Smaug On The MAGA Money Pile
They’re not getting it.
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Trump’s MAGA Inc. is sitting on $400 million with less than 90 days until the election. The RNC is sitting on about $160 million.
The comforting theory, the one held dear by elected Republicans feeling the growing wrath of voters as the Iran war drags on and the economy keeps hammering them, is that Chris LaCivita and the rest of Trump’s political team will spend that pile down to save the GOP majorities in the House and the Senate.
Good luck.
I’m here to propose a rather different scenario, and to explain why I think it’s the likely one.
Trump is Tolkien’s Smaug, the dragon curled on the dwarves’ treasure under the Lonely Mountain, jealously guarding every last coin and gem.
First, Donald Trump likes money.
He likes it more than he likes anything else in this world, including his children. That love of cash has manifested itself this year in an epic tidal wave of political corruption.
Yes, he’s raked in billions from crypto scams, from selling pardons to criminals, from side deals to enrich himself, his family, and a host of other scummy and entirely predictable actors. Why not collect more from the suckers funding MAGA Inc?
We’re missing something about the MAGA Inc. money.
Trump believes it’s his.
In his mind, it wasn’t raised for the party. It wasn’t raised for candidates. It wasn’t raised to ensure an electoral victory this fall. He thinks it was raised for him, literally and personally for him. Sure, that’s an ugly and stupid category error, but why would you expect anything different at this point?
Trump also has one thing going for him that no other Republican candidate has ever had. He isn’t really a Republican.
Donald Trump is a member of the Trump party, a party dedicated to one man, and a singularly self-obsessed man at that. So put yourself inside that rattled, sloppy brain for a moment. You see a political tidal wave coming for the GOP. You’re sitting on nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars that might not even save them. What do you do?
If you’re Donald Trump, I’ll tell you exactly what you do. You spend it on yourself. You transfer it into your own pockets.
Trump doesn’t care whether Republicans win or lose, except insofar as losing might be a slight inconvenience in terms of investigations.
And the Republican suckers already confirmed Todd Blanche, so why bother helping them any further? Blanche stonewalls for two years, keeps covering up the Epstein files, keeps inventing novel and hysterically wrong legal protections for Trump, and the clock runs out. Trump leaves, takes the money, and the GOP gets a final middle finger from a president who holds them in robust contempt.
That’s the thing the elected officials desperate for cash don’t fully understand. A man who would abandon his Secretary of State, his Treasury Secretary, and dozens of his closest aides and hide in a catering cart to escape an alleged Iranian attack is a guy without loyalty at any level. A man who will put the lives of his team at risk isn’t the guy who’s going to rip off a check for $150 million to save Ken Paxton.
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The same data-broker pipeline is what fuels the meme-coin push notification hitting your father’s phone, the “urgent Medicare” robocall hitting your grandmother’s landline, and the “you have won” text hitting your kid’s iPhone. It is one economy. Trump is running the political version of it out of the White House. The retail version is running on your family from a call center in a strip mall.
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Take yourself off the mailing list. Take your parents off it too, while you’re at it. The dragon isn’t the only one grifting.
Now, back to the pile.
Donald Trump has always been a take-the-money-and-run guy.
Politics is the best business he’s ever had, by several orders of magnitude. He was a crappy real estate developer, multiply bankrupt, including bankrupt in casinos, which ought to be mathematically impossible. Regardless of the image they sold on The Apprentice, Trump never made the money he wanted until he could extract bribes from the tech bros and Wall Street, scam seniors out of their Social Security checks to prop up his garbage meme coin, and turn the government into a checkout line for criminals seeking pardons, companies seeking favors, and billionaires seeking tax cuts.
Holding power is great, sure.
But Trump thinks he’s already past that part, and somewhere in there he knows that with Democrats in the majority he’ll have two straight years to spend redecorating the White House.
The donors to MAGA Inc. are in crypto, finance, energy and, of course, AI. They’ll have to splash some money around to the Democrats again after the election, but that cash will be a rounding error.
I could be wrong, but I feel like the Dragon is going to keep laying on that mountain of gold, saving it for himself.
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You are right on all angles! That is why I like what you write, you seem to know him better than many others do. Just sitting here on TV "HE" just said "We're going to make so much MONEY!" Period End! He's consumed in greed and vanity. Nothing more nothing less!
Trumpian corruption is a far greater danger to American capitalism than "godless communism" whatever that means.