Complicated Money-Laundering: Trump Campaign’s Main Expenditures Are to Trump?
The FEC filings for May are in, and while any sane&normal presidential candidate would be kicking the whole campaign thing into high gear - i.e. hitting up the donor base for the Big Bucks, hiring the staffing infrastructure you need to compete in 50 states, pre-buying key media slots on the major networks for late October, etc. etc. - Donald Trump has done none of this.
Instead, he’s steadily funneled what little cash his campaign has on hand to himself, via a complex web of shell companies, and to his kids.
At this point, maybe there is something to the rumors that Trump is actually dead flat broke, and that the presidential campaign was nothing more than a desperate move to shore up his faltering hotel business (as Obama alluded to at the correspondent’s dinner).
Is it possible that Trump is just doing to the RNC and the presidential campaign what he has done to all his casinos and hotel properties:
- Come in, full of braggadocio
- Make a series of outrageous claims to win free airtime
- Convince suckers that there is actual value behind all the bluster
- Get suckers to commit to this glorious future of "winning"!
- Quietly arrange so that all the investor's money is getting siphoned off to shell companies
- Shift blame onto 3rd party (in this case, the RNC)
- Declare victory
- Leave behind smoldering crater of bankruptcy
Am I missing any steps? Well, besides the destruction of civil political discourse in the U.S., and our standing as a decent democracy, that is…