The Trump campaign is broke and broken with a candidate slipping further off the rails as the minutes tick by. But he's got a very powerful, albeit illegal to use, tool: the whole of the federal government. From day one, Trump's plan was to use the White House to expand his personal brand and make him some money. Now he's using the federal government to try to hang on to the White House, using taxpayer dollars as his own slush fund.
The most egregious example of what Trump is doing to fund his campaign with federal dollars. The worst abuse has to be Attorney General William Barr's entire Justice Department being an arm of the campaign. It's bad enough that Barr is out there, in his official capacity as attorney general, echoing Trump's contention that mail-in ballots are unsafe and that this election could be rigged against his boss. "There's no more secret vote," Barr lied in an official news conference in Arizona in September. "Your name is associated with a particular ballot. The government and the people involved can find out and know how you voted. And it opens up the door to coercion." None of that is true. Your name is not on your ballot, however you cast it. Elections officials only know if you cast a ballot. Of course Barr knows that. That's not going to stop him from amplifying Trump's lies or from carving out a legal path for Trump to contest the election when it doesn't go his way.
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Barr is also using the Justice Department—lawyers getting paid with taxpayer funds—to defend Trump personally against a defamation charge from E. Jean Carroll, who alleges Trump raped her in the 1990s. Barr's DOJ is arguing that Trump's denial of the rape charge and the statements he made against Carroll were him acting in his official capacity as president, so we have to foot the bill for his defense in the ensuing defamation case from Carroll. When a New York judge was going to turtle on whether he was required to provide a DNA sample and be deposed in the case, the DOJ's interference slowed down that proceeding, protecting Trump in a private matter in the weeks before the election. "Trump's effort to wield the power of the U.S. government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent," Carroll's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, told Politico, "and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out."
Trump has also been pushing Barr to prosecute Joe Biden and President Barack Obama for spying on his 2016 campaign. "Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes—the greatest political crime in the history of our country—then we're going to get little satisfaction," Trump told Fox Business last week. That might be a step too far even for Barr. We'll see.
Then there's the things like his raid on the Medicare Trust fund, $8 billion and change to send $200 bribes to seniors in the guise of prescription drug assistance. He and chief of staff Mark Meadows cooked up that scheme, and tried to get the pharmaceutical companies to pay for it. When they balked, they decided they may as well bilk the seniors they're supposedly helping by taking the money out of Medicare. This was all so last-minute and harebrained, it turns out that it probably can't be done before the election, so Trump is spending an extra $20 million to send out letters telling them the bribe is on the way.
Trump also insisted that a letter signed by him be included in food boxes in the Farmer to Families program, federally funded food assistance that will have the campaign stamp on it. This, as Laura Clawson explained, has complicated assistance from food banks, many of which "are consulting lawyers to be sure they won't get in trouble for elections activity, or seeing volunteers quit because of the letters, or racing to remove the letters from the boxes one by one before handing them out."
He's been using the White House as the prop for his campaign, a Hatch Act violation that his chief of staff Mark Meadows—whose salary is paid by us—dismisses. "Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares," Meadows said back in August, when the White House was the backdrop for Trump's RNC speech. Then he had his big MAGA rally on White House grounds last week, and that too was dismissed because, according to a White House spokesperson whose government salary is paid by us, it was the White House instead of the campaign that organized it. "The White House takes the Hatch Act very seriously and ensures its events, and the government employees participating in them, comply with the law," the spokesman, Judd Deere, said. So that's him admitting that White House staff are acting as campaign staff in organizing MAGA rallies on White House grounds. Insane.
Bob Bauer, the former White House counsel to Obama, calls Trump's use of the federal government for his reelection “a frontal assault" on the line "between normal political puffery in an administration, some flexibility under the Hatch Act and a clear misuse of government resources to advance a campaign’s objectives." He told Politico "Trump is openly saying, 'I get to use this office, the authority and resources that come with it, to just advance my political interests in the most raw terms.'" That's what he's been doing all along, particularly by using Trump properties for official business. He's been intent on stealing everything he could get his hands on while in office, and is going to use the Treasury to keep him in office so he can steal the rest.
