The first official project of the End Citizens United Action Network will expose Trump’s broken promises and fight efforts to dismantle our campaign finance laws
One of the core tenets of Donald Trump’s early success as a presidential candidate was his claimed commitment to fixing our broken campaign finance system. His rhetoric made him sound like a reformer.
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly railed against the outsized role of money in politics, calling Super PACs “very corrupt” and saying we must get rid of them because they are a “a disaster waiting to happen.” He called his opponents “puppets” and said that Big Money donors exercise “total control over these candidates.”
On top of this, Trump claimed that his own past manipulations of our broken campaign finance system made him the ideal candidate to fix it. He famously pledged to fix the “rigged system” and “drain the swamp.”
Since the election, all this talk has stopped. Now that Trump has used Americans’ outrage over the Big Money saturating our politics to help his candidacy, every indication suggests that he has no intention of addressing the problem.
Instead, Trump is handing out Cabinet and West Wing posts to a cabal of mega-donors to his campaign and Super PACs. They include anti-reform extremists who support more money and less transparency in our elections. His legal counsel, Don McGahn, prides himself on gridlocking the Federal Elections Commission’s enforcement authority and on being the “architect” of the Big Money system that’s running Washington. Rex Tillerson, his nominee for Secretary of State, ran ExxonMobil while it spent tens of millions of dollars to undermine our elections, and worked to keep its political spending secret.
Americans are fed up with Big Money running our politics. That’s why End Citizens United is pushing back.
Our advocacy wing, ECU Action Network, has launched a new initiative called “Hold Trump Accountable.” We will push the Administration to clean up the system by ending unlimited, undisclosed spending in our elections. Before his cynical reversal, President-elect Trump made a case against Super PACs. Those groups, and secretive dark money groups that serve a similar function, must go. We’ll also oppose efforts to dismantle our remaining campaign finance rules, such as eliminating contribution limits to candidates and political parties. We’ll push back on Trump’s nominees who have a history of skirting and weakening campaign finance laws, and we’ll expose Trump's broken promises to make sure voters are aware of his hypocrisies.
ECU Action Network will mobilize our 3 million members to ensure that Donald Trump follows through on his promises to reform our campaign finance system, and that he acts on behalf of the American people – not his Big Money allies or Republican leadership in Congress. If he doesn’t uphold his commitments, there will be a price to pay while he is in office, during the 2018 midterms, and throughout his re-election campaign.
The overwhelming majority of Americans, regardless of political ideology, agree that there’s too much money in politics. They’ve made it abundantly clear that they don’t just want change -- they’re demanding it. Hold Trump Accountable offers a platform for individual Americans who feel shut out by the system to harness their power and send the administration a message.
Join us in this fight.
You can learn more about our efforts, about President-elect Trump’s record on reform, or sign up to take action on our Hold Trump Accountable website HERE.