Trump still trying to get your money

Donald Trump just can’t stop writing me.

“Friend, Did you see my email from a few days ago?” he asked on Tuesday. Now, if Trump was really your friend, don’t you think he’d call you by your … name?

Anyhow, all of these letters involve fundraising. And great deals! Contribute any amount to Trump’s joint fundraising committee, Save America, and “your gift will be INCREASED by 500%.”

“We have a CRITICAL Endof-Month fundraising deadline coming up, and each day when I ask my team who has stepped up, they NEVER mention YOUR NAME. Why is that, Friend?” the wounded former president demanded.

Once again we will note it’d be pretty strange for your name to come up when nobody seems to really know what it is.

To be fair, Trump is almost an internet monk now, compared with the way he communicated during his last presidential campaign. In the months before the 2020 election, his supporters were reportedly getting an average of about 14 emails a day from his organization.

Trump hasn’t said whether he’ll be running again in 2024. He’s plenty busy with other stuff, like holding rallies, playing golf and spending the anniversary of 9/11 providing commentary for a boxing match at a Florida casino.

And he’s hardly the only major political name out beating the bushes for donations. Nancy Pelosi was in my inbox Wednesday with a letter decrying the new Texas anti-abortion law and with a petition at the very end of which we learn Nancy “needs $981 more in the door before midnight to hit her goal.”

Kind of hard to believe she couldn’t just pick up the phone and nail down that $981. But on the plus side, Pelosi indicated she’d be very happy with just $20. And she did get in my actual first name.

Well, it’s certainly impressive how urgent Trump makes it all sound. During the Labor Day barrage he announced “your 400% impact offer has been extended” and if you just “CONTRIBUTE NOW,” a $250 contribution will count as … $1,250!

If you’re interested, please make sure it happens only once. As Shane Goldmacher reported in The New York Times this spring, a 63-yearold cancer patient in hospice donated what was just about his last $500, and then discovered $3,000 had been withdrawn by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days, leaving his account empty and frozen. The campaign, you see, had set up a default system that siphoned new money every week from donors who didn’t realize they had to make a special effort to opt out.

Campaign finance is, by any measure, a wicked complicated matter. Mistakes do happen. In the past 2½ months of 2020, the Biden campaign made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million. Which sounds like a hell of a lot until you consider that for the same period, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee had to issue more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million.

Many of the Trump emails suggest he needs money to challenge those evil, wrongheaded, “Biden won!” election results. Doesn’t seem like all that great a legal investment. Although probably better than those lawsuits Rudy Giuliani announced in a parking lot next to a porn store in Philadelphia.