As you’ve probably heard by now, Donald Trump left the White House in debt to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, with a significant chunk of the money coming due just two short years from now. As my colleague Bill Cohan has noted, the ex-president personally guaranteed his debts, meaning that if he doesn‘t pay them—which is pretty much his thing!—his creditors can seize his assets, including Mar-a-Lago, where he currently lives.
Unfortunately for Trump, thanks to the events of January 6, 2021, corporate America doesn’t want to touch him with a 3,000-foot pole, and he can no longer rely on previous sources of income like hosting the PGA Championship. Of course, there’s the very real possibility he could sell state secrets to the United States’ enemies—a prospect current and former government officials are reportedly girding for—though that would have required him to pay any attention whatsoever during his intelligence briefings, which we know he rarely did. Luckily for the world’s most infamous con man, though, he seems to have identified a new grift: diverting money from the party he’s the de facto head of into his own pocket. Per The Hill:
Last year, as Trump mounted a disgraceful campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election, supporters were hounded with emails asking them to donate to the then president’s legal defense fund. But as The New York Times reported in November, the majority of those donations went to Trump’s personal PAC, not to fighting (nonexistent) mass election fraud. And while Trump would have had his followers believe such funds were going toward his political activities, as the Associated Press noted at the time, leadership PACs can “be tapped to pay for personal expenses” and have “long been abused.” As Adav Noti, a former Federal Election Commission attorney, explained, the Save America PAC funds “could pay [Trump] children consulting fees. They could pay the children’s significant others’ consulting fees. They could buy Don Jr.’s book, which the campaign can’t do. They could do anything with it. There’s no personal use restriction.” Which sounds like an ideal situation for a guy hundreds of millions of dollar in debt!
Meanwhile, despite basically being told to fuck off on a daily basis by Trump, the RNC has decided to continue kissing the ring, both metaphorically and financially speaking. According to The Washington Post, the Republican National Committee “is moving part of its spring donor retreat next month to Mar-a-Lago from a nearby hotel for a dinner speech that will be headlined by former president Donald Trump, according to Republicans involved in the planning of the event.” Acolytes of the ex-president regularly patronized his for-profit businesses—particularly his Washington hotel—from 2016 to 2020 and evidently have no plans to stop.
On Sunday, apparently speaking for the majority of the party save the few who called to impeach Trump and were subsequently punished, Senator Lindsey Graham said that he was aware that Trump is a dangerous megalomaniac but simply doesn’t care. “There’s something about Trump, there’s a dark side,” Graham said. “And there’s some magic there. What I’m trying to do is just harness the magic.”
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