We learned over the weekend how a Donald Trump fundraising scam
has imploded, but not before Donald Trump was able to trick supporters and grift them out of
millions, actually, really tens of millions of dollars. Now, you might be saying
you told us about this, David. You told us about how after Trump lost
in November of twenty twenty, he raised, what was it, 70 something million dollars
with the idea that he was going to use it to pay for recounts, fight the results, support Georgia's
Senate candidates. What were their names? I'm even forgetting Kelly Leffler and David Perdue. And
instead, he kept the cash and he used it to pay off campaign debts and all of this other stuff.
Right? That's true. That's all true. But a bunch of those millions that he raised came from people
who weren't trying to give him any more money, whose intention was to make a one time donation.
But they were billed again and again and again and once again, right wing media is silent on it.
Republican elected officials are silent on it. They're looking the other way,
maybe because some of them are using this same scam and we just haven't heard about it yet.
So here's what happened. The New York Times has a full report explaining the ruse. And it goes like
this. Donald Trump knew he was in trouble last fall. Publicly at every rally, he would say, oh,
we've got look, I've got great marks here and I've got all these polls and we're winning everything.
And of course, he wasn't. And he knew he wasn't, but not only was the polling not looking good, the
fundraising was looking terribly. Fundraising is not a matter of opinion. It's not. Well, Rasmussen
says this and EPSO says that. And the truth is in between. No, you know, how many dollars are coming
in? And they were in trouble. So what the Trump campaign started doing in September was to set up
recurring donations for online donors so that the donations would keep happening every week
up until Election Day. Now, understand that in principle, there's nothing scam about a recurring
donation. If that is the norm, if that's what's expected, if people understand that that's going
on, it's not the norm in political contributions. If you sign up for cable with Comcast and you're
told this service is seventy five dollars a month and every month you keep having cable, you expect
you're going to keep getting built. That's the way it works. We all, for the most part, understand
that if you sign up for a gym membership and they say beautiful, you know, it's it's 40 dollars per
month and that includes access to, you know, the weight room and the web. You expect that
each month your credit card is going to get hit with a 40 dollar charge. That's what you expect
in political donations. The default is you donate once and that's it. And the Trump campaign started
setting up their fundraising website back in September to by default, make whatever you
donate a recurring weekly donation. You had to go through a fine print disclaimer and then uncheck
a box that was checked by default to avoid your donation being a recurring donation. And then
as the election closed in, Trump's campaign did even more to hide the disclaimer and the opt out.
And they even introduced a second pre checked box, which I'm going to show you in a moment, known to
them as the money bomb, which increased a person's contribution automatically programmatically going
forward when individuals intended to make just one donation. So check out what this looked like. It's
too huge. I'm showing it to the video audience. I know if you're listening, you can't see this,
but it's two huge yellow boxes with a bunch of bold text which are checked by default.
And the bold text is all Trump will win, win, win, but then at the bottom, not in bold. It says,
make this a weekly recurring donation until November 3rd. And then there's another one
of these yellow boxes with tons of bold text about Trump is a patriot. You're a patriot for donating.
And then at the bottom, not in bold an escalator. Donate another hundred dollars automatically on
October 9th. Can you imagine, you know, how we have these borderline illegal membership
discounts that I offer people even though I'm at risk of going to prison? Because these deals I'm
offering you are so good. We offer these discounts if you use the coupon code better. Twenty one, you
say 50 percent off forever, right? Our discounts are forever. Trump did the opposite. It's like a
reverse coupon code. It's like if I had a sixty dollar membership and then I hide a box where
your next renewal goes to one twenty. Don't worry, I would never do that to you. Our discounts are
permanent. The scam netted Trump millions and of course, some people saw it on their credit
card and they filed a chargeback, but tons of people did not. And incredibly tragically,
there are individuals who fell for this who were too sick and in the hospital to fight
the charges. But the charges just kept coming. One guy named Victor Avelino, 78 year old Californian,
he made a nine hundred ninety dollar online donation to Trump in September,
and then it recurred seven more times, adding up to eight thousand dollars. And he told The
New York Times, quote, I'm retired. I can't afford to pay all that damn money. Now, some of the money
ended up being refunded. Some people successfully disputed the charges. Many did not. These refunds
coincided with a surge of donors calling credit card companies, saying, I am a victim of fraud.
I've been defrauded by Trump fundraising. A Wells Fargo fraud investigator said,
quote, It started to go absolutely wild. Now, this is not for me about oh, I feel bad
for Trump. It's who got suckered because the truth is they got suckered by Trump in terms
of even supporting him politically and then they got suckered again with the fundraising scam. OK,
someone wrote to me and said, David, screw them. They were dumb enough to fall for Trump's campaign
anyway. Screw them on the money as well. OK, well, maybe, but this isn't really about that.
This is about how at every opportunity Donald Trump ran his campaign like a multilevel
marketing scam like Trump University. And this is part of Trump cares about his supporters
only as far as they are useful to him. Remember, during the January 6th Trump riots,
one of the reactions Trump had as the coverage continued was that Trump felt the low class and
sort of course, nature of his supporters was making him look bad. That's how Trump views
his supporters. He doesn't view them as people with whom he's morally and politically aligned,
who he wouldn't dare scam. These are mostly people that, as a rich dude from New York,
he spent his life trying to stay away from, and he will gladly scam them.
And he did. And he scammed them on fundraising and his entire presidency was a scam. So this
has now been exposed by The New York Times, the fundraising. I don't even think this is the end
of the fundraising scams. I think there will be more. Let me know your thoughts. You can find
me on Twitter at David Pakman. We are back from vacation and there is so much to talk about today.