The New Yorker: Donald Trump’s Latest Grift May Be His Most Cynical Yet

The New Yorker: Donald Trump’s Latest Grift May Be His Most Cynical Yet

In an interview with S. V. Date, of HuffPost, Paul S. Ryan, a campaign-finance lawyer at the watchdog group Common Cause, used more colloquial language. “It’ll be a slush fund,” he said. Whereas the rules governing campaign pacs are fairly strict, the rules for leadership pacs are scandalously lax. OpenSecrets notes that some politicians use such funds to make campaign donations to other candidates in their party. Trump could end up doing this, too, but he also has many other options, including directing some of the donations to himself and his children. “Trump could decide to pay himself $1 million a year out of this fund,” Ryan noted. “That’s legal. He could pay Don Jr. and Ivanka, if he wanted to.”

If you want to see how Donald Trump’s world works, register on his campaign Web site—it’s still active. To help keep tabs on the Trump campaign’s activities, I took this step many months ago, and, since then, I’ve been receiving text messages and e-mails every day, purportedly from Trump and his sons, asking for money. After the election, I thought these fund-raising alerts might stop arriving, but they didn’t. They just changed topic. Instead of requesting donations to help reëlect the President, they asked for money to finance his flailing challenge to the results. In the past few weeks, there seem to be more texts than ever. …

The actual destination of the donations was revealed in some fine print located below a blue button marked “Continue,” which was the natural place to stop reading and start transferring cash. Any money donated to the Trump Make American Great Again Committee would be “allocated according to the following formula,” the fine print said: “75% of each contribution first to Save America, up to $5,000 … then to DJTFP’s Recount Account, up to a maximum of $2,800/$5,000…. 25% of each contribution to the RNC’s Operating Account, up to a maximum of $35,500/$15,000.”

It’s not clear how many Trump donors have read this declaration or understood its meaning, which isn’t immediately obvious. What it seems to say is that, for any donation of up to five thousand dollars, not a cent goes directly to the campaign account that is helping pay for Trump’s legal battle—the Donald J. Trump for President Recount Account. Instead, a quarter of the donation goes to the R.N.C., and the other three quarters goes into a new Trump fund-raising vehicle called Save America. What is this entity? The WinRed page doesn’t say, but, in the past few days, some details about the fund have emerged.

Save America is a so-called leadership pac, which OpenSecrets.org, a Web site run by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based nonprofit that tracks political money, defines as a “political action committee that can be established by current and former members of Congress as well as other prominent political figures.” In an interview with S. V. Date, of HuffPost, Paul S. Ryan, a campaign-finance lawyer at the watchdog group Common Cause, used more colloquial language. “It’ll be a slush fund,” he said. Whereas the rules governing campaign pacs are fairly strict, the rules for leadership pacs are scandalously lax. OpenSecrets notes that some politicians use such funds to make campaign donations to other candidates in their party. Trump could end up doing this, too, but he also has many other options, including directing some of the donations to himself and his children. “Trump could decide to pay himself $1 million a year out of this fund,” Ryan noted. “That’s legal. He could pay Don Jr. and Ivanka, if he wanted to.”