If anyone thought I was using yesterday’s column to overstate the degree to which Trump is using this ‘rigged election’ nonsense to build his MAGA brand, I suggest you take a look at this article in yesterday’s WaPo [thanks Paula] which lays out in detail how the Trump campaign is shutting down.
Want to know why Trump’s campaign is closing up shop? It’s not because he’s lost every, single legal challenge that he brought against the Biden campaign [Thanks again Paula.] It’s because the campaign is broke.
The Federal Election Commission has just posted financial data that ruins through October 31st. We’ll have to wait another month to get the final numbers for the 2019-2020 campaign expenditures and receipts, but he current data goes far enough.
How much money did the Biden campaign receive beginning in 2019? Try $952,259,368, of which $720 million and change came from individual contributions, the other $229 mill from various committees (i.e., all those PACS.)
How much did Trump pull in during the same period of time? A whole, big $533,843,893, of which $317 million was individually donated, with another $214 million sent over by the PACS and other groups.
Trump received 5.5 million individual contributions and many people donated to his campaign more than once. Know how many individual donations Joe and Kammie received? Try 8.6 million donations, okay?
In other words, an incumbent President who ran around the country appearing at more than 75 large public rallies and events during the first three years of his Administration, pulled in half as much money as the challenger raised, and only 40% of the funds that accounted for individual donations to the Biden campaign.
Now let’s look at one other number and compare the two campaigns. As of October 31st, the total debt of the Biden campaign was a big, fat zero. For all the talk about how Democrats like to spend money they don’t have, that certainly wasn’t how Joe ran his campaign. On the other hand, the Trump campaign owed $1.2 million as of October 31st, and if he wants to continue contesting the election results, the debt will only increase.
Trump has demanded recounts in a number of battleground states but there’s only one little problem. Want to get the votes counted again? Pay for the privilege. To recount in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan would cost the Trump campaign millions of bucks. They don’t have millions of bucks. They have gurnisht, a Yiddish word which means zero as in zilch.
It turns out the good news for Trump is that he can use money that is donated to his campaign to cover these and other legal costs any way he chooses to use the dough. Last week Trump and his minions began asking supporters to donate money to something called the ‘election defense fund.’ The purpose of this fund is to pay the costs of ‘defending the integrity’ of the election, so it is said.
Except if you read the fine print of these solicitations, it turns out that half of any monies received will go to pay down the campaign’s debt. Do you know anyone who ever reads the fine print? I don’t, and that includes me.
Want the really good news? The word is now out that Joe doesn’t want to see any post-election investigations of Trump. He doesn’t want the federal investigation of Trump’s tax returns to go forward, ditto any investigations of how or why Trump grants legal immunity to members of his staff. The official story is that Joe feels that such activity would further divide the country. Fine.
Here’s the real reason that Joe’s thinking enough is enough. Because if the government leaves Trump alone, then he can sit on his rear end in Mar-a-Lago, tweet to his heart’s content and nobody will pay attention to him at all. Can you imagine a world in which the liberal media has to actually go out, dig up and report real news?
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