [Trump] an advantage that a front-runner has never had before to absolutely wrap it up by Super Tuesday,” longtime Republican lawyer Allen Ginsberg said of the California changes.

    At the center of the Trump campaign’s effort is a little-known former White House aide, Clayton Henson, who, the Times reported, has “traversed the country for months on Mr. Trump’s behalf to establish a beachhead with party officials.” The campaign has reportedly wooed state GOP officials in states including Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, Hawaii, and Tennessee.

    “This is the kind of stuff that’s not talked about in the news,” Scott Golden, the chairman of the Tennessee GOP, said. “This is important stuff. It is ultimately about making sure your person is the nominee.”

    Jack McCordick

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  • Donald Trump, Sadly, Can’t Be Counted Out

    Donald Trump, Sadly, Can’t Be Counted Out

    A twice-impeached former president announced his third run for the presidency last week from the gold-leafed ballroom of his Palm Beach club. It was inevitable, perhaps, despite many Republicans wishing he’d held off from announcing before next month’s Senate runoff in Georgia. Of course, Trump serving his own needs shouldn’t be surprising given his last disastrous foray into a Georgia runoff, when his refusal to accept his 2020 loss may have helped the Democrats net two Senate seats and control of the chamber. 

    But the Trump who spoke at Mar-a-Lago wasn’t the terrifying, if occasionally amusing, wannabe autocrat we saw during his four years in the White House. Trump looked diminished. The midterms a week earlier turned out not to be a referendum on the party in power, as had been predicted, but instead another disaster for Trumpism. (Just ask Arizona’s Kari Lake.) This was the third election in which Trump was seen as damaging his party’s performance, following Republicans losing the House in 2018 and the presidency two years later. And it was yet another example of Trumpism’s inability to scale, as a slew of mini-Trumps failed to be elected in battleground states. Sure, some MAGA candidates won in ruby red states, where a jar of peanut butter would have triumphed if it had an R next to its name. 

    Somber from his recent midterm shellacking, Teleprompter Trump stuck largely to his blander and less incendiary talking points. While Teleprompter Trump is less scary, and perhaps less racist, he is also much less engaging, which became clear as some of the audience reportedly tried to leave midway through the speech. According to The Washington Post, the only current member of Congress to show up was primary-losing, “Dark MAGA” proponent Madison Cawthorn, who is about to have a very empty calendar come January. 

    Trump’s announcement was met with exhaustion from fact-checkers like the Post’s Glenn Kessler, who summed up the announcement as such: “New Trump campaign, same old falsehoods.” (Kessler knows past Trump falsehoods, having chronicled more than 30,000 false or misleading claims from Trump while he was in office). News outlets, like NPR, didn’t mince words with this excellent, and very factual, lede: “Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, announced he is running again for president in 2024.” The former president’s early entrance into the next presidential race comes also amid speculation that he is trying to get ahead of potential criminal charges by announcing before he’s indicted. Indeed, as James Carville put it to me in a text: “Hard to win when the picture on your campaign poster is a mug shot.” 

    Following last week’s lackluster speech, the chorus of Trump critics on the right is getting louder. “Maybe there’s a little blood in the water and the sharks are circling,” outgoing Maryland governor Larry Hogan told the Associated Press on Friday. “I don’t think we’ve ever gotten to this point before.” Hogan spoke critically of Trump when he appeared that night in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition, an event that drew other potential presidential contenders, including former vice president Mike Pence, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley. “Let’s stop supporting crazy, unelectable candidates in our primaries,” said Sununu, “and start supporting winners who can close the deal in November. Holy cow!”

    Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post is pummeling the former president, while National Review ran an editorial entitled “No.” Billionaire donors like Stephen Schwarzman and Ken Griffin are similarly saying “no” to another Trump run. Never Trump and Trump-skeptical Republicans have finally realized, or are at least admitting, that Trumpism is poison in general elections in competitive states and congressional districts. Much of the commentariat is ready to dismiss Trump’s viability in 2024—yet unfortunately, for them, and for us, columnists and pundits are not the base of the Republican Party.

    Here’s the problem with this particular moment in history: We’ve been here before. We’ve counted Trump out before, multiple times. In July 2015, a Gallup poll found most Republicans didn’t see Trump as a serious candidate. Then even after Trump defied the odds, and became the Republican nominee, there was a moment where it looked like the Access Hollywood tape would derail him. Then, as president, he mused about the “very fine people on both sides” following violence at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. And who could forget Trump’s suggesting in a 2020 debate against Joe Biden that the Proud boys should “stand back and stand by.”

    Molly Jong-Fast

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