Donald Trump "has done nothing but sucker his supporters" by redirecting campaign fundraising hauls to cover his legal bills, according to former GOP staffer Tara Setmayer.
The former president is the current frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as he seeks to retake the White House, with polls regularly giving him a vast lead over the rest of the pack. Despite that, he is also facing a gauntlet of legal battles, some of which have already resulted in criminal indictments at the federal and state level. While Trump has maintained his innocence in each case, and seen polling boosts with each new round of charges, the litany of cases has also left him with a growing stack of legal bills.
During the Saturday edition of his MSNBC show, host Jonathan Capehart reported on the recently uncovered fine print in Trump campaign fundraising emails, which noted that while 90 percent of the funds given would go to the campaign itself, 10 percent would be diverted to the former president's "Save America" political action committee (PAC). As Capehart further noted, this PAC has been providing funds to pay Trump's legal bills, with former GOP staffer and adviser Setmayer calling the situation "the grift that keeps on giving."
"Ding, ding ding. There it is, Jonathan—it's the grift that keeps on giving, it's the grift that keeps on grifting," Setmayer said. "Look, since the RNC [Republican National Committee] is not paying for his legal bills anymore, they have to figure out a way to pay his legal bills and the Donald Trump campaign has done nothing but sucker his supporters."
Previously a communications director for former GOP Representative Dana Rohrabacher, Setmayer now works with the anti-Trump conservative PAC, The Lincoln Project. She formally left the Republican Party in 2020 and declared herself an independent.
She continued on Saturday: "Lincoln Project put an ad out about that called 'Sucker' a couple months ago, and we re-upped because it continues to happen and yet these people still gravitate towards him, because whether you like it or not, Donald Trump is a genius at communicating to these folks and making them believe he is their champion. I'll never understand how he pulled that off completely, but he has, and people keep giving him their hard-earned money."
The Trump campaign recently claimed that it raised roughly $35 million in the second quarter of 2023 alone, seeing notable bumps in the wake of his various criminal indictments. At the start of his campaign late last year, only 1 percent of donations were diverted to the "Save America" PAC. The shift to 10 percent was fairly recent, according to a New York Times report from late June, and evident only through the fine print in fundraising emails.
Newsweek reached out to the Trump campaign press office via email for comment.
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Thomas Kika is a Newsweek weekend reporter based in upstate New York. His focus is reporting on crime and national ... Read more
