Trump Campaign Donations (1 Viewer)

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    Optimus Prime

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    This really belongs in the daily trump tracker thread but since it’s closed

    this guy
    ====================================

    Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

    It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

    What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

    “It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

    But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.

    Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.

    As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

    The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.

    “Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”

    The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors.

    All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time...............



     
    I remember this happening to a man in Pensacola during the campaign. His money was eventually refunded and his reply was something like "could you imagine Biden actually giving your money back?"
     
    Here’s the current box, they’re still doing it. This is from Trump’s PAC, WinRed. They aren’t targeting the sharpest tools in the shed are they?



    Holy crap this is real.
     
    Here’s the current box, they’re still doing it. This is from Trump’s PAC, WinRed. They aren’t targeting the sharpest tools in the shed are they?


    The following things can both be true:

    1) Trump is a swindling crook and,
    2) People who fall for this deserve it.
     
    They should confiscate the money to pay for Holiday inns for the immigrant children in our custody.
     
    Yeah, it's real. Just took my own screenshot, lol. This is just sad. Not the site, which is terrible, but people actually making donations to this thing.

    Screenshot_20210407-170812_Samsung Internet.jpg
     
    We'll see if it's actually gets banned
    ===========================

    After a New York Times investigation highlighted how former President Donald Trump’s campaign used a shady fundraising tactic — prechecked recurring donation boxes — the Federal Election Commission (FEC) has taken a rare unanimous vote to recommend to Congress that they pass a law banning the practice.

    As the Times reported back in early April, during the 2020 election, Trump’s campaign found itself at a cash disadvantage with now-President Joe Biden, and started sending out online fundraising solicitations that made repetitive donations the default option. Some of these were set up to authorize additional donations later in the campaign, some for monthly or even weekly recurring donations. The campaign also sometimes used prechecked boxes to double the donation and made the language and disclaimers complex and confusing.........

    The FEC reviewed the issue and voted unanimously, 6-0, to recommend to Congress that they pass a law banning this type of pre-selected repetitive donation. The FEC is evenly split, with 3 Republican appointees and 3 Democrats, and had spent most of the recent years gridlocked on partisan lines. Regarding this specific fundraising tactic, however, the six were all on the same page — including the three Republican commissioners appointed by Trump himself...........

     
    I wonder how many were swindled but just didn’t complain to the feds about it? Or didn’t even notice because the recurring amount was small enough to go unnoticed.

    I mean $5 a week probably wouldn’t get noticed by a lot of people, but you get 10-20 million of them and it adds up.

    And probably would have never been caught and made a boatload of money

    But got too greedy
     

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