Oh Lord, We’re Financing Trump
Next
time your lawn needs a rehab, you know whom to bill.
By Gail Collins
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 9, 2020
Hey, it looks like Donald Trump is
running out of money.
Stop applauding.
The Times’s Shane Goldmacher and Maggie
Haberman reported this week that just as the presidential
race is steaming into high gear, the Trump campaign has frittered away more
than $800 million of the $1.1 billion it raised since the start of 2019.
The money went to much-needed
initiatives like $11 million in reservations for Super Bowl ads. A great
investment! Look what it did for Michael Bloomberg.
The Biden campaign — which raised way
more money than Trump in August, seems to be spending a lot less. Do you sniff
disastrous ineptitude in the Republican air? Think of it this way: This
election is the Trump family’s new version of their Atlantic City casinos.
Or: The campaign’s
finances are structured with all the discipline and care of the Mexican wall
project.
Or: The president’s campaign
projections sound approximately as reliable as his timetable for coronavirus
relief.
If this keeps up, by late October
Donald Jr. and the other kids will be trying to keep the family’s political
fortunes afloat with gigs on the rent-a-celebrity circuit. Party planners will
have to decide whether their guests would be more impressed rubbing elbows with
Jared Kushner or the 2015 winner of “The Bachelor.”
To be fair, some Trump supporters are
trying to do things more creatively. Just the other day, they had a lovely boat
parade on a Texas lake that was perfect except for the part where five boats
sank.
But if the fund-raising doesn’t pick
up, Joe Biden will have a definite advantage for the last leg of the race. That
might reduce the suspense, and a Democratic victory might look a little less
spectacular — maybe history would just regard the vice president as an average
guy who got lucky.
Pop survey: In your scale of worries,
which most concerns you:
A) The future of the endangered axolotl
salamander.
B) The possibility
that if Trump gets too weak, Biden’s triumph would seem less impressive.
C) Eric Trump’s tweet that N.F.L.
football is “dead” now that Dallas Cowboys players are allowed to take the
knee.
Wow, I had no idea there was so much
concern about the axolotl! Although if I had a choice between a walking fish with
several gills on each side of its head and the gang at the White House, I, too,
would certainly opt for the former.
But OK, about the president of the
United States. You have to love the fact that a guy who’s bragged all his life
about his ability to attract investors can’t match a career politician from
Delaware when it comes to creating a well-financed campaign.
Trump claims that in a crisis, he’ll
pay for the campaign with his own money. It’s not clear how much he could come
up with — we’re still waiting for those tax returns. But it would certainly be
an interesting change of pace for a guy who’s been trying to foist all the
bills on us.
Right now we the people are paying a
ton of money — rightfully — for the Secret Service to guard Trump wherever he goes.
But it seems crass for him to be charging us up to $650 a night for rooms at
Mar-a-Lago so the agents have a place to sleep, and $17,000 a month for putting
them up at his golf course in New Jersey.
The Trump campaign has been kind of
bragging about its intention of paying to replace the sod on the White House
lawn where Republican crowds gathered during the convention. This, you will
recall, involved roughly 1,500 people mobilized to demonstrate their love for
the president and hatred of social distancing. It’s sort of the people’s lawn,
right? People, how many of you invited Donald Trump to stage the Republican
convention there?
Another bill we’ve
been footing involves a sexual assault allegation. You may remember that last
year a New York journalist, E. Jean Carroll, claimed she had been raped by
Trump in a department store changing room. Carroll’s charges involved events
she said happened more than two decades ago, and it was too late to try to
press them as a crime. So when Trump denied them in an interview, she sued him.
It’s a long and depressing story — in
which you, American citizens, appear in the final act. The Justice Department
says that since Trump was president when he issued the denial, he was “acting
within the scope of his office as president of the United States.”
Get it? If the Justice Department is
working on Trump’s behalf in this matter, you, me and every axolotl owner in
America will be footing part of the bill.
Everybody knows we live in tough times,
trying to work and take care of kids stranded at home, and worrying about the
economy. We learned recently that since March, people have watched 41.2 million hours of chess on Twitch.
Even going for a walk loses its allure
when it involves being swathed in masks. But at least it gives you a feeling
that everybody’s working together to contain the coronavirus. My own
neighborhood has been extremely diligent on the mask front, and I’m pretty sure
it’s because everyone knows Donald Trump hates them.
So there’s a real plus. Never say he
never did anything for the people.
