Ahead of Donald Trump’s Saturday rager for his billionaire buds, the Biden campaign released a video—with a fully on-board Sen. Bernie Sanders—showing just the sort of thing that will happen there. Plenty of posh posteriors are certain to be smooched, but you’re unlikely to see many red-hatted MAGA Americans begging Trump to sign their chest—unless Marjorie Taylor Greene somehow gets in.
Trump seems to attract two natural constituencies: billionaires and bigots. With a portion of the money they find in their couch cushions, billionaires are buying tax cuts, government deregulation, and all the usual trappings of crony capitalism. The bigots, on the other hand, are downgrading to slightly expired, off-brand lunch meats so they can load up on Trump’s golden sneakers, meme stocks, and tricked-out Bibles, complete with a foreword by Kid Rock and a hollowed-out section for smuggling Corn Nuts into church. (It’s where the chapter on false idols used to be, no biggie.)
Watch:
DONALD TRUMP: … because you are all people that have a lot of money! I know 20 of you, and you’re rich as hell! … We’re going to give you tax cuts. We’re going to pay off our debt.
JOE BIDEN: That’s everything you need to know about Donald Trump: When he thinks the cameras aren’t on, he tells his rich friends, quote, “We’re going to give you tax cuts.”
BERNIE SANDERS: Can anyone in America imagine that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality—billionaires are doing phenomenally well—that he’s going to give them huge tax breaks? And then at the same time, he’s going to cut Social Security, Medicare, and programs that our kids need.
BIDEN: This is his economic plan? That’s what he wants to do? Cutting taxes for his friends, cutting Social Security for you? That makes me mad as hell, quite frankly.
SANDERS: The hypocrisy is just outrageous. This is what he says to his billionaire friends, not quite what he’s saying at his rallies.
BIDEN: There are 1,000 billionaires in America, in this country. They pay an average tax rate of 8.2% [in] federal taxes. So I have a plan. We have a plan: Asking his good buddies to begin to pay their fair share.
SANDERS: You have one candidate who wants to cut Medicare and Social Security, and one who’s going to protect it. That’s why I’m supporting Joe, and I hope you will as well.
BIDEN: Thanks, pal.
Brilliant! The Trump footage—which came from a December Mar-a-Lago event in support of weirdo North Carolina gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson—does a great job of both unmasking Trump and projecting unity. While Nikki Haley voters are still dithering over their potential support for Donald Trump, destroyer of worlds, Democrats are fully united behind Biden this year, and Bernie stepped into the fray from the get-go.
The B&B collaboration is great news on its own, but have you seen the numbers behind the two campaigns’ respective fundraising efforts? The Biden campaign is crushing it while Trump is scrambling to catch up.
Not only did Biden bring in about $90 million in March alone, his campaign currently has $192 million cash on hand. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign raised $66 million in March and currently holds $93 million—less than half of Biden’s total.
As a result, Trump is placing outsized importance on Saturday’s fundraiser. And as the above video proves, his donors will be expecting a lot more than a few “Fuck Joe Biden” flags in exchange for their efforts.
The Washington Post:
Trump’s team is aware that it is behind and wants to catch up quickly, according to one of the people familiar with its fundraising who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private activities.
Trump’s fundraising team has been asked to secure as many checks as possible as soon as possible to boost the former president’s numbers. Republican officials are eager to narrow the gap so they can compete with Biden’s field effort and advertising campaigns. They hope to ensure that GOP candidates win up and down the ticket. But Trump’s legal woes are placing a strain on several of his political committees.
Ah, yes, his legal “woes.”
Republicans could have easily avoided nominating a guy with 88 felony charges and a résumé that includes both a botched pandemic response and a failed coup, but they went another way. And now a sizable portion of their donations are going down a legal sinkhole.
And, not for nothing, Biden is only too happy to troll his cacophonous counterpart over the disparities.
Trump must knows how weak all this makes him look, and so he appears particularly keen on pumping his billionaire friends—who would likely make out big in a future Vladimir Putin-style kleptocracy—for more cash.
The Post:
Trump is closely tracking who is attending the fundraiser Saturday, who has given the maximum and how much has been raised, according to a person who spoke to him recently. His advisers regularly brief him on the attendees. “He is focused on this fundraiser,” one person familiar with his thinking said. “He has a lot of friends in Palm Beach, and he’s saying, are they giving?”
In recent weeks, Trump has spent time meeting with donors almost every day, people close to the former president said.
As Daily Kos noted three weeks ago, Trump is increasingly relying on billionaires to bankroll his dastardly plans, because he’s currently a money sieve with a pathetic campaign war chest.
So far, anyway, Saturday’s big fundraiser looks like a success—assuming the bulk of the haul doesn’t automatically go to keeping Trump out of prison. Then again, that would be reason enough for these plutocrats to pry open their wallets, since Trump is the only major presidential candidate who appears determined to make the obscenely rich among us marginally more obscene.
The Associated Press:
The event at the Palm Beach, Florida, home of billionaire investor John Paulson is expected to bring in $43 million for the former president’s third run at the White House, according to Paulson.
The high-dollar event is expected to include about 100 guests, including more than a few billionaires, and top a new single-event fundraising record set by President Joe Biden, who raised $26 million recently at a gathering with former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
“The response to our fundraising efforts has been overwhelming, and we’ve raised over $43 million so far,” Paulson, a hedge fund manager, said in a statement. “There is massive support amongst a broad spectrum of donors.”
Hmm, “a broad spectrum of donors.” In other words, billionaires and multimillionaires seasoned in dodging campaign finance limits. After all, the GOP is nothing if not a big, air-conditioned, glamping-style tent party.
None of this is surprising, of course—unless you’re a lower-income Trump voter who pays attention only to what he says at his rallies, while ignoring his actual policies and the awful stuff he word-vomits behind closed doors.
After Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (aka the Trump Tax Scam)—a billionaire boondoggle that he continually lied about in order to muster support from his less-well-to-do fans—he rushed to Mar-a-Lago to congratulate his real friends on the daring heist they’d all just pulled off.
CBS News:
President Trump kicked off his holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago Friday night at a dinner where he told friends, “You all just got a lot richer,” referencing the sweeping tax overhaul he signed into law hours earlier. Mr. Trump directed those comments to friends dining nearby at the exclusive club — including to two friends at a table near the president’s who described the remark to CBS News — as he began his final days of his first year in office in what has become known as the “Winter White House.”
The president has spent many weekends of his presidency so far at the “Winter White House,” where initiation fees cost $200,000, annual dues cost $14,000, and some of the most affluent members of society have the opportunity to interact with the president in a setting while many Americans cannot. This weekend, the president arrived after signing the most consequential legislation, and arguably, the greatest achievement, of his presidency thus far.
In the end, it was Trump’s only major legislative achievement—and it was a giant failure for pretty much everyone but the people who it was actually intended to help: America’s millionaires and billionaires.
Maybe his less-wealthy fans will be satisfied enough with Trump’s plans to start cutting Social Security and Medicare …
Or, you know, maybe not …
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.
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