Paying a Billionaire's Legal Fees

Is this a presidential campaign or a GoFundMe for a billionaire?

The Washington Post reported on Friday that more than half of the money Donald Trump raised in the second quarter of 2023 went to the PAC that is paying his mounting legal fees.

So while Trump-supporting blogs were crowing that Trump led the pack with over $35 million raised, in reality, the Trump campaign only took in 17.7 million.

About half of that $35 million was raised by Trump's Save America PAC, the fundraising operation that is spending millions to cover the costs of the lawyers representing the former president and his allies in the myriad of investigations that have come down the pike in the last few years.

I read the Post's article with my jaw in my lap.

Is this a presidential campaign or is it a GoFundMe campaign to get Trump’s most faithful followers, many of whom are retirees on fixed incomes, to pay the billionaire’s legal fees for him?

Perhaps instead of Save America, the PAC should be renamed Save Trump's Sorry Ass.

According to one Trump advisor who spoke to the Post, the money raised by this PAC "is going to legal and people who don't do much," leaving very little for advertising or marketing Trump’s presidential campaign.

The advisor added that "a lot" of the money raised by Save America "is just going to legal."

This explains why the DeSantis campaign pulled in more money in Quarter 2 than the Trump campaign despite only raising campaign cash for the last six weeks of the quarter. Trump is more focused on raising money for lawyers than he is on raising money to campaign for president.

It also explains why Team Trump hasn't been flooding the zone with his trademark rallies.

Those rallies cost money – money Trump needs to pay for his army of lawyers.

And while the entire WaPo article left me incredulous, the statement from Trump campaign spokesman Steve Cheung left me gobsmacked:

Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said the political and legal efforts are blending together because Trump and his supporters view the prosecutions as President Biden’s effort to stop him. “They see another political indictment or target letter and they know this is just the weaponized Biden Justice Department going after President Trump,” he said. “It solidifies in their mind what the President has been saying for all these months. So much of the legal messaging is political messaging and so much of political messaging is legal messaging.”

Consider the implications of this statement.

Every campaign has legal fees. Generally, though, campaign legal fees relate directly to running a political campaign. So to justify fleecing MAGA grandmas to pay the billionaire's legal fees, Cheung is claiming that the investigations into Trump are directly related to Trump's presidential campaign because the investigations and indictments are part of Biden's reelection strategy.

Keep in mind that billionaire Donald Trump couldn't be bothered to crack open his own wallet to help pay the legal fees of the people who, fueled by his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, stormed the Capitol on January 6 and then found themselves arrested and charged.

But now, he wants the same supporters whom he led down the garden path to cough up their hard-earned money to help pay for his lawyers.

It beggars belief.

Is it any wonder there are rumblings about the motives behind Trump's decision to run again in 2024?

It's hard not to conclude that the Trump 2024 campaign is nothing more than a well-coordinated GoFundMe operation to get his most devoted and loyal followers to foot the bill for his often self-inflicted legal problems.

That certainly would explain why Trump uses every pending indictment and grand jury target letter as fundraising fodder.

Fact is, if you omit the money he raised off of his indictments, Trump's campaign haul would be even more anemic than it already is.

Joe Biden isn't using the weaponized Justice Department as a campaign strategy.

Instead, Donald Trump is using a presidential campaign as a front to pay his legal bills.

This is why Trump is doing the bare minimum of campaigning while outsourcing his messaging to pro-Trump blogs and only giving speeches at events paid for by others.

The only question is, how long before Republican voters have had enough of this grift and tell Trump to get bent?