Grift or get Grifted

by kara on August 24, 2016

Here’s a fun story gleaned from the monthly campaign financial reports: Back in March, when Donald Trump was “self-funding” his primary campaign (he wasn’t, really), he paid himself considerably less for rent for his campaign headquarters than he charged his campaign since donor money really started rolling in. How much more? Well, quintuple. HuffPo has the fun details:

Trump nearly quintupled the monthly rent his presidential campaign pays for its headquarters at Trump Tower to $169,758 in July, when he was raising funds from donors, compared with March, when he was self-funding his campaign, according to a Huffington Post review of Federal Election Commission filings. The rent jumped even though he was paying fewer staff in July than he did in March.

The Trump campaign paid Trump Tower Commercial LLC $35,458 in March — the same amount it had been paying since last summer — and had 197 paid employees and consultants. In July, it paid 172 employees and consultants.

Huh. Fuzzy maths. Fewer staff, but a helluva lot more rent. Hey, Trump his a bizness man and a bizness man will charge what the market will bear, and be sure that a campaign HQ for the Republican nominee is going to be a lot pricier than the HQ for one of several primary candidates. That’s just #logic. That is  #capitalism. Who cares about it being exactly the same location.

Do we have a picture of the luxurious digs the Trump campaign staff in the Tower are getting for all that moolah Trump’s raking in? Why yes, we do:

trump-tower-office

Are the wires there for the staffers to hang themselves? Give me 10 minutes in this shithole and I’ll find you 20 code violations

I mean, can’t some patriotic OSHA representative needs to open an investigation on that deadly looking campaign office? I can’t imagine those hanging wires and shaky looking walls are up to code. I would  slap on a coat of this before you leave for the night:

get

“If I was a donor, I’d want answers,” said a prominent Republican National Committee member who supports Trump, asking for anonymity to speak freely. “If they don’t have any more staff, and they’re paying five times more? That’s the kind of stuff I’d read and try to make an (attack) ad out of it.”

If I was a donor, I’d want a brain scan, but thanks, Trump supporter, I am sure bet that’s already been forwarded to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

As usual, the July financial disclosures show a lot of payments to Trump’s own businesses, just as they did back in May, when the campaign shelled out $1.1 million to companies owned by Trump and his family. We can see the wisdom of Trump funneling money to his own businesses. They’re the only companies doing business with Donald Trump who can be fairly sure they won’t get stiffed.
You might think that with only 76 days to the general election, the Trump campaign might be ramping up its spending on staffing local offices and getting ready to get out the vote. It turns out, the biggest single chunk of the campaign’s July spending — about half of it — went to “Giles-Parscale, a  San Antonio web design and marketing firm” that does online fundraising for the campaign. Giles-Pascale is a crossover vendor from Trump’s real estate organization that the Trump campaign paid $8.4 million in July, about twice what the firm had collected from it over the course of the preceding year.

I sure love how Trump staffers are working in filthy, high-priced shitholes. I love Ma and Pa Goober cashing in their saving bonds to send to this grifter. I love Trump fleecing his wealthy and poor supporters alike. Trump could steal their life savings, pimp their daughters out, and burn their fucking houses down, and they’d still love him for ‘tellin’ it like it is”, for building a wall around all the white people and for giving voice to their  hatred of black and brown people. To these petty, racist, misogynistic, ignorant sack of bastards, bigotry and hate are more important then their own welfare. Any cursory look at Trump’s life would tell these idiots that he has fucked over every person he has ever met, but they accept it because they love him for his racism. These people are unteachable. I started to feel sorry for the really stopped donors who sit in their trailers eating Swanson dinners off a tv tray while they watch Wheel O’ for they do not have the means or the wherewithal to get out and see that America is already great and people are basically good. But they don’t live in trailers, and have a median income of $72,000, which is about $10,000 more than Clinton supporters and well above the national median ($53,000), so I stopped feeling sorry for them and have let go of the trailer stereotype.

Anyway, I love the staffer’s offices, it is what they deserve. Dateline, 2040:

The CDC is looking into an unusually high number of former staffers from 2016’s disastrous Donald Trump Presidential campaign contracted mesothelioma, apparently traced to an asbestos contaminated building in which staffers worked in the late summer and early autumn of that election year. President Malia Obama stated that the White House would be providing full support to the CDC’s investigation.

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