Money Can’t Buy Me Love…or An Election Campaign
In June of 2015, Donald Trump announced he was running for president and made several eye-opening promises.
Among them, that he’d be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” (He left the White House in 2020 with the worst jobs record since Herbert Hoover.)
Another, that he’d build a border wall and have Mexico pay for it. (Under the Trump administration only 80 miles of new border wall were built and the United States, not Mexico, paid for it.)
And, he’d stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. (Two years after Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal, Iran resumed enriching uranium and cut in half the time it would need to build a nuke.)
But it was another promise he made that he broke almost immediately, and well before he became president: to self-fund his campaign.
“I don’t need anybody’s money,” he said at the time. “It’s nice. I don’t need anybody’s money. I’m using my own money. I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors.”
Less than two months later, he held a campaign event that looked very much like a fundraiser — complete with signage asking attendees to “Please have cash ready to make checks payable to: Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.” And not long after that, he added a contributions page to his website.
He has since then refreshed his pledge to self-fund, telling reporters in 2020 that he might use some of his own money — if necessary. But in reality, he’s been a prolific fundraiser, blowing through more than $1 billion— with a “B” — in 2020. And, despite what he insists, losing.
And now he’s begging top donors for multi-million-dollar donations to keep him afloat.
While Trump is more than happy to spend other people’s hard-earned money to fund his reelection campaign, and his mounting legal bills while he’s at it, others are dumping unholy amounts of their own money to fund long-shot campaigns. And it isn’t going well.
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