Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out of more money?
Dan Haynie
Only Trump could tell you that for certain. And he did. In the summer of 2021, he was speaking on Zoom to a group of historians, asking him about the e******n of 2020. One of his responses: “When I didn’t win the e******n…” Though of course, he still maintained the e******n was r****d, despite having lost at least 61 court cases. Despite being told by all of his advisors that he had lost. Despite being told by all of his security agencies that there was nothing even approaching significant e******n f***d.
However, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, Trump did absolutely use the e******n loss to con people out of their money. If you followed the actual Donald J. Trump for 40 years, rather than the TV Trump that folks v**ed for in 2016, you’d have expected this. It’s what he does.
So let’s look at the genesis of that grift! Immediately after the e******n, Trump proceeded to fight like a cornered honey badger against his loss. He had enlisted multiple white shoe legal firms for this purpose. This was not unusual… everyone does it, ahead of time, thanks to the e******n in 2000. After a bit less than two weeks, they had all quit. This does not tell you exactly what was in Trump’s mind at the time, but consider the two weeks after the e******n and what he did next.
Even before he lost, Trump was in full fundraising mode. He had been since the summer. Biden was well ahead on fundraising, and that can be critical in the latter part of the e******n. As much as some of us are political wonks and know everything that’s going on in the nearly two year P**********l political seasons, plenty of regular people don’t tune into this with any real consideration until the debates, until maybe September, maybe October. That’s a hell of a time to run out of money. So Trump pumped hard over the summer. Too hard. He was money-bombing his supporters for weekly matching donations they didn’t know about over the summer. That resulted in at least $121 million in credit card charge-backs by August/September, but that money was pretty much spent. So he had to keep raising money.
The loss gave him the perfect opportunity to fight the e******n. He immediately started busking for his “Recount Committee” or wh**ever. Right off, only 40% of that money went to the recount effort. The remaining 60% was going to pay off the campaign debt. Thing is, this was spectacularly successful! He brought in over $200 million in November of 2020. And the one thing you know about any huckster is their firm belief that it’s immoral to allow a fool to keep his money.
As mentioned, Trump did fight the e******n results. For nearly two weeks. Well, okay, maybe a bit longer, as the legal teams shifted around. But the serious legal battles were fought and lost those first two weeks. Trump’s white shoe lawyers quit. So on November 16, Trump puts Rudy Giuliani in charge of his legal efforts to overturn the e******n, along with a handful of Fox News “TV Lawyers.” But he did one additional thing, and that’s significant.
The fundraising continued, but the passthroughs changed. Not the texts, which in fact got even bolder and more desperate over the e******n loss. They were still asking for money to fight for Trump to somehow be made President again. But now 75% of the money was going to Trump’s “Save America” Leadership PAC — his personal slush fund — and the rest was going to the Republican National Committee. Hush money, to keep the RNC’s interest in not stopping Trump’s grift. And under Giuliani, the focus clearly moved from actual court cases to spreading chaos in an effort to gin up donations. I think it’s pretty obvious that, in mid-November 2020, Trump absolutely knew he had lost.
But consider Trump and his narcissistic, possibly even dark triad personality. He started out in office with a few truly capable people around him. And why not? Trump didn’t know diddly-squat about politics aside from his various donations to buy a few Congress-folk from time to time, though most of that was in NY and Jersey. So real, functional Republican advisors tended to offer the names of real, functional advisors and cabinet members. Especially on foreign policy, Trump his the ground in 2017 with a surprisingly capable group of people.
But that was what the small handed big guy wanted. He wanted his usual cadre of toadies and yes-men. In his small business, they were long time subservients, and his kids… he never ran any sort of real company, at least not for very long. No board rooms — no board, nothing like the TV version of Trump Corporation. He ran a small family business that occasionally managed to get a real manager in to run a small piece of the business. The Trumps did quite well in the Atlantic Casino business, for example, which was started under Fred Trump, but with Donald as the public face of that business. They had a crack team running the casinos well, until the three top folks died in a helicopter crash and Donald Trump himself took over. In office, Trump had people making him a daily brief that only included positive news articles… and not much in the way of reading. Pundits on Fox News learned that Trump was watching at various times of the day, and oriented their broadcasts to him, repeating his every lie back to him to ensure he kept following them… and with him, his MAGAs.
So by the e******n of 2020, Trump was surrounded with yes-men, in person and on television. Not the entire administration, but certainly his inner circle. There were multiple reports of Trump going into raging attacks on people who told him the t***h, rather than what he wanted to hear, in the latter days of his Presidency, before and after the e******n.
When Trump told them that the e******n had been stolen, they agreed or at least shut up about it. Some parroted it back, because that’s what Trump wanted to hear. The MAGA media outlets echoed everything back to him that he was selling, along with various new conspiracy theories covering the same material. Trump had always restricted his exposure to things he didn’t want to hear, and that increased after the e******n. He also sought to replace some in his administration who were too honest about the real e******n results, or too honest to participate in his attempt at stealing the Presidency post-e******n .
And sadly, it’s been pretty obvious that Trump’s mental acuity was fading. The Trump of 2016 was slower and simpler than the Trump from interviews ten or twenty years in the past. His own father, Fred Trump, lost his mind in the 1990s, officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1993 before finally dying from pneumonia in 1999. So picture Trump, surrounded by source of information he’s willing to tolerate just echoing his own lies back to him.
I think it’s quite possible that Trump gas-lit himself on this. Plenty of advisors did tell him that he had lost, that his claims of fraud were bogus, even if his inner circle and Fox News said otherwise. He very clearly did understand, at one point in time, that he lost, fair and square. That’s the only possible reason a guy with that level of egoism and the utter fear of being labelled a failure installed in him by his father for decades would have stopped really trying to fight the e******n results and instead just going for the pure grift. If a single lawyer had proposed a legal recourse, he would have found the money to do wh**ever was called for.
He did, of course, change tactics a few times when some advisor came up with a new nefarious plan: hack the e*******l v**e , hack the e*******l v**e tally, bring in “alternate fact” slates of e*****rs, bring in armed terrorists to fight the e*******l v**e tally, wh**ever. None of that suggests that he necessarily did or did not understand he had lost at those points in time. But just follow the money.
One more thing. I suspect part of the motivation for grabbing at that money was also related to Trump’s true reckoning of the e******n. One reason Trump was desperate to be reelected was all the money he was supposedly grifting from the US Government as President. We already know about $141 million in free vacations to his golf clubs in Florida and Jersey, a chunk of which was paid to those formerly not-profitable clubs. But the other was all of his legal entanglements, prior to his Presidency, that came out before or shortly after the 2016 e******n, and perhaps some follow-ons. One more term put all of those things behind the statute of limitations. Once he knew for certain he was not going to be President again, he was in a Cat 7 panic over his financial certainty. He knows, after all, whether he was breaking the law back in the pre-Presidency days. He knows his debts to his creditors.
But you know what creditors and the law can’t touch? Money in a Leadership PAC. That’s not technically his money until he pays himself, his company, or some other entity out of that cache of cash. But he is the sole controller of that cash. That’s why he was pushing his supporters so hard to make him a multi-millionaire yet again. He’d make a lousy regular guy… he’s never done a single thing the way any of his under $1M/year income v**ers have done.
slatten49 wrote:
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out of more money?
Dan Haynie
Only Trump could tell you that for certain. And he did. In the summer of 2021, he was speaking on Zoom to a group of historians, asking him about the e******n of 2020. One of his responses: “When I didn’t win the e******n…” Though of course, he still maintained the e******n was r****d, despite having lost at least 61 court cases. Despite being told by all of his advisors that he had lost. Despite being told by all of his security agencies that there was nothing even approaching significant e******n f***d.
However, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, Trump did absolutely use the e******n loss to con people out of their money. If you followed the actual Donald J. Trump for 40 years, rather than the TV Trump that folks v**ed for in 2016, you’d have expected this. It’s what he does.
So let’s look at the genesis of that grift! Immediately after the e******n, Trump proceeded to fight like a cornered honey badger against his loss. He had enlisted multiple white shoe legal firms for this purpose. This was not unusual… everyone does it, ahead of time, thanks to the e******n in 2000. After a bit less than two weeks, they had all quit. This does not tell you exactly what was in Trump’s mind at the time, but consider the two weeks after the e******n and what he did next.
Even before he lost, Trump was in full fundraising mode. He had been since the summer. Biden was well ahead on fundraising, and that can be critical in the latter part of the e******n. As much as some of us are political wonks and know everything that’s going on in the nearly two year P**********l political seasons, plenty of regular people don’t tune into this with any real consideration until the debates, until maybe September, maybe October. That’s a hell of a time to run out of money. So Trump pumped hard over the summer. Too hard. He was money-bombing his supporters for weekly matching donations they didn’t know about over the summer. That resulted in at least $121 million in credit card charge-backs by August/September, but that money was pretty much spent. So he had to keep raising money.
The loss gave him the perfect opportunity to fight the e******n. He immediately started busking for his “Recount Committee” or wh**ever. Right off, only 40% of that money went to the recount effort. The remaining 60% was going to pay off the campaign debt. Thing is, this was spectacularly successful! He brought in over $200 million in November of 2020. And the one thing you know about any huckster is their firm belief that it’s immoral to allow a fool to keep his money.
As mentioned, Trump did fight the e******n results. For nearly two weeks. Well, okay, maybe a bit longer, as the legal teams shifted around. But the serious legal battles were fought and lost those first two weeks. Trump’s white shoe lawyers quit. So on November 16, Trump puts Rudy Giuliani in charge of his legal efforts to overturn the e******n, along with a handful of Fox News “TV Lawyers.” But he did one additional thing, and that’s significant.
The fundraising continued, but the passthroughs changed. Not the texts, which in fact got even bolder and more desperate over the e******n loss. They were still asking for money to fight for Trump to somehow be made President again. But now 75% of the money was going to Trump’s “Save America” Leadership PAC — his personal slush fund — and the rest was going to the Republican National Committee. Hush money, to keep the RNC’s interest in not stopping Trump’s grift. And under Giuliani, the focus clearly moved from actual court cases to spreading chaos in an effort to gin up donations. I think it’s pretty obvious that, in mid-November 2020, Trump absolutely knew he had lost.
But consider Trump and his narcissistic, possibly even dark triad personality. He started out in office with a few truly capable people around him. And why not? Trump didn’t know diddly-squat about politics aside from his various donations to buy a few Congress-folk from time to time, though most of that was in NY and Jersey. So real, functional Republican advisors tended to offer the names of real, functional advisors and cabinet members. Especially on foreign policy, Trump his the ground in 2017 with a surprisingly capable group of people.
But that was what the small handed big guy wanted. He wanted his usual cadre of toadies and yes-men. In his small business, they were long time subservients, and his kids… he never ran any sort of real company, at least not for very long. No board rooms — no board, nothing like the TV version of Trump Corporation. He ran a small family business that occasionally managed to get a real manager in to run a small piece of the business. The Trumps did quite well in the Atlantic Casino business, for example, which was started under Fred Trump, but with Donald as the public face of that business. They had a crack team running the casinos well, until the three top folks died in a helicopter crash and Donald Trump himself took over. In office, Trump had people making him a daily brief that only included positive news articles… and not much in the way of reading. Pundits on Fox News learned that Trump was watching at various times of the day, and oriented their broadcasts to him, repeating his every lie back to him to ensure he kept following them… and with him, his MAGAs.
So by the e******n of 2020, Trump was surrounded with yes-men, in person and on television. Not the entire administration, but certainly his inner circle. There were multiple reports of Trump going into raging attacks on people who told him the t***h, rather than what he wanted to hear, in the latter days of his Presidency, before and after the e******n.
When Trump told them that the e******n had been stolen, they agreed or at least shut up about it. Some parroted it back, because that’s what Trump wanted to hear. The MAGA media outlets echoed everything back to him that he was selling, along with various new conspiracy theories covering the same material. Trump had always restricted his exposure to things he didn’t want to hear, and that increased after the e******n. He also sought to replace some in his administration who were too honest about the real e******n results, or too honest to participate in his attempt at stealing the Presidency post-e******n .
And sadly, it’s been pretty obvious that Trump’s mental acuity was fading. The Trump of 2016 was slower and simpler than the Trump from interviews ten or twenty years in the past. His own father, Fred Trump, lost his mind in the 1990s, officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1993 before finally dying from pneumonia in 1999. So picture Trump, surrounded by source of information he’s willing to tolerate just echoing his own lies back to him.
I think it’s quite possible that Trump gas-lit himself on this. Plenty of advisors did tell him that he had lost, that his claims of fraud were bogus, even if his inner circle and Fox News said otherwise. He very clearly did understand, at one point in time, that he lost, fair and square. That’s the only possible reason a guy with that level of egoism and the utter fear of being labelled a failure installed in him by his father for decades would have stopped really trying to fight the e******n results and instead just going for the pure grift. If a single lawyer had proposed a legal recourse, he would have found the money to do wh**ever was called for.
He did, of course, change tactics a few times when some advisor came up with a new nefarious plan: hack the e*******l v**e , hack the e*******l v**e tally, bring in “alternate fact” slates of e*****rs, bring in armed terrorists to fight the e*******l v**e tally, wh**ever. None of that suggests that he necessarily did or did not understand he had lost at those points in time. But just follow the money.
One more thing. I suspect part of the motivation for grabbing at that money was also related to Trump’s true reckoning of the e******n. One reason Trump was desperate to be reelected was all the money he was supposedly grifting from the US Government as President. We already know about $141 million in free vacations to his golf clubs in Florida and Jersey, a chunk of which was paid to those formerly not-profitable clubs. But the other was all of his legal entanglements, prior to his Presidency, that came out before or shortly after the 2016 e******n, and perhaps some follow-ons. One more term put all of those things behind the statute of limitations. Once he knew for certain he was not going to be President again, he was in a Cat 7 panic over his financial certainty. He knows, after all, whether he was breaking the law back in the pre-Presidency days. He knows his debts to his creditors.
But you know what creditors and the law can’t touch? Money in a Leadership PAC. That’s not technically his money until he pays himself, his company, or some other entity out of that cache of cash. But he is the sole controller of that cash. That’s why he was pushing his supporters so hard to make him a multi-millionaire yet again. He’d make a lousy regular guy… he’s never done a single thing the way any of his under $1M/year income v**ers have done.
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out ... (
show quote)
All those words wasted. NWr!the con is Brandon!
Wonttakeitanymore wrote:
All those words wasted. NWr!the con is Brandon!
Slaten has not had an original thought since he came to OPP. He post some other leftwinger's thoughts, takes a few comments, and when he sees most are not buying it disappears for a little while and then reappears when he discovers another person's thoughts to post. All the while he is believing he is the most intelligent person on OPP. He is no longer worth engaging.
slatten49 wrote:
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out of more money?
Dan Haynie
Only Trump could tell you that for certain. And he did. In the summer of 2021, he was speaking on Zoom to a group of historians, asking him about the e******n of 2020. One of his responses: “When I didn’t win the e******n…” Though of course, he still maintained the e******n was r****d, despite having lost at least 61 court cases. Despite being told by all of his advisors that he had lost. Despite being told by all of his security agencies that there was nothing even approaching significant e******n f***d.
However, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, Trump did absolutely use the e******n loss to con people out of their money. If you followed the actual Donald J. Trump for 40 years, rather than the TV Trump that folks v**ed for in 2016, you’d have expected this. It’s what he does.
So let’s look at the genesis of that grift! Immediately after the e******n, Trump proceeded to fight like a cornered honey badger against his loss. He had enlisted multiple white shoe legal firms for this purpose. This was not unusual… everyone does it, ahead of time, thanks to the e******n in 2000. After a bit less than two weeks, they had all quit. This does not tell you exactly what was in Trump’s mind at the time, but consider the two weeks after the e******n and what he did next.
Even before he lost, Trump was in full fundraising mode. He had been since the summer. Biden was well ahead on fundraising, and that can be critical in the latter part of the e******n. As much as some of us are political wonks and know everything that’s going on in the nearly two year P**********l political seasons, plenty of regular people don’t tune into this with any real consideration until the debates, until maybe September, maybe October. That’s a hell of a time to run out of money. So Trump pumped hard over the summer. Too hard. He was money-bombing his supporters for weekly matching donations they didn’t know about over the summer. That resulted in at least $121 million in credit card charge-backs by August/September, but that money was pretty much spent. So he had to keep raising money.
The loss gave him the perfect opportunity to fight the e******n. He immediately started busking for his “Recount Committee” or wh**ever. Right off, only 40% of that money went to the recount effort. The remaining 60% was going to pay off the campaign debt. Thing is, this was spectacularly successful! He brought in over $200 million in November of 2020. And the one thing you know about any huckster is their firm belief that it’s immoral to allow a fool to keep his money.
As mentioned, Trump did fight the e******n results. For nearly two weeks. Well, okay, maybe a bit longer, as the legal teams shifted around. But the serious legal battles were fought and lost those first two weeks. Trump’s white shoe lawyers quit. So on November 16, Trump puts Rudy Giuliani in charge of his legal efforts to overturn the e******n, along with a handful of Fox News “TV Lawyers.” But he did one additional thing, and that’s significant.
The fundraising continued, but the passthroughs changed. Not the texts, which in fact got even bolder and more desperate over the e******n loss. They were still asking for money to fight for Trump to somehow be made President again. But now 75% of the money was going to Trump’s “Save America” Leadership PAC — his personal slush fund — and the rest was going to the Republican National Committee. Hush money, to keep the RNC’s interest in not stopping Trump’s grift. And under Giuliani, the focus clearly moved from actual court cases to spreading chaos in an effort to gin up donations. I think it’s pretty obvious that, in mid-November 2020, Trump absolutely knew he had lost.
But consider Trump and his narcissistic, possibly even dark triad personality. He started out in office with a few truly capable people around him. And why not? Trump didn’t know diddly-squat about politics aside from his various donations to buy a few Congress-folk from time to time, though most of that was in NY and Jersey. So real, functional Republican advisors tended to offer the names of real, functional advisors and cabinet members. Especially on foreign policy, Trump his the ground in 2017 with a surprisingly capable group of people.
But that was what the small handed big guy wanted. He wanted his usual cadre of toadies and yes-men. In his small business, they were long time subservients, and his kids… he never ran any sort of real company, at least not for very long. No board rooms — no board, nothing like the TV version of Trump Corporation. He ran a small family business that occasionally managed to get a real manager in to run a small piece of the business. The Trumps did quite well in the Atlantic Casino business, for example, which was started under Fred Trump, but with Donald as the public face of that business. They had a crack team running the casinos well, until the three top folks died in a helicopter crash and Donald Trump himself took over. In office, Trump had people making him a daily brief that only included positive news articles… and not much in the way of reading. Pundits on Fox News learned that Trump was watching at various times of the day, and oriented their broadcasts to him, repeating his every lie back to him to ensure he kept following them… and with him, his MAGAs.
So by the e******n of 2020, Trump was surrounded with yes-men, in person and on television. Not the entire administration, but certainly his inner circle. There were multiple reports of Trump going into raging attacks on people who told him the t***h, rather than what he wanted to hear, in the latter days of his Presidency, before and after the e******n.
When Trump told them that the e******n had been stolen, they agreed or at least shut up about it. Some parroted it back, because that’s what Trump wanted to hear. The MAGA media outlets echoed everything back to him that he was selling, along with various new conspiracy theories covering the same material. Trump had always restricted his exposure to things he didn’t want to hear, and that increased after the e******n. He also sought to replace some in his administration who were too honest about the real e******n results, or too honest to participate in his attempt at stealing the Presidency post-e******n .
And sadly, it’s been pretty obvious that Trump’s mental acuity was fading. The Trump of 2016 was slower and simpler than the Trump from interviews ten or twenty years in the past. His own father, Fred Trump, lost his mind in the 1990s, officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1993 before finally dying from pneumonia in 1999. So picture Trump, surrounded by source of information he’s willing to tolerate just echoing his own lies back to him.
I think it’s quite possible that Trump gas-lit himself on this. Plenty of advisors did tell him that he had lost, that his claims of fraud were bogus, even if his inner circle and Fox News said otherwise. He very clearly did understand, at one point in time, that he lost, fair and square. That’s the only possible reason a guy with that level of egoism and the utter fear of being labelled a failure installed in him by his father for decades would have stopped really trying to fight the e******n results and instead just going for the pure grift. If a single lawyer had proposed a legal recourse, he would have found the money to do wh**ever was called for.
He did, of course, change tactics a few times when some advisor came up with a new nefarious plan: hack the e*******l v**e , hack the e*******l v**e tally, bring in “alternate fact” slates of e*****rs, bring in armed terrorists to fight the e*******l v**e tally, wh**ever. None of that suggests that he necessarily did or did not understand he had lost at those points in time. But just follow the money.
One more thing. I suspect part of the motivation for grabbing at that money was also related to Trump’s true reckoning of the e******n. One reason Trump was desperate to be reelected was all the money he was supposedly grifting from the US Government as President. We already know about $141 million in free vacations to his golf clubs in Florida and Jersey, a chunk of which was paid to those formerly not-profitable clubs. But the other was all of his legal entanglements, prior to his Presidency, that came out before or shortly after the 2016 e******n, and perhaps some follow-ons. One more term put all of those things behind the statute of limitations. Once he knew for certain he was not going to be President again, he was in a Cat 7 panic over his financial certainty. He knows, after all, whether he was breaking the law back in the pre-Presidency days. He knows his debts to his creditors.
But you know what creditors and the law can’t touch? Money in a Leadership PAC. That’s not technically his money until he pays himself, his company, or some other entity out of that cache of cash. But he is the sole controller of that cash. That’s why he was pushing his supporters so hard to make him a multi-millionaire yet again. He’d make a lousy regular guy… he’s never done a single thing the way any of his under $1M/year income v**ers have done.
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out ... (
show quote)
C'mon Slatten, could be that you need some of this too:
Nah, he's supposed to pay rent. But, as with everyone else he owes, he skips town with nary a penny due paid.
AuntiE
Loc: 45th Least Free State
slatten49 wrote:
Nah, he's supposed to pay rent. But, as with everyone else he owes, he skips town with nary a penny due paid.
Again, you would
never consider taking take a cure for diabetes if invented by Trump.
There is much to find fault with in Trump; however, he is not anywhere near as horrendous as what sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
AuntiE wrote:
Again, you would never consider taking take a cure for diabetes if invented by Trump.
There is much to find fault with in Trump; however, he is not anywhere near as horrendous as what sits in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Well, M'Lady, this is America and you are free to believe as you choose...however wrong.
Liberty Tree wrote:
Slaten has not had an original thought since he came to OPP. He post some other leftwinger's thoughts, takes a few comments, and when he sees most are not buying it disappears for a little while and then reappears when he discovers another person's thoughts to post. All the while he is believing he is the most intelligent person on OPP. He is no longer worth engaging.
And, yet to varying degrees during my 10 years on OPP, you continue to troll me with your inane comments.
Thanks, L-T, for the continuing amusement
slatten49 wrote:
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out of more money?
Dan Haynie
Only Trump could tell you that for certain. And he did. In the summer of 2021, he was speaking on Zoom to a group of historians, asking him about the e******n of 2020. One of his responses: “When I didn’t win the e******n…” Though of course, he still maintained the e******n was r****d, despite having lost at least 61 court cases. Despite being told by all of his advisors that he had lost. Despite being told by all of his security agencies that there was nothing even approaching significant e******n f***d.
However, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, Trump did absolutely use the e******n loss to con people out of their money. If you followed the actual Donald J. Trump for 40 years, rather than the TV Trump that folks v**ed for in 2016, you’d have expected this. It’s what he does.
So let’s look at the genesis of that grift! Immediately after the e******n, Trump proceeded to fight like a cornered honey badger against his loss. He had enlisted multiple white shoe legal firms for this purpose. This was not unusual… everyone does it, ahead of time, thanks to the e******n in 2000. After a bit less than two weeks, they had all quit. This does not tell you exactly what was in Trump’s mind at the time, but consider the two weeks after the e******n and what he did next.
Even before he lost, Trump was in full fundraising mode. He had been since the summer. Biden was well ahead on fundraising, and that can be critical in the latter part of the e******n. As much as some of us are political wonks and know everything that’s going on in the nearly two year P**********l political seasons, plenty of regular people don’t tune into this with any real consideration until the debates, until maybe September, maybe October. That’s a hell of a time to run out of money. So Trump pumped hard over the summer. Too hard. He was money-bombing his supporters for weekly matching donations they didn’t know about over the summer. That resulted in at least $121 million in credit card charge-backs by August/September, but that money was pretty much spent. So he had to keep raising money.
The loss gave him the perfect opportunity to fight the e******n. He immediately started busking for his “Recount Committee” or wh**ever. Right off, only 40% of that money went to the recount effort. The remaining 60% was going to pay off the campaign debt. Thing is, this was spectacularly successful! He brought in over $200 million in November of 2020. And the one thing you know about any huckster is their firm belief that it’s immoral to allow a fool to keep his money.
As mentioned, Trump did fight the e******n results. For nearly two weeks. Well, okay, maybe a bit longer, as the legal teams shifted around. But the serious legal battles were fought and lost those first two weeks. Trump’s white shoe lawyers quit. So on November 16, Trump puts Rudy Giuliani in charge of his legal efforts to overturn the e******n, along with a handful of Fox News “TV Lawyers.” But he did one additional thing, and that’s significant.
The fundraising continued, but the passthroughs changed. Not the texts, which in fact got even bolder and more desperate over the e******n loss. They were still asking for money to fight for Trump to somehow be made President again. But now 75% of the money was going to Trump’s “Save America” Leadership PAC — his personal slush fund — and the rest was going to the Republican National Committee. Hush money, to keep the RNC’s interest in not stopping Trump’s grift. And under Giuliani, the focus clearly moved from actual court cases to spreading chaos in an effort to gin up donations. I think it’s pretty obvious that, in mid-November 2020, Trump absolutely knew he had lost.
But consider Trump and his narcissistic, possibly even dark triad personality. He started out in office with a few truly capable people around him. And why not? Trump didn’t know diddly-squat about politics aside from his various donations to buy a few Congress-folk from time to time, though most of that was in NY and Jersey. So real, functional Republican advisors tended to offer the names of real, functional advisors and cabinet members. Especially on foreign policy, Trump his the ground in 2017 with a surprisingly capable group of people.
But that was what the small handed big guy wanted. He wanted his usual cadre of toadies and yes-men. In his small business, they were long time subservients, and his kids… he never ran any sort of real company, at least not for very long. No board rooms — no board, nothing like the TV version of Trump Corporation. He ran a small family business that occasionally managed to get a real manager in to run a small piece of the business. The Trumps did quite well in the Atlantic Casino business, for example, which was started under Fred Trump, but with Donald as the public face of that business. They had a crack team running the casinos well, until the three top folks died in a helicopter crash and Donald Trump himself took over. In office, Trump had people making him a daily brief that only included positive news articles… and not much in the way of reading. Pundits on Fox News learned that Trump was watching at various times of the day, and oriented their broadcasts to him, repeating his every lie back to him to ensure he kept following them… and with him, his MAGAs.
So by the e******n of 2020, Trump was surrounded with yes-men, in person and on television. Not the entire administration, but certainly his inner circle. There were multiple reports of Trump going into raging attacks on people who told him the t***h, rather than what he wanted to hear, in the latter days of his Presidency, before and after the e******n.
When Trump told them that the e******n had been stolen, they agreed or at least shut up about it. Some parroted it back, because that’s what Trump wanted to hear. The MAGA media outlets echoed everything back to him that he was selling, along with various new conspiracy theories covering the same material. Trump had always restricted his exposure to things he didn’t want to hear, and that increased after the e******n. He also sought to replace some in his administration who were too honest about the real e******n results, or too honest to participate in his attempt at stealing the Presidency post-e******n .
And sadly, it’s been pretty obvious that Trump’s mental acuity was fading. The Trump of 2016 was slower and simpler than the Trump from interviews ten or twenty years in the past. His own father, Fred Trump, lost his mind in the 1990s, officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1993 before finally dying from pneumonia in 1999. So picture Trump, surrounded by source of information he’s willing to tolerate just echoing his own lies back to him.
I think it’s quite possible that Trump gas-lit himself on this. Plenty of advisors did tell him that he had lost, that his claims of fraud were bogus, even if his inner circle and Fox News said otherwise. He very clearly did understand, at one point in time, that he lost, fair and square. That’s the only possible reason a guy with that level of egoism and the utter fear of being labelled a failure installed in him by his father for decades would have stopped really trying to fight the e******n results and instead just going for the pure grift. If a single lawyer had proposed a legal recourse, he would have found the money to do wh**ever was called for.
He did, of course, change tactics a few times when some advisor came up with a new nefarious plan: hack the e*******l v**e , hack the e*******l v**e tally, bring in “alternate fact” slates of e*****rs, bring in armed terrorists to fight the e*******l v**e tally, wh**ever. None of that suggests that he necessarily did or did not understand he had lost at those points in time. But just follow the money.
One more thing. I suspect part of the motivation for grabbing at that money was also related to Trump’s true reckoning of the e******n. One reason Trump was desperate to be reelected was all the money he was supposedly grifting from the US Government as President. We already know about $141 million in free vacations to his golf clubs in Florida and Jersey, a chunk of which was paid to those formerly not-profitable clubs. But the other was all of his legal entanglements, prior to his Presidency, that came out before or shortly after the 2016 e******n, and perhaps some follow-ons. One more term put all of those things behind the statute of limitations. Once he knew for certain he was not going to be President again, he was in a Cat 7 panic over his financial certainty. He knows, after all, whether he was breaking the law back in the pre-Presidency days. He knows his debts to his creditors.
But you know what creditors and the law can’t touch? Money in a Leadership PAC. That’s not technically his money until he pays himself, his company, or some other entity out of that cache of cash. But he is the sole controller of that cash. That’s why he was pushing his supporters so hard to make him a multi-millionaire yet again. He’d make a lousy regular guy… he’s never done a single thing the way any of his under $1M/year income v**ers have done.
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out ... (
show quote)
I'm pretty sure that long after Trump is dead, some folks will still be trying to prosecute everybody who v**ed for him. The hatred runs that deep.
However, looking at our current situation, with what some consider a "competent" administration in charge, most of them will have starved to death. Right beside all of those who v**ed for this "t***sformative", new planet friendly way of dying.
Something you gotta get through that thick noggin of yours, Slats.
Trump, and Republicans ain't in charge now, nor have they been for a year and a half.
Just from my ignorant perspective, I figger we're REALLY fucked now.
I see nothing good happening in government now.
When I'm forced to eat my dog, I'll go to WAR!
AuntiE
Loc: 45th Least Free State
archie bunker wrote:
I'm pretty sure that long after Trump is dead, some folks will still be trying to prosecute everybody who v**ed for him. The hatred runs that deep.
However, looking at our current situation, with what some consider a "competent" administration in charge, most of them will have starved to death. Right beside all of those who v**ed for this "t***sformative", new planet friendly way of dying.
Something you gotta get through that thick noggin of yours, Slats.
Trump, and Republicans ain't in charge now, nor have they been for a year and a half.
I'm pretty sure that long after Trump is dead, som... (
show quote)
Oh, yea gads. How dare you point that out. If they did not have Trump as the big bad bogeyman, their life would be without any meaning at all.
AuntiE wrote:
Oh, yea gads. How dare you point that out. If they did not have Trump as the big bad bogeyman, their life would be without any meaning at all.
I fat fingered it, and had to edit.
But, I stand by what I said.
slatten49 wrote:
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out of more money?
Dan Haynie
Only Trump could tell you that for certain. And he did. In the summer of 2021, he was speaking on Zoom to a group of historians, asking him about the e******n of 2020. One of his responses: “When I didn’t win the e******n…” Though of course, he still maintained the e******n was r****d, despite having lost at least 61 court cases. Despite being told by all of his advisors that he had lost. Despite being told by all of his security agencies that there was nothing even approaching significant e******n f***d.
However, it’s not quite that simple. Yes, Trump did absolutely use the e******n loss to con people out of their money. If you followed the actual Donald J. Trump for 40 years, rather than the TV Trump that folks v**ed for in 2016, you’d have expected this. It’s what he does.
So let’s look at the genesis of that grift! Immediately after the e******n, Trump proceeded to fight like a cornered honey badger against his loss. He had enlisted multiple white shoe legal firms for this purpose. This was not unusual… everyone does it, ahead of time, thanks to the e******n in 2000. After a bit less than two weeks, they had all quit. This does not tell you exactly what was in Trump’s mind at the time, but consider the two weeks after the e******n and what he did next.
Even before he lost, Trump was in full fundraising mode. He had been since the summer. Biden was well ahead on fundraising, and that can be critical in the latter part of the e******n. As much as some of us are political wonks and know everything that’s going on in the nearly two year P**********l political seasons, plenty of regular people don’t tune into this with any real consideration until the debates, until maybe September, maybe October. That’s a hell of a time to run out of money. So Trump pumped hard over the summer. Too hard. He was money-bombing his supporters for weekly matching donations they didn’t know about over the summer. That resulted in at least $121 million in credit card charge-backs by August/September, but that money was pretty much spent. So he had to keep raising money.
The loss gave him the perfect opportunity to fight the e******n. He immediately started busking for his “Recount Committee” or wh**ever. Right off, only 40% of that money went to the recount effort. The remaining 60% was going to pay off the campaign debt. Thing is, this was spectacularly successful! He brought in over $200 million in November of 2020. And the one thing you know about any huckster is their firm belief that it’s immoral to allow a fool to keep his money.
As mentioned, Trump did fight the e******n results. For nearly two weeks. Well, okay, maybe a bit longer, as the legal teams shifted around. But the serious legal battles were fought and lost those first two weeks. Trump’s white shoe lawyers quit. So on November 16, Trump puts Rudy Giuliani in charge of his legal efforts to overturn the e******n, along with a handful of Fox News “TV Lawyers.” But he did one additional thing, and that’s significant.
The fundraising continued, but the passthroughs changed. Not the texts, which in fact got even bolder and more desperate over the e******n loss. They were still asking for money to fight for Trump to somehow be made President again. But now 75% of the money was going to Trump’s “Save America” Leadership PAC — his personal slush fund — and the rest was going to the Republican National Committee. Hush money, to keep the RNC’s interest in not stopping Trump’s grift. And under Giuliani, the focus clearly moved from actual court cases to spreading chaos in an effort to gin up donations. I think it’s pretty obvious that, in mid-November 2020, Trump absolutely knew he had lost.
But consider Trump and his narcissistic, possibly even dark triad personality. He started out in office with a few truly capable people around him. And why not? Trump didn’t know diddly-squat about politics aside from his various donations to buy a few Congress-folk from time to time, though most of that was in NY and Jersey. So real, functional Republican advisors tended to offer the names of real, functional advisors and cabinet members. Especially on foreign policy, Trump his the ground in 2017 with a surprisingly capable group of people.
But that was what the small handed big guy wanted. He wanted his usual cadre of toadies and yes-men. In his small business, they were long time subservients, and his kids… he never ran any sort of real company, at least not for very long. No board rooms — no board, nothing like the TV version of Trump Corporation. He ran a small family business that occasionally managed to get a real manager in to run a small piece of the business. The Trumps did quite well in the Atlantic Casino business, for example, which was started under Fred Trump, but with Donald as the public face of that business. They had a crack team running the casinos well, until the three top folks died in a helicopter crash and Donald Trump himself took over. In office, Trump had people making him a daily brief that only included positive news articles… and not much in the way of reading. Pundits on Fox News learned that Trump was watching at various times of the day, and oriented their broadcasts to him, repeating his every lie back to him to ensure he kept following them… and with him, his MAGAs.
So by the e******n of 2020, Trump was surrounded with yes-men, in person and on television. Not the entire administration, but certainly his inner circle. There were multiple reports of Trump going into raging attacks on people who told him the t***h, rather than what he wanted to hear, in the latter days of his Presidency, before and after the e******n.
When Trump told them that the e******n had been stolen, they agreed or at least shut up about it. Some parroted it back, because that’s what Trump wanted to hear. The MAGA media outlets echoed everything back to him that he was selling, along with various new conspiracy theories covering the same material. Trump had always restricted his exposure to things he didn’t want to hear, and that increased after the e******n. He also sought to replace some in his administration who were too honest about the real e******n results, or too honest to participate in his attempt at stealing the Presidency post-e******n .
And sadly, it’s been pretty obvious that Trump’s mental acuity was fading. The Trump of 2016 was slower and simpler than the Trump from interviews ten or twenty years in the past. His own father, Fred Trump, lost his mind in the 1990s, officially diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1993 before finally dying from pneumonia in 1999. So picture Trump, surrounded by source of information he’s willing to tolerate just echoing his own lies back to him.
I think it’s quite possible that Trump gas-lit himself on this. Plenty of advisors did tell him that he had lost, that his claims of fraud were bogus, even if his inner circle and Fox News said otherwise. He very clearly did understand, at one point in time, that he lost, fair and square. That’s the only possible reason a guy with that level of egoism and the utter fear of being labelled a failure installed in him by his father for decades would have stopped really trying to fight the e******n results and instead just going for the pure grift. If a single lawyer had proposed a legal recourse, he would have found the money to do wh**ever was called for.
He did, of course, change tactics a few times when some advisor came up with a new nefarious plan: hack the e*******l v**e , hack the e*******l v**e tally, bring in “alternate fact” slates of e*****rs, bring in armed terrorists to fight the e*******l v**e tally, wh**ever. None of that suggests that he necessarily did or did not understand he had lost at those points in time. But just follow the money.
One more thing. I suspect part of the motivation for grabbing at that money was also related to Trump’s true reckoning of the e******n. One reason Trump was desperate to be reelected was all the money he was supposedly grifting from the US Government as President. We already know about $141 million in free vacations to his golf clubs in Florida and Jersey, a chunk of which was paid to those formerly not-profitable clubs. But the other was all of his legal entanglements, prior to his Presidency, that came out before or shortly after the 2016 e******n, and perhaps some follow-ons. One more term put all of those things behind the statute of limitations. Once he knew for certain he was not going to be President again, he was in a Cat 7 panic over his financial certainty. He knows, after all, whether he was breaking the law back in the pre-Presidency days. He knows his debts to his creditors.
But you know what creditors and the law can’t touch? Money in a Leadership PAC. That’s not technically his money until he pays himself, his company, or some other entity out of that cache of cash. But he is the sole controller of that cash. That’s why he was pushing his supporters so hard to make him a multi-millionaire yet again. He’d make a lousy regular guy… he’s never done a single thing the way any of his under $1M/year income v**ers have done.
Is The Big Lie simply for Trump to con people out ... (
show quote)
Another big lie by slatten.
AuntiE
Loc: 45th Least Free State
archie bunker wrote:
I fat fingered it, and had to edit.
But, I stand by what I said.
You must not call attention to the fact Trump is no longer in office. What else do they have to whine about? They assuredly cannot talk about the current administration.
Liberty Tree wrote:
Slaten has not had an original thought since he came to OPP. He post some other leftwinger's thoughts, takes a few comments, and when he sees most are not buying it disappears for a little while and then reappears when he discovers another person's thoughts to post. All the while he is believing he is the most intelligent person on OPP. He is no longer worth engaging.
I think the Marines gave Slats a 10 gun salute and put him 6' under. He will still be v****g demoKraut even though 6' under. I volunteered to play Taps for him but he rejected that offer and brought in 30,000 Guardsmen to protect himself.
If you want to reply, then
register here. Registration is free and your account is created instantly, so you can post right away.
