Month: April 2021

This piece in the Daily Beast about COVID on the front lines in this fourth surge is just chilling. It’s not over and the people who are dying at this point are tragic victims of bad timing, ignorant obstinacy or people who think the pandemic is over and are wantonly spreading it around:

As he drove past reopened churches on Sunday, critical-care nurse John Haacke figured Easter will prove to be yet another holiday followed by a surge in COVID-19.

“It’s not like a guessing game,” Haacke told The Daily Beast on Sunday night. “We told you it’d go up after Halloween. We told you it’d go up after Thanksgiving. We told you it’d go up after Christmas. We told you it’d go up after New Year’s. And it’s going to go up after Easter.”

COVID-19 cases were already on the rise in recent days at the hospital in Eastern Maryland where he works in the ICU.

“Things are picking up again. It seems like it won’t stop.” he said. “I have two sets of husbands and wives that died in the last week and a half, right in beds next to each other. I think in both families, the children infected them.”

None of the patients had been vaccinated. They either had not yet been able to get a shot or they had declined the opportunity. One clerical worker in her 50s had been given the chance but refused and ended up in the ICU with COVID-19.

The woman’s chest X-ray looked like a white sheet of paper, something increasingly common among recent patients.

“The worst chest X-rays I’ve ever seen in my life,” Haacke said. “Some of these X-rays, with an untrained eye you wouldn’t know there’s a lung that exists in there.”

The ICU team decided the woman’s best chance was extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), where a machine pumps and oxygenates the blood outside the body.

“We tried to send her out Friday to put her on ECMO, but they didn’t have any beds available,” Haacke said. “It’s been that way.”

On Monday afternoon, the woman took a turn from bad to worse. Haacke and his team spent two hours doing everything they could. Her husband and daughter arrived and were able to say their goodbyes. Then it was over for the woman as it was over for 270 Americans the day before, as it has been over for more than 550,000 of us since the pandemic began.

“The daughter was carried out, physically lifted and carried out because she was so hysterical,” Haacke reported. “Jesus Christ, this is awful.”

Other patients with white-out X-rays include a patient in his mid-thirties.

“He’s expected to not do well,” Haacke said.

Even if such a patient does survive, his lungs may be hopelessly scarred and damaged.

“At that point, you’re looking at a lung transplant,” Haacke said.

In general, Haacke noted, the new patients are “younger and sicker.”

He suspects one or more variants are responsible.

“I’m convinced there’s something going on,” he said. “We just don’t have the data to prove it right now.”

But even if they had proof, it would not change much.

“We can’t do anything differently anyway,” Haacke said.

What could change everything in the COVID-19 fight would be if we all did things differently in our everyday lives. Anti-mask Republican governors such as Kristi Noem of South Dakota have been rightly condemned for placing politics over science while thousands died. But an increasing number of governors who started out heeding science are now putting politics first, reopening everything from restaurants to sports arenas to gyms despite warnings from medical experts. They include Democrats Andrew Cuomo of New York, where cases are up 41 percent in the last two weeks, and Phil Murphy of New Jersey, where cases are up 20 percent in the same period. There is also relatively moderate Republican Larry Hogan of Maryland, where cases have jumped 41 percent in two weeks.

Even so, no matter what state you live in, nobody is forcing you to go out for dinner or attend a game or take a fitness class. We all know what the CDC says, and it is our individual responsibility to do our part to curb the virus.

“I am not the front line,” Haacke declared. “You are the front line. We are your last defense.”

Haacke believes that when hope finally arrived in the form of the vaccines, too many people began acting as if the fight were already over.

“Everybody decided they were done with it,” he said. “[COVID-19] is not done. It’s certainly not done.”

The virus gave a particularly wrenching demonstration of that last week with a man in Haacke’s ICU. The man was determined not to be put on a ventilator.

“You just watch people try so hard to not get intubated,”Haacke said.

Despite the discomfort, the man remained face down to facilitate his breathing. Haacke would remember him making clear that he was willing to do anything he was asked and was grateful for whatever was being done for him.

“Thank you. Anything you guys tell me, I’m going to do it. Anything you want. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

The man’s wife was on a ventilator in a room 25 feet away, but he was in constant need of what Haacke terms “as much oxygen you can possibly give a human being without putting a plastic tube down your throat.” Haacke could not interrupt it for even a few brief moments.

“I couldn’t get him physically 25 feet to see her,” Haacke said.

Even with the uninterrupted maximum supply, the man’s blood oxygen level suddenly dropped.

‘He didn’t want to be intubated and he died,” Haacke said. “His neighbor and best friend was admitted the day he died and [the neighbor] is not looking good, either.”“Mix it up on Easter. See you in 5-14 days in the ICU.”

The man had at least been able to see his children and grandkids. He never did see his wife, who at last report remained in the ICU on a ventilator.

“She’s still there,” Haacke said.

Meanwhile, Haacke awaits a surge that he feels is coming as a result of reopened churches and holiday family gatherings.

“Mix it up on Easter,” Haacke said. “See you in 5-14 days in the ICU.”

He figures the surge may continue up to June.

“Until the vaccine is much more widely available,” he said. “There’s just not enough people out there yet who have been vaccinated.”

The clerical worker who died on Monday afternoon was not the only person Haacke has encountered who refused the vaccine. Another was someone who declined even though he routinely injects himself with a substance laced with any number of contaminants.

“I had a heroin addict [who] told me he wasn’t going to take it,” Haacke said. “He said it with a straight face.”

sigh…

Thinking about the horror of the right’s response to the pandemic, I suddenly remembered this:

You can see why they love Trump so much. He would have cheered that comment too. It’s reflexive assholery.

President Biden believes Georgia’s new, GOP-promulgated voting restrictions are Jim Crow 2.0. Republicans say no. But Jim Crow was not Jim Crow until it was Jim Crow. The process took time after Reconstruction, explains Jamelle Bouie:

There was no statute that said, “Black people cannot vote.” Instead, Southern lawmakers spun a web of restrictions and regulations meant to catch most Blacks (as well as many whites) and keep them out of the electorate. It is true that the “yes” argument of President Biden and other Democrats overstates similarities and greatly understates key differences — chief among them the violence that undergirded the Jim Crow racial order. But the “no” argument of conservatives and Republicans asks us to ignore context and extend good faith to lawmakers who overhauled their state’s election laws because their party lost an election.

“The disenfranchisers were forced to contrive devious means to accomplish their purposes,” wrote J. Morgan Kousser in “The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910” (1974). Jim Crow 2.0 has to be just as careful to avoid clearly running afoul of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. “Black people cannot vote” won’t appear in the legislative record.

Neither was Southern resistance about race alone:

One of Kousser’s conclusions is that Jim Crow voting restrictions were as much about partisanship as they were about race, with Southern Democrats targeting the two groups outside of plantation-dominated areas, Blacks and low-income whites, who powered their Republican and Populist opposition.

That was before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s produced a “come to Jesus” moment for Democrats, and Republicans took over the mantle of overt discrimination.

Race is too simplistic a frame for explaining Republican voting restrictions in Georgia and elsewhere. Republicans are devoted to conserving the established pecking order in this country. And raw power for themeslves.

“The incontrovertible truth is that if Trump had won Georgia, or if Republicans had held Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue’s seats in the Senate, this law wouldn’t exist,” Bouie writes:

It took three decades of struggle, and violence, before Southern elites could reclaim dominance over Southern politics. No particular restriction was decisive. The process was halting, contingent and contested, consolidating in different places at different times. It was only when the final pieces fell into place that the full picture of what took place was clear.

Put a little differently, the thing about Jim Crow is that it wasn’t “Jim Crow” until, one day, it was.

The signs are clear even if the denials are loud. Nobody is fooled except Republicans and some of their judges.

George Lakoff’s “Moral Politics” has some age on it now. Published in 1996, the work sought to explain, well, “How Liberals and Conservatives Think.” The operative metaphor Lakoff uses to explain their different life and policy choices derives from child-rearing. Liberals are nuturant parents. Conservatives are strict fathers whose authority kids learn not to challenge. The rest follows.

Lakoff’s metaphor has some wear and tear since 1996. But the struggle of minds between the Biden administration and the Republican Party is an almost textbook illustration. Biden says Yes to what the country wants. Republicans say No.

Trumpism has stripped away conservatism’s veneer of morality and patriotism leaving naught but the will to power. And, hoo-boy, having their power challenged really brings out the authoritarian in Republicans.

How derring-do entrepreneurs running major corporations with whom Republicans reflexively side disapprove of the GOP clamping down on the voting access of uppity non-Republicans? How dare corporation use free speech Republicans defend when it comes in the form of cash donations to condemn antidemocratic Republican legislation? Why, that’s biting the hands that feed them tax breaks!

Politico:

In recent days, GOP leaders have encouraged boycotts against a group of companies that have condemned or pulled business from states that have passed more restrictive voting laws. The appetite for punitive measures hasn’t ended there. Republicans are also encouraging state and federal officials to utilize the tax code as a means of hitting back at, what they deem to be, “woke capitalism.” And they’re targeting some of the most iconic American brands — from Delta and Coca Cola to Major League Baseball — in the process.

[…]

The increasingly aggressive pushback against politically outspoken companies is the latest, and perhaps purest, illustration of a party at a philosophical crossroads. Republicans spent decades aligning themselves with the business community and its preferences for lower taxes and fewer regulations. During the 2017 GOP tax reform push, the party slashed the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent. In return, they have been bolstered with industry money and political support. Now, however, they’re betting that they can win on a backlash to the idea that political correctness has entered the boardroom and is irreversibly damaging conservative causes.

At a philosophical crossroads? Republicans left that fork in their rear view when they chose the patron saint of avarice as their party’s avatar. “My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” Donald Trump told a rally in 2016. He bilked his own followers out of tens of millions (maybe more) in unintended donations last fall. Then, “under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims,” he used more bilked donations “to help cover the refunds he owed.” He pocketed the rest.

Republicans left behind any pretensions of allegiance to the country, its principles, or its constitution on January 6th.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is trying to keep up the facade, nonetheless. He denied new voting restrictions introduced by Republican state legislators in Georgia and elsewhere represent Jim Crow 2.0. He warned big business to “stay out of politics.”

In a statement issued Monday, McConnell now calls corporate free speech “bullying.” “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order,” McConnell wrote.

Responding to those threats of retaliation, Elie Mystal of The Nation tweeted, “The thing the 1st Amendment ACTUALLY PROHIBITS, is the thing the @GOP threatens to do FIRST.” Republicans reach immediately for the belt. It’s what strict fathers do.

The most telling thing about this bout of Republican "cancel culture" is how quickly they abandon "let the market decide" principles and go straight for "vindictive law making.
The thing the 1st Amendment ACTUALLY PROHIBITS, is the thing the @GOP threatens to do FIRST.

— Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC) April 5, 2021

McConnell once filed multiple amicus curiae briefs in support of the rights of free speech and association expressed in corporate campaign donations. McConnell insisted those rights were “fundamental” and “of central importance,” Jennifer Rubin writes at The Washington Post. Not now:

McConnell is hardly alone. After Major League Baseball announced it will move its All-Star Game from Georgia, Republicans vowed revenge. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), another strident defender of corporate free speech, now sings a different tune:

Why does @MLB still have antitrust immunity? It’s time for the federal government to stop granting special privileges to specific, favored corporations—especially those that punish their political opponents. https://t.co/k3GIZuGYHB

— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) April 2, 2021

Hmmm. Corporations can punish political opponents by giving campaign donations to their friends, but not in adopting business practices they believe are in their own interest?

Not when corporate interests are out of alignment with the Daddy Party’s will to power.

Mitch McConnell today:

“Parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”

I have an idea. Let’s raise their taxes. That’ll teach them.

It’s always so tempting to think that the current moment is unique and that the factors that brought us to a particular place couldn’t have been anticipated. Right now, we are awash in conspiracy theories, from QAnon to The Big Lie to anti-Vaxers and it really seems like things have gotten weird.

But there have always been conspiracy theorists among us and one of the most likely groups to fall down a rabbit hole are conservative evangelicals many of whom are ready to believe that liberals are satan worshippers and that abortions are being used as a form of genocide.

Considering their fealty to Donald Trump, it isn’t surprising that they would be among the most vaccine resistant:

Stephanie Nana, an evangelical Christian in Edmond, Okla., refused to get a Covid-19 vaccine because she believed it contained “aborted cell tissue.”

Nathan French, who leads a nondenominational ministry in Tacoma, Wash., said he received a divine message that God was the ultimate healer and deliverer: “The vaccine is not the savior.”

Lauri Armstrong, a Bible-believing nutritionist outside of Dallas, said she did not need the vaccine because God designed the body to heal itself, if given the right nutrients. More than that, she said, “It would be God’s will if I am here or if I am not here.”

The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.

As vaccines become more widely available, and as worrisome virus variants develop, the problem takes on new urgency. Significant numbers of Americans generally are resistant to getting vaccinated, but white evangelicals present unique challenges because of their complex web of moral, medical, and political objections. The challenge is further complicated by longstanding distrust between evangelicals and the scientific community.

“Would I say that all public health agencies have the information that they need to address their questions and concerns? Probably not,” said Dr. Julie Morita, the executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former Chicago public health commissioner.

No clear data is available about vaccine hesitancy among evangelicals of other racial groups. But religious reasoning often spreads beyond white churches.

Many high-profile conservative pastors and institutional leaders have endorsed the vaccines. Franklin Graham told his 9.6 million Facebook followers that Jesus would advocate for vaccination. Pastor Robert Jeffress commended it from an anti-abortion perspective on Fox News. (“We talk about life inside the womb being a gift from God. Well, life outside the womb is a gift from God, too.”) The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, J.D. Greear, tweeted a photo of himself receiving a shot.

But other influential voices in the sprawling, trans-denominational movement, especially those who have gained their stature through media fame, have sown fears. Gene Bailey, the host of a prophecy-focused talk show on the Victory Channel, warned his audience in March that the government and “globalist entities” will “use bayonets and prisons to force a needle into your arm.” In a now-deleted TikTok post from an evangelical influencer’s account that has more than 900,000 followers, she dramatized being killed by authorities for refusing the vaccine.

Dr. Simone Gold, a prominent Covid-19 skeptic who was charged with violent entry and disorderly conduct in the Jan. 6 Capitol siege, told an evangelical congregation in Florida that they were in danger of being “coerced into taking an experimental biological agent.”

The evangelical radio host Eric Metaxas wrote “Don’t get the vaccine” in a tweet on March 28 that has since been deleted. “Pass it on,” he wrote.

Some evangelicals believe that any Covid restrictions — including mask mandates and restrictions on in-person church worship — constitute oppression.

And some have been energized by what they see as a battle between faith and fear, and freedom and persecution.

“Fear is the motivating power behind all of this, and fear is the opposite of who God is,” said Teresa Beukers, who travels throughout California in a motor home. “I violently oppose fear.”

Ms. Beukers foresees severe political and social consequences for resisting the vaccine, but she is determined to do so. She quit a job at Trader Joe’s when the company insisted that she wear a mask at work. Her son, she said, was kicked off his community college football team for refusing Covid testing protocols.

“Go ahead and throw us in the lions’ den, go ahead and throw us in the furnace,” she said, referring to two biblical stories in which God’s people miraculously survive persecution after refusing to submit to temporal powers.

Jesus, she added, broke ritual purity laws by interacting with lepers. “We can compare that to people who are unvaccinated,” she said. “If they get pushed out, they’ll need to live in their own colonies.”

One widespread concern among evangelicals is the vaccines’ ties to abortion. In reality, the connection is remote: Some of the vaccines were developed and tested using cells derived from the fetal tissue of elective abortions that took place decades ago.

The vaccines do not include fetal tissue, and no additional abortions are required to manufacture them. Still, the kernel of a connection has metastasized online into false rumors about human remains or fetal DNA being an ingredient in the vaccines.

Some evangelicals see the vaccine as a redemptive outcome for the original aborted fetus.The Vatican has said that vaccines are “morally acceptable,” and Catholics in America are much less likely than white evangelicals to say they won’t get vaccinated. Pope Francis visited a vaccination site in the Vatican on Friday.Credit…Vatican Media

Some Catholic bishops have expressed concerns about the abortion link, too. But the Vatican has concluded the vaccines are “morally acceptable,” and has emphasized the immediate danger posed by the virus. Just 22 percent of Catholics in America say they will not get the vaccine, less than half the share of white evangelicals who say that.

Some say they don’t need it because the virus has hit the communities of color more than white people, which is really stupid. It’s true that that people of color have been hit harder per capita but in sheer numbers many more white people have died simply because there are so much more of them. White people are not immune, needless to say.

White pastors have largely remained quiet. That’s in part because the wariness among white conservative Christians is not just medical, but also political. If white pastors encourage vaccination directly, said Dr. Aten, “there are people in the pews where you’ve just attacked their political party, and maybe their whole worldview.”

What a bunch of cowards.

The experts all say that you have to listen to their concerns and then give them the information they need to understand why it’s important. Good luck with that:

There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.

There are two parts to the problem, she said: The scientific community has not been as friendly toward evangelicals, and the religious community has not encouraged followers to pursue careers in science.

Distrust of scientists has become part of cultural identity, of what it means to be white and evangelical in America, she said.

[…]

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci are not going to be able to persuade evangelicals, according to Curtis Chang, a consulting professor at Duke Divinity School who is leading an outreach project to educate evangelicals about the vaccine.

The project includes a series of short, shareable videos for pastors, answering questions like “How can Christians spot fake news on the vaccine?” and “Is the vaccine the Mark of the Beast?” The latter refers to an apocalyptic theory that the AntiChrist will force his sign onto everyone at the end of the world.

These are questions that secular public health entities are not equipped to answer, he said. “The even deeper problem is, the white evangelicals aren’t even on their screen.”

Mr. Chang said he recently spoke with a colleague in Uganda whose hospital had received 5,000 vaccine doses, but had only been able to administer about 400, because of the hesitancy of the heavily evangelical population.

“How American evangelicals think, write, feel about issues quickly replicates throughout the entire world,” he said.

At this critical moment, even pastors struggle to know how to reach their flocks. Joel Rainey, who leads Covenant Church in Shepherdstown, W.Va., said several colleagues were forced out of their churches after promoting health and vaccination guidelines.

Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influence on their churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said.

Good Lord …

And:

Here’s Blunt on Fox on Sunday trying to make the case that Democrats are being fincally irresponsible. He sounds like a fool.

Wallace: During the Trump presidency, even before the pandemic, the national debt increased by more than $3 trillion and in 2017, every Republican in the Senate, including you, voted for the big Trump tax cuts which cut revenue by almost one and a half trillion dollars. So I guess the question is, when I hear for instance Mitch McConnell talking about debt and deficits, hasn’t the Republican Party—haven’t you lost your credibility on those issues?

Blunt: “Well, I don’t think anybody has a very good record for the last decade on this. I think the deficit under the Obama years and the Trump years are very similar.”

Well, there is one huge difference. Obama was confronted with the massive financial crisis upon taking office. Trump inherited an economy in smart recovery and the Republicans decided that instead of doing what they always say the Democrats should do and pay down the deficit, they went on a spending spree to give their rich friends huge tax cuts.

That’s what they did after Clinton left a surplus as well, when Bush came in. It’s how they roll. Democrats seem to have learned that they’ve been played for suckers on this issue for decades. And the press appears to be willing to point out the GOP’s lack of credibility, at least for now.

This is not to say the GOP won’t argue that the infrastructure bill and the rest are just “tax ‘n spend” projects (to benefit the wrong people, if you know what I mean.) But the deficit argument is dead for the moment. Thank goodness.

Money cheap right now and it’s a perfect time to do some major government infrastructure investment for the future. Here’s hoping they don’t end up with President Manchin throwing a monkey wrench in the whole thing.

Amazing how prescient Frank was.

A masked Easter bunny makes an appearance at the White House! pic.twitter.com/uxXD3Iriqk

— Maegan Vazquez (@maeganvaz) April 5, 2021

Trump himself gave one of his beloved balcony speeches about the military. With the bunny standing beside him. For real.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, candidate Donald Trump happened to be in the middle of a major federal class-action lawsuit spanning several states over an allegedly fraudulent operation called Trump University. You may recall that one of his first racist scandals during the 2015 primary campaign came about after he claimed the judge in that federal fraud case was biased against Trump because of his Hispanic heritage. The Trump University suit was a big story during that campaign but, as always, there was so much chaos surrounding Trump that I’m not sure people really understood what it was all about. It should have been the biggest story because it was unfolding during the campaign and illustrated everything the people needed to know about Donald Trump. It showed, in living color, that Trump was a real, bonafide con artist, in the literal sense of the word.

The grift was pretty simple. It started off as an online operation that quickly morphed into one of those bait and switch operations where they entice you to come to listen to a free lecture from some “expert” to teach you the tricks of the trade (or tell you the secret of life) which turns out to be nothing more than a sales pitch to buy more expert lessons in the same subject — which also turn out to be sales pitches. It’s what a lot of multi-level marketing schemes and frankly, cults, do to bilk people out of their savings. A 2017 report from the Center for American Progress explains further: 

Near the end, Trump University focused almost exclusively on the seminars, both running them and licensing the brand name out to an organization called Business Strategies Group. These seminars often began with a free session to get people in the door. Once individuals arrived, salespeople often tried to upsell them the “Trump Elite Packages,” ranging from the Bronze Elite Package for $9,995 up to the Gold Elite Package for $34,995.

Trump, of course, had a TV show in which he pretended to be a genius businessman and that was enough to get a lot of naive fans to sign on, apparently believing the lies in the brochures, which said that Trump had personally chosen the instructors and the so-called courses were credentialed by major universities like Stanford and Northwestern. The court case showed that none of that was true. And according to the Washington Post, Trump was personally involved in all the advertising that made those claims.

And despite pressure from the leaders of the seminars to write favorable reviews of the “course” there was an unusually high refund request rate from unsatisfied “students.” Time magazine reported that it was 32% for the three-day seminar and 16% for the Gold Elite package.

Trump eventually settled the fraud case for $25 million after the election, successfully shutting it down before it reached a courtroom. In the end, 6,000 customers were eligible for a piece of the $25 million settlement.

How in the world could an advanced democracy ever elect someone who was so blatantly a con man? It wasn’t as if it was far in the past or there was some serious dispute as to whether or not it was really a scam. It was obvious to anyone who looked at the case that there was no “university” and Donald Trump was running a grift. It wasn’t the first or the only one but it was being litigated right in the middle of the campaign.

I was reminded of that astonishing story this weekend when I read Shane Goldmacher’s shocking New York Times report on the Trump campaign’s fundraising practices. If anything, they were even more deceptive than the Trump University con.

Goldmacher reported that the campaign and its online fundraising platform WinRed hustled its most loyal supporters out of tens of millions of dollars with deceptive donation links on their emails and websites. It’s unknown to this day how many people unknowingly signed up for weekly recurring donations and “money bombs” (agreements to donate a lump sum on a future date), but there were so many requests for refunds that at one point, 1-3% of all credit card complaints in the U.S. were about WinRed charges.

What exactly did those prechecked boxes look like?

Well, as the campaign’s finances worsened they became dizzyingly complex. Here is an example from October of the text a Trump donor would have to wade through — and uncheck — to not give multiple times.https://t.co/vu10yWJaEs pic.twitter.com/N3NdYSMYPH

— Shane Goldmacher (@ShaneGoldmacher) April 3, 2021

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

“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. There is no way of knowing how many people just paid the bills, either thinking they had no recourse or failing to notice it.

The Times compared the GOP’s WinRed donation platform to the successful Democratic site ActBlue that it is modeled on and the GOP’s practices leading up to the 2020 election were much more unscrupulous. The refund request rate wasn’t even close. In fact, “the Trump/RNC operation issued more online refunds in *December 2020* than the Biden/DNC operation issued in all of 2019 and 2020.” But then WinRed itself is a product of Trump-affiliated henchmen who made their platform for profit, unlike the non-profit Act Blue, and even kept their fees when people demanded a refund which Act Blue does not. They made a lot of money on this scheme.

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 which they didn’t consciously agree to “loan” in the first place. Trump’s post-election “Stop the Steal” fundraising at least partially went to pay off those “loans” from the campaign making the whole scheme very “Ponzi-esque.”

It wasn’t just the Trump campaign that did this. GOP candidates who used WinRed all used the same tactics including the Republicans in two Senate runoff campaigns in Georgia. There were many many requests for refunds of donations to both Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the Times reported.

Salon