Donald Trump is grifting from his cult members as he’s running for president. This is unprecedented. Normally, candidates just beg for money to get themselves elected. But Trump is begging to line his own pockets. And his followers don’t seem to think there’s anything wrong with it.
Philip Bump at the Washington Post notes that he’s doing so much of it thathis campaign is suffering from a shortage of cash:
The New York Times looked at the “creative bookkeeping” it said the campaign was undertaking to expand its relatively modest coffers. That phrase is a fraught one. Earlier this year Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York for using “creative bookkeeping,” if you will: creative bookkeeping specifically centered on hiding money that was spent to boost his 2016 campaign. That is one way to run a low-cost presidential campaign: skirt the laws around transparency.
Another is to outsource campaign functions. Trump’s team has done this in some obvious ways, including tasking outside groups with running his turnout efforts. But the effort goes well beyond that, with the Times noting that his campaign had only 11 employees on its payroll in August, the most recent month for which full spending data was available.
This is in part because the campaign has offloaded its direct voter contact, which often means setting up offices in targeted states and hiring people to staff them and do the actual outreach. It is in part, too, because the campaign is “bending the rules to their breaking point,” in the words of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Dan Weiner, who spoke to the Times. Consider that in 2020, Trump’s campaign employed more than 200 people in August. And even that was modest: In August 2012, Barack Obama’s reelection bid employed about 900.
If we visualize the August spending by each major-party campaign since 2012, we can see just how small the purple “payroll” sliver is in the 2024 spending for Trump. (The circles below are scaled to total spending.)
Both in terms of raw spending and as a percentage of total August spending, Trump’s 2024 campaign expenditures on staff are modest. (You can also see that a lot of those August 2020 employees weren’t making very much.)
He doesn’t like to pay people. We know that. Bump speculates that if he wasn’t getting his donors to buy his worthless junk to pad his own wallet maybe the campaign would have more money to spend. But then, why bother? He’s got billionaires to pay for his super pacs and paupers to give him their last pennies to buy his hideous sneakers and blasphemous Bibles so why change a thing? Man’s gotta make a living. And he’s tied in the polls…
How is it possible that this lecherous criminal cretin is tied in the polls????