Major GOP donors must feel like complete suckers now that is becoming known that Trump's campaign is basically dead broke, he's dragging down the entire party, and he's even put Democrats in position to potentially take back the Senate.
“The Senate majority is the most important objective right now,” said Dan Eberhart, who has given over $190,000 to Trump’s reelection effort, according to the AP. “It’s the bulwark against so much bad policy that the Democrats want to do if they sweep the elections.”
Eberhart and others feel burned after the state of Trump's campaign war chest has come into clearer view in the final months of the race. “You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly,” veteran GOP strategist Mike Murphy told the AP of the Trump campaign's spending habits.
Trump and his campaign aides burned through
$1 billion like they were on a drunken Beverly Hills lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous bender. It's still early days on the effort to figure out how the blew it all-- but here's some early research.
1. There's the $10 million Super Bowl ad bought by the campaign so Trump could feel powerful before Democrats had even settled on a nominee.
2. Then we have more than $310 million in spending that's concealed by a web of limited liability companies, according to the AP. While that was going on, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale managed to purchase a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a $400,000 yacht, and several million-dollar-plus condos after siphoning some $40 million from the Trump campaign alone.
3. Nearly $100,000 was needed to prop up the release of Donald Trump Jr.’s book, “Triggered,” pushing it to the top of The New York Times’ bestsellers list.
4. Over $7.4 million was spent at Trump-branded properties since 2017
5. At least $35.2 million spent on Trump merchandise
6. $38.7 million in legal and “compliance” fees, including the legal costs of his impeachment proceedings
7. At least $14.1 million spent on the Republican National Convention, which was relocated several times and ended up being a mostly virtual event
8. A $250,000 ad run during Game 7 of the 2019 World Series after Trump was booed by spectators for attending Game 5
9. $1.6 million wasted on TV ads so Trump could see himself on TV in the Washington, D.C., media market, where Biden is polling at about 87%
10. Untold amounts of money on repeated visits by Trump and Pence to the state of Minnesota, which also played host to several campaign stops from Trump's children. The campaign mistakenly viewed the state as a potential lifeline if Trump lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. When it became obvious that Trump was down a solid 10 points to Biden, campaign manager Bill Stepien (according to Axios reporting) maintained a negligible and basically useless ad presence in Minnesota through the first weeks of October because "Trump would inevitably blow up at him if he were to read newspaper stories that he was going off the air in a Rust Belt battleground."
11. And best of all was the "strategic" decision in May, when
Parscale unleashed $176 million in spending to drag down Biden in public
polling-- that worked out well, didn't it?
It has been reported that the Biden campaign is spending more than twice as much in the closing days of race—$142 million to the Trump campaign's coordinated buy with the Republican National Committee (RNC) of $55 million.
Pissed off Republicans donors have responded by setting up a separate pro-Trump super PAC, Preserve America, that is explicitly not being run by Trump's people because he's clearly not sending his finest. Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson recently poured $75 million into that PAC instead of just handing it over to the Trump campaign. Methinks it is much too late for that. . . but good luck!
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