San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Fundraising tactic traps Trump fans
Stacy Blatt was in hospice care in September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.
It was a big sum for a 63yearold 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 Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through midOctober, without his knowledge — until Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell Blatt, 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 Blatt said, “like it was a scam.”
But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenue by the Trump campaign and the forprofit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun in September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors for every week until the election.
Contributors had to wade through a fineprint disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.
As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by the New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the optout language.
The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make.
The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final 2½ months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joe Biden’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.
The recurring donations swelled 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.
In effect, the money that Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interestfree loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.
WinRed said that every donor receives at least one followup email about pending repeat donations in advance and that the company makes it “exceptionally easy” for people to request their money back. “WinRed wants donors to be happy and puts a premium on customer support,” said Gerrit Lansing, WinRed’s president.
Jason Miller, a spokesperson for Trump, downplayed the fraud complaints. He said records showed that 0.87% of its WinRed transactions had been subject to credit card disputes. “The fact we had a dispute rate of less than 1% of total donations despite raising more grassroots money than any campaign in history is remarkable,” he said.