Trump using his political PAC as slush fund for personal expanses

 OF COURSE TRUMP HAS SCAMMED MILLIONS FROM HIS NOT-VERY-BRIGHT SUPPORTERS

"One of the more ironic aspects of Donald Trump’s improbable election win in 2016 was that many of his supporters declared they were voting for him because unlike career politicians, he actually told the truth. In reality, of course, he lied about everything all the time.

Obviously Trump hasn’t stopped lying since he left Washington, with the biggest lie being that he won the 2020 election, but at the same time, his supporters continue not to care. So while it might tick off a normal person to learn that money they’d donated to a (supposedly) important cause had actually gone to funding personal expenses for a guy who never misses a chance to tell everyone how rich he is, we’re pretty sure the ex-president’s followers will not be bothered."

Here is the thing: it isn't illegal. It is just improper. Presidents would give up their business holdings in the past not because they were legally required to, but to avoid the mere appearance of impropriety.

So much of the US system is just traditions and norms and assumes that the majority of the people acting within the system are doing so in good faith and it sucks.

What it is illegal is for the President to accept "things of value" from certain groups and the easiest way to make sure you can't be accused of that is to have absolutely nothing they can put value into, which is totally a law Trump actually broke but that also doesn't seem to matter because enforcement mechanisms were never defined it was all just good faith bullshit.

For a guy who claims to be a billionaire, he really seems to engage in the high-dollar-value equivalent of scrounging change from the couch cushions. If you're really a billionaire, why would you need to bilk supporters with a fake legal defense fund, run a scam charity, or send taxpayer dollars directly into your own pocket by charging the Secret Service retail price to protect you at properties you own? (Spoiler alert: it's because he's not actually all that wealthy.)

Then, as now, Trump talked about winning in business, in romance, in life. Yet, Spy investigated the shakiness of his business dealings and revealed how most developers in New York real estate considered him a bit player. In one stunt, the magazine sent tiny checks to prominent New Yorkers to see who would cash them. Those who did received a series of checks, each diminishing in size. For Trump, the checks kept coming.

"In April, New York Times reporter Shane Goldmacher revealed that the Trump campaign had ripped off supporters for tens of millions of dollars through a scheme in which when they donated money, the default option authorized the campaign to transfer the pledged amount from people’s bank accounts not once but every single week. Later the campaign introduced a second prechecked box that doubled a person’s contribution and was thus known internally as a “money bomb.” (In order for people to have noticed this, they would have had to wade through “lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.”) And the scheme continued after Trump lost the election, with his campaign reportedly “continu[ing] the weekly withdrawals through prechecked boxes all the way through December 14.” Those withdrawals, the Times noted, occurred “as [Trump] raised tens of millions of dollars for his new political action committee, Save America.”"