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How Trump bilked millions from his cult

This report from Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times about the GOP small donor fundraising apparatus is a blockbuster. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the Trump campaign was scamming its loyal supporters, but the scale is unbelievable. They ended up refunding many millions but it’s unknown how many people got bilked out of “recurring donations” they didn’t realize they’d signed up for.

“Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out. As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, It introduced a second prechecked box.”

The story compares the right wing WinRed donation platform, modeled on the successful Democratic site ActBlue, and it’s clear that the Republicans were grifting. WinRed itself is a product of Trump affiliated henchmen who made their platform for profit, unlike Act Blue, and kept fees even for refunds.

And the way the Trump campaign ran their fundraising operation was insanely aggressive and unscrupulous. The article also compares that to the Biden campaign and the differences are monumental. Biden’s team also refunded donations for various reasons, which is normal in all campaign, but the sheer number of refunds to Trump donors amounted to a huge no interest (and profitable for WinRed) loan to the campaign — a loan which required that the people loaning the money go to a great deal of trouble get money back they didn’t consciously agree to “loan” in the first place. Millions of people didn’t realize they were signing on to future money bombs and recurring donations that ran into the thousands of dollars. It’s unknown how many just let it slide and allowed the Trump campaign to keep the money because it was too complicated to try to get it back. A lot of Trump donors were elderly.

The scam grew through the course of the campaign as Trump is reported to have been livid that they weren’t collecting enough money:

The small and bright yellow box popped up on Mr.Trump’s digital donation portal around March 2020. The text was boldface, simple and straightforward: “Make this a monthly recurring donation.” The box came prefilled with a check mark.

Even that was more aggressive than what the Biden campaign would do in 2020. Biden officials said they rarely used pre-checked boxes to automatically have donations recur monthly or weekly; the exception was on landing pages where advertisements and emails had explicitly asked supporters to become repeat donors.

As the months went on, they quietly changed it from a monthly to a weekly contribution and the pitch became more and more obscure, culminating in this mess:

The credit card companies told the Times that they were inundated with complaints and requests to cancel cards:

The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.[…]

“It started to go absolutely wild,” said one fraud investigator with Wells Fargo. “It just became a pattern,” said another at Capital One. A consumer representative for USAA, which primarily serves military families, recalled an older veteran who discovered repeated WinRed charges from donating to Mr. Trump only after calling to have his balance read to him by phone.

The unintended payments busted credit card limits. Some donors canceled their cards to avoid recurring payments. Others paid overdraft fees to their bank.

The guy who ran this grift was a Jared Kushner acolyte, unsurprisingly.

Here are just a few of the stories in the article:

Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”

Jeff Kropf, the executive director of the Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation, a conservative group, said he had been “very careful” to uncheck recurring boxes — yet he missed the “money bomb” and got a second charge anyway.

“Until WinRed fixes their sneaky way of adding additional contributions to credit cards like they did to me, I won’t use them again,” he said.

But it wasn’t just WinRed, it was the campaign. And according to the Times, all the GOP campaigns are doing it. The two Georgia runoff campaigns were particularly aggressive.

Keith Millhouse, a transportation consultant in California, intended to donate once to Mr. Perdue, with the aim of keeping Republicans in control of the Senate. He wound up a recurring contributor and called the practice “repugnant” and “deceptive.”

“I’m busy like a lot of other people during this Covid era and I just wanted to get in, make a donation, get done and move on to what I needed to do next,” he said. “I thought I had done that. Then I find out that, you know, I’m getting these other charges.”

He canceled the repeating charge when he saw the reminder email. But by then WinRed had already processed his second $100 “bonus” contribution. He figured it was not worth the hassle to protest. “Don’t try to sucker it out of me,” he said.

I wonder how many people like him are out there.

Still, they hold Dear Leader blameless:

But for some Trump supporters like Ron Wilson, WinRed is a scam artist. Mr. Wilson, an 87-year-old retiree in Illinois, made a series of small contributions last fall that he thought would add up to about $200; by December, federal records show, WinRed and Mr. Trump’s committees had withdrawn more than 70 separate donations from Mr. Wilson worth roughly $2,300.

“Predatory!” Mr. Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, “I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”

That makes me want to cry. This is a man who is known for being a predatory con artist in his business career, behaved totally corruptly as president and took advantage of his own supporters and these people still love him and hold him blameless. I will never understand it.

By the way, he’s still doing it:

And after Mr. Trump’s first public speech of his post-presidency at the end of February, his new political operation sent its first text message to supporters since he left the White House. “Did you miss me?” he asked.

The message directed supporters to a WinRed donation page with two prechecked yellow boxes. Mr. Trump raised $3 million that day, according to an adviser, with more to come from the recurring donations in the months ahead.

And all the other Republicans are too, including Mitch McConnell. I guess they figure their supporters are suckers and deserve what they get.

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