Trump, Once The Man Who Couldn’t Be Bought, Is Now Up For Sale
The Republican presidential nominee is openly handing out favors to big donors in an unprecedented fashion.
huffpost.com
In June 2015, former President Donald Trump infamously came down a golden escalator and declared himself the man who couldn’t be bought.
“I’m using my own money,” Trump said in the opening speech of his presidential election campaign. “I’m not using the lobbyists. I’m not using donors. I don’t care. I’m really rich.”
Trump, who did self-fund large portions of his 2016 primary campaign, would return to this theme again and again. He would run against a field of more mainstream GOP politicians, each backed by super PACs filled with million-dollar checks from wealthy donors, and then against Democrat Hillary Clinton, who many voters saw as the embodiment of a moneyed class of Washington insiders.
Now, almost a decade later, he is running as a candidate who is openly for sale. He has said he’ll offer plum jobs to major donors like Elon Musk, promised favors to oil executives, bragged to the wealthy about the tax cuts he can deliver and has even taken time away from his campaign to pitch a cryptocurrency project for his sons.
Americans can even buy DJT on the stock market, in the form of shares in the publicly traded holding company that owns his social media site, Truth Social. That company’s revenues are meager, with the share price hitting all-time lows, but it’s still being propped up by the former president’s loyal political fandom.
“He just thinks he operates in his own world,” Fred Wertheimer, a veteran of decades of fights over campaign finance and government ethics, told HuffPost. “What he’s doing is incredibly brazen in both asking for large amounts of money and telling people what he’s going to do for them in return.”
“Bottom line, I’ve never seen anyone do what he’s doing,” Wertheimer said.
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