Trump Spent $1.1 Million In Campaign Money On Lawyers And #MAGA Hats In 3 Months

Last week, we decried the fact that Donald Trump is nickel-and-diming working class Americans by convincing them to donate small sums of money to joint committees and ultimately, to the RNC. The national party, for instance, gets 25% of donations received by the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee.”

The Washington Post spoke with some of the folks who have donated and the stories betray the extent to which Trump is quite literally selling dreams to people who can’t afford to pay for them.

One of the small donors is Martha Adams 70, a retired speech pathologist from Austin. She told the Post that when she donated to the joint committee, she intended for her money to go to the president. “I tried to give just to him, because I think he knows best what to do,” she said. “I don’t know if I really meant to give it to the RNC.”

Same thing goes for Gwynne Abrams, an unemployed nanny in Henderson, Nev., who gave $78 to the joint committee. “I’m not giving to the Republican Party, really,” she said, and her rationale is simple: “[the GOP has] done nothing since they’ve been in control of the Senate and House.”

But see that’s the thing: she is giving to the Republican Party — “really“. And that would be the same Republican party that is trying to pass a tax plan that, at least according to the best available information, would benefit Donald Trump and his family to the tune of $1.1 billion.

So that would be bad enough as it is. Trump convinced working class Americans to vote against their own self-interest by duping them with a campaign based on hyperbole and populist rhetoric and now he’s pushing those same lies to take money from unemployed nannies, money which is then used to further an agenda that enriches people like Trump.

Worse than that though is the distinct possibility that some of the money being sent in by small donors is being used to finance Trump’s lawyer fees — even as the campaign swears there’s some kind of Chinese wall between money from “wealthy” donors and small donors, with contributions from the latter not being used to help Trump defend himself against charges of collusion. Again: “believe me.”

Well according to the reports filed on Sunday with the Federal Election Commission Trump’s campaign spent more than $1.1 million on legal fees in the past three months alone. Here’s The New York Times: 

The biggest share of the legal payments revealed on Sunday by Mr. Trump’s campaign and the joint committees it formed with the Republican Party – $830,000 – went to Jones Day, the law firm representing the campaign in connection with the investigations.

[…]

The campaign committee also paid nearly $238,000 in July and August to the offices of the New York lawyer Alan S. Futerfas, who is representing the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. in the investigations.

So in the nine months through September, Trump’s campaign spent $2.1 million on legal fees.

When he’s not using Gwynne’s nannying money to pay high powered lawyers to ward off collusion investigations, he’s buying red #MAGA hats. No, seriously. Here’s the Times again:

The spending not consumed by legal expenses was more reflective of Mr. Trump’s campaign-style political operation, which did not pause after his election, unlike most presidential campaigns’ operations, which are dialed back or rolled into party committees. Mr. Trump still holds rallies around the country, and the costs included facility rentals, as well as travel and the red Make America Great Again hats sold on Mr. Trump’s campaign website.

It would appear, then, that Trump is using donations to make those red hats and then, assuming he’s marking them up (which you damn well know he probably is), selling those same red hats for a profit. And who knows where those profits end up. Certainly not in the service of the people who are effectively paying to have them produced.

As the Times goes on to remind you, some of the $7 million raised from small donors this year has come from e-mail solicitations “pegged to news events like Mr. Trump’s feud with National Football League players over their protests during the national anthem.” That brings us back to this mailer, sent out less than 24 hours after Mike Pence made a spectacle of himself at the direction of Trump by leaving a Colts game after the anthem:

Do you see how bad this is? It is the worst kind of exploitation. He is engineering feuds for the sole purpose of using them to solicit money from people who have no (or very little) money to give.

And then he’s using that money to fund his legal defense and also to fly around the country and hold campaign rallies just 10 months into his term. At those rallies, he sells the same dream to people wearing hats that they effectively bought twice.

Allow us to simply close as we did last week – by quoting the same WaPo piece cited above:

Chris Chavez, a 20-year-old who runs a small vending business in Scottsdale, Ariz., and grew up watching Trump on the reality show “The Apprentice” with his father made his first political donations ever to support Trump’s campaign last year and has contributed about $50 this year, including $3 to the RNC as part of a contest to meet the president at a rally in Arizona in August. He won and got to meet Trump backstage.

“My heart just stopped,” Chavez recalled. “I would donate to his 2020 campaign in a heartbeat.”