I’ve been signed up to the Trump campaign’s email blasts for a while, in the spirit of knowing what the enemy is up to. Many of these emails have been reported on DailyKos by others and, honestly, they’re mostly generic Trumpian blather that doesn’t really rise to the level of news. As such, I’ve never bothered to share any of them here...until now.
Today’s fundraising missive from the campaign has me questioning exactly how they can make such a claim in an official fundraising letter. Not that it contains the usual Trump lies or exaggerations (those are actually in one of their milder forms, believe it or not) but that it makes a claim about the donations themselves that seems, well...illegal.
Here are screen shots of the email as I received it. I had to do these in four images since the email is stretched out by weird spacing and graphics, none of which I wanted to leave out so everyone would get the full effect.
As you can see, the official committee (since it is combined fundraising committee of the Trump campaign and the RNC) is offering to match contributions by individual donors at 500%. How, exactly, they are going to do this is left unsaid, but can be of at best questionable legality. This is essentially approving a contribution in someone else’s name. How exactly the campaign will abide by the legal contribution limits for individuals while doing this is an open question. Just as importantly, it is not strictly legal to funnel money through another individual in their name to make a contribution to a campaign to avoid contribution limits. So the question then becomes, what is the source of these matching funds? If they come from one or a few individuals, then very little matching is going to actually take place, before they too run into their own contribution limits and then we’re looking at illegal campaign contributions all over again. In pretty much every instance, this looks extremely fishy.
But as we know, playing fast and loose with campaign rules and especially with contributions is par for the course for the Trump campaign. But perhaps this is something that needs looking into to find out if they really are using ordinary people as dupes to funnel in extra cash from big donors, or if they’re simply lying to their own donors and have no intention of actually matching anything. Either way, it looks like the Trump campaign is once again trying to scam the public, one way or another.