HOW YOU CAN HELP SAVE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN FROM FINA

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HOW YOU CAN HELP SAVE THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN FROM FINANCIAL RUIN

by Dana Milbank
September 8, 2020

Well, this is embarrassing.

Seems President Trump has run his reelection campaign into financial distress, a status that will not surprise those familiar with the Trump Taj Mahal, the Trump Castle, the Trump Plaza Atlantic City, the Trump Plaza New York, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, Trump Entertainment Resorts, the Trump Tower Tampa, the Trump Shuttle, Trump: The Game, Trump magazine, Trump Mortgage, Trump Steaks, Trump mattresses, Trump pillows, Trump perfume, Trump shirts, Trump underwear, Trump shoes, Trump eyeglasses, Trump University, Trump Vodka, the Trump Foundation and the U.S. Treasury.

The New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report that Trump and the Republican National Committee squandered their $200 million cash advantage, spent $800 million of the $1.1 billion raised and now face the possibility of a “cash crunch.”

The culprit: “profligate habits” such as a car and driver for the now-former campaign manager, payments to Trump businesses, and a “vanity splurge” on Super Bowl ads.

Now, the cash-strapped campaign has had to abandon a $3 million plan to put the Trump name on a NASCAR race car. Sad!

Bloomberg News reports that Trump might pump $100 million of his own money into his campaign. But this raises another disturbing matter: Does he have any money? The president is still fighting to keep his tax returns hidden, and he has been using his official powers to direct commerce and tax breaks to his struggling properties.

Happily, there is a solution at hand to save the billionaire’s campaign from financial ruin! TMZ reports that a Bible signed by Trump is being sold through a memorabilia company, Moments In Time, for $37,500. In the photo on the merchant’s website, Trump’s Sharpie signature is scrawled generously across the title page, where the author’s name might go, right below “HOLY BIBLE/KING JAMES VERSION.”

TMZ reports that the Bible was signed at the White House during the first week of June, “just a couple of days after he’d ordered federal law enforcement to fire pepper spray and rubber bullets at peaceful George Floyd protesters” for his Bible photo op at St. John’s Episcopal Church. The photo-op Bible is not the one for sale.

But what if it were?

If an ordinary Trump-signed Bible can fetch $40k, surely the photo-op Bible would bring in a cool six figures for Trump’s struggling campaign from a wealthy Trump sucker supporter. (I’m looking at you, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and MyPillow guy Mike Lindell.)

Heck, Scott Pruitt, then-head of the Environmental Protection Agency, once sent an aide to buy a used Trump Hotel mattress to curry favor with the boss.

And if Trump is good at anything, it is getting people to pay money for his name — whether it’s on their condos or, in one failed-to-launch scheme, Trump-branded urine tests. In 2016, people paid $49 each just to be listed on a wall in Trump Tower.

There was also that time Trump got a “fake bidder” to pay $60,000 in a 2013 auction for a life-size portrait of Trump. According to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump’s charitable foundation then reimbursed the fake bidder, a pharmaceutical billionaire.

Imagine the millions Trump could raise for his campaign by selling articles from historic moments of his presidency. It wouldn’t be legal, strictly speaking, but when has that mattered?

Trump could autograph rolls of the “beautiful, soft” paper towels he tossed at Puerto Ricans struggling to recover from a hurricane.

He could inscribe chunks of the border wall, built by a group affiliated with Steve Bannon (who is now under indictment for improperly profiting from the scheme). The shoddily built wall is at risk of crumbling into the Rio Grande.

He could sign the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration weather map he doctored with a Sharpie to show a hurricane heading toward Alabama.

He could auction off autographed pill bottles with the 63 million surplus doses of hydroxychloroquine the federal government ordered.

He could even sell, with autographed plaques affixed, the cages he used to detain migrant children after separating them from their parents.

The potential auction items are limitless: the Helsinki 2018 lectern from which Trump sided with Vladimir Putin over U.S. intelligence; the Air Force One model redesigned to look like Trump’s private jet; a pepper-spray canister from Lafayette Square; Confederate flags and monuments he has protected for the very fine people who like them; the Ukraine documents never sent to Congress; the too-tight tuxedo he wore to Buckingham Palace; the golf cart he rode at the Group of Seven while other world leaders walked; and the unnecessary bombs and planes ordered by the “top people in the Pentagon” who “want to do nothing but fight wars.”

In an instant, Trump’s campaign coffers would be great again. Chauffeurs would be rehired, cash would resume flowing to Trump businesses, and all would be right with the world.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/...ts-wrapper

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