News Clips

Trump donors beware! President Trump is saying he needs your money for legal challenges to last week’s election outcome, but he’s showing you in the fine print that your money won’t be used for legal challenges. What will he do with your money? Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior. During his 2016 campaign, Trump’s campaign paid his businesses more than $12 million. Since taking office in 2017, Trump’s campaign has continued paying his businesses millions more of his donors’ dollars, together with millions of taxpayer dollars paid to Trump’s businesses. 

“It’s a straight-up bait and switch,” Paul S. Ryan, the vice president of policy and litigation at Common Cause, tells me. Such email solicitations target small donors, so for the “overwhelming majority of people contributing … none of their money will end up in recount accounts” or be used for otherwise challenging the election. Rather, it will be used to extend Trump’s influence over the RNC during the Biden presidency and to build up his leadership PAC, which amounts to a “slush fund” for Trump’s personal use. “There is no limit to how much Donald Trump can pay himself or any member of his family under ‘Save America,’” Ryan notes. Earlier versions of the “election defense fund” email solicitations indicated the funds were to be used to retire Trump’s campaign debt. “Presumably he raised enough to retire that debt," says Ryan, "and he’s building this new slush fund.”

“This is a slush fund. That’s the bottom line,” said Paul S. Ryan, a longtime campaign finance attorney with the good government group Common Cause. “Trump may just continue to string out this meritless litigation in order to fleece his own supporters of their money and use it in the coming years to pad his own lifestyle while teasing a 2024 candidacy.”

“This looks like the latest example of Trump administration officials bending and breaking ethics laws and norms,” said Paul Seamus Ryan, the vice president of litigation for the group Common Cause. “This is unfortunately par for the course for this administration.”

Paul Seamus Ryan, of the nonprofit group Common Cause, said it was legal for candidates to rent things from their own business — as long as they appeared to be paying market rates and not overcharging. But, Ryan said, he had never seen anyone do it at the scale Trump has. “It’s extremely unusual. Unprecedented, in my experience — 20 years or so, watchdogging money in elections,” said Ryan, an election-law expert.

Under the Hatch Act, government officials are prohibited from using government resources to engage in partisan political activity, and from commanding other government employees to do so. Paul Seamus Ryan, a vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said that if explicit communications surfaced linking the discount cards to the president’s re-election, health officials could face punishment. “It is likely these are people who could face criminal and civil legal liability if they go through with this scheme and it is for a political purpose,” he said.