Disenfranchisement for our foes, empty bank accounts for our friends

From the NYT, some investigative reporting. But if you’re counting visits, here’s the summary: The campaign of super duper billionaire stable genius was so broke it resorted to increasingly ridiculous experiments with fine print to turn intended one-time donations into monthly and then weekly recurring donations.

Naturally, it is catching on with the GOP.

By last summer, the Biden campaign had begun outraising Mr. Trump’s team, and the president was hopping mad. For months, years even, his advisers had been telling him how he had built a one-of-a-kind financial juggernaut. So why, Mr. Trump demanded to know, was he off the television airwaves just months before the election in critical battleground states like Michigan?

“Where did all the money go?” he would lash out, according to two senior advisers.

Cut to: Junior flopping and rolling in a pile of coke like a sparrow taking a dust bath.

Jeff Kropf, the executive director of the Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation, a conservative group, said he had been “very careful” to uncheck recurring boxes — yet he missed the “money bomb” and got a second charge anyway.

Man who stuck his face in the maw of a face-eating leopard was surprised when the leopard ate his face.

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 Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr.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.”

Brother of man who enjoyed feeding face-eating leopards thinks his brother’s face may have been eaten by a leopard.

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.

That sounds fairly fucking duplicitous to moi. And while it appears that it doesn’t rise to the level of crime, if you try to tell a normal person that they’ll think you’re a crook too, and no wonder. Honest people don’t engage in an increasingly ridiculous experiments with fine print so they can rummage in people’s bank accounts. Even Republicans who have been marinating their brains in hate can see that something is not on. So fuck ’em.

The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.

Fool/folly, dog/vomit, perpetually failing failson/juggling various failures.

But it did allow former guy to outperform Biden in one area.

Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.

That translated into $122 million in refunds from DJT compared to $21 million from Biden. But in the midst of this, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler decided they would use the same tactics.

In the final 2020 reporting period, from Nov. 24 through the end of the year, Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler refunded $4.8 million to WinRed donors — more than triple the amount refunded by their Democratic rivals via ActBlue, even though the Democrats had raised far more money online. The refunds have stretched into 2021 and have been a source of frustration for the Loeffler campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter.

El. Em. Ay. Oh. Aw, is someone missing their insider trading information pipeline?

But Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell both use the platform and I’m sure they’ll eventually come up with a formula that satisfies Republican politicians need to rip off their voters and outstrips refund demands. Or maybe they’ll get back in power and make campaign refund demands a capital crime.