Every Republican Is Crooked. They are not trying to credibly pretend otherwise. That is the only possible narrative for the news that, as reported by Politico, a Trump-promoting group has been holding pro-Trump events in black communities at which they hand out "cash gifts in increments of several hundred dollars, stuffed into envelopes," to lucky ticket holders.
The raw cynicism of this plan is, of course palpable. After failing to attract the votes of black Americans due to Donald Trump being a neo-Nazi-praising racist who retains a white supremacist as his top policy adviser and speech-scribbler, the "Urban Revitalization Coalition" has settled on a plan to simply hand out envelopes of cash. That's what "urban" communities want, right? Envelopes of cash distributed at random?
There is no apparent "Rural Revitalization Coalition" going to white neighborhoods with similar cash-sacks, so we can infer from this that Trump's anonymous funders believe that their "trade cash for votes" plan will have an effectiveness in the targeted "urban" communities that it would not have elsewhere. We can only speculate why, because the group's leader, the obsessively pro-Trump black pastor Darrell Scott, flatly refuses to identify the funders behind the effort and so we cannot ask them. Politico notes Scott is also a co-chair of the Trump campaign's "Black Voices For Trump initiative." Mmm-hmm.
There are several problems with this plan, aside from it looking exactly as crooked as critics of Republicanism now expect as matter of course. The Urban Revitalization is, according to their tax filings, a "charity," and it is not clear that holding Trump-supporting cash giveaways targeting random rallygoers based on absolutely nothing meets the definition of "charity" in any plausible legal fashion. The anonymity is a problem, because knowing precisely who believes handing out cash-stuffed envelopes to attract Trump voters would seem to be in the public interest.
And then there is the rather more pedantic problem of this being quite possibly the stupidest plan for getting any community's votes ever devised. The people getting the cash have no obligation to vote for Trump, since such a pledge would still be insanely illegal even in our current laws-are-optional national shudder. The rallies are therefore mainly a filter on who, in each community, can stomach being seen with this seedy group of Trump grifters in exchange for a chance in the world's saddest lottery. Given that the leader is a pastor, we can presume the primary audience isn’t black voters but Religious Suckers Who Believe Anything—one of the few American groups that has already been obsessively supportive of the alleged raping, bribing, tax-evading Hate Pumpkin from his first days.
The Urban Revitalization Coalition's scheme is somehow both deeply insulting and deeply stupid at once, then. In that regard, it is about as Trumpian as it could be.
