One of the great myths that propelled Donald Trump into the White House in 2016 was that he was a genius businessman who would use his singular negotiating skills to restore America’s so-called greatness. In reality, he was a total failure who put six companies into bankruptcy and only did well playing the part of a successful businessman on TV (and using multimillion dollar losses to basically never pay taxes). Of course, Trump never told supporters that their savior nearly went broke due to a series of very bad business decisions, just like his campaign hasn’t tweeted about the fact that it’s strapped for cash after blowing most of its money on legal fees, Trump properties, private jet rides, and his eldest son’s book.
The Associated Press reports that despite having raised over $1 billion since 2017, the president’s reelection campaign has “set a lot of it on fire.” One of the biggest tells is that Joe Biden and his Democratic allies are expected to outspend Trump and the GOP by more than 2-to-1 on ads in the final days of the campaign, reportedly because Trump just doesn’t have the cash:
Where the campaign has dropped major money on advertising, it might as well have put the cash through an industrial shredder for all the impact it made. In January, Trump spent $10 million on a Super Bowl ad when he didn’t even have a Democratic challenger, in a pointless pissing contest with Mike Bloomberg. Last fall, he dropped $250,000 on an ad that ran during Game 7 of the World Series, after the booing against him reached “almost 100 decibels” during Game 5. The campaign also sunk $1.6 million on TV ads in the Washington, D.C., media market—where he received a humiliating 4% of the vote in 2016 and has no chance of winning in 2020—so Trump could gaze adoringly at himself during Fox News commercial breaks. Additionally, Parscale reportedly purchased “a fleet of luxury vehicles“; surrogates were flown on private jets; and it wouldn’t be a Trump operation if the candidate wasn’t charging his own campaign to stay at his properties to the tune of more than $7.4 million since 2017. “They spent their money on unnecessary overhead, lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous activity by the campaign staff and vanity ads,” Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant, told the AP. “You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly.”
Naturally, money also went toward legal fees ($38.7 million), merchandise ($35.2 million), and relocating the Republican National Convention after a fight with North Carolina’s governor over coronavirus safety measures. And obviously donors must have known six-figures worth of their contributions would be put toward the first son’s crack at literature:
Meanwhile, $310 million can’t be accounted for because it went through limited liability firms, which is precisely the amount of sketchy one should expect from Team Trump. And while campaign manager Bill Stepien insisted that money is not an issue, donors seem to be growing suspicious about whether their money is in good hands: