How Trump Swindled Over $ 100 Million From His Voters

How Trump Scammed His Voters Out Of More Than $ 100 Million

Donald Trump’s election campaign attracted supporters using pre-marked checkboxes to donate an amount not just once, but every week. More than $ 100 million was generated against the will of donors.

Stacy Blatt, a 63-year-old Kansas City woman, was in the hospital for cancer last September when she decided to donate $ 500 to Donald Trump. Less than 30 days later, his account was suspended. When he asked why, he found out: The Trump campaign had charged him $ 3,000 in just under a month. Blatt, who was living on less than $ 1,000 a month, was bankrupt.

Like Stacy Blatt, hundreds of thousands of Donald Trump supporters fared last year.

That “money bomb”

But let’s start at the beginning: As the New York Times discovered, the Trump campaign only managed to stay afloat financially during the hot phase of the election campaign last year because it enriched itself on its supporters.

This is nothing new in itself. Election campaigns are based on donations, especially in the United States. But the Trump election campaign came up with something special: They installed checkboxes on your online donation form, like those used in the general terms and conditions, which you must accept when making an online purchase. These checkboxes were pre-marked and formulated as “dizzying complex”. If you missed it, you agreed to make the donation automatically each week.

In March 2020, at the beginning of the election campaign, these check boxes looked like this:

This pre-checked checkbox was already a first in the world of political fundraising. This was generally only known in the private sector, for example with magazine subscriptions. By the way, pre-marked checkboxes are completely banned in Europe.

But for the Trump campaign, this was just the beginning.

In June 2020, a second checkbox was added, the so-called “money bomb”. With this, the donor agreed to donate the same amount again on Trump’s birthday. It turned out to be the highest earning day in campaign history.

Since the introduction of the money bomb, requests for reimbursement from astonished donors have also exploded. While about two percent of donations were previously refunded in both the Biden and Trump campaigns, this number suddenly shot to more than 12 percent for Republicans.

In September, when it became clear that the Trump campaign was making significantly less money than its Democratic rivals, it became even more aggressive. Repeated monthly donations suddenly became weekly grants. The wording of the checkboxes has also become more confusing and obscure.

Gradually, it became more difficult for donors to see what was actually in the boxes. For example, the information you donate weekly has been removed of the type in bold.

Already in October the boxes looked like this:

Huge, bold text with some words written entirely in capital letters. Many Trump supporters could no longer see exactly what they agreed to here.

$ 122 million

The result: the donation platform WinRed, through which the support was processed, had to return $ 122 million in donations. That’s 10.7 percent of all 2020 donation income. For comparison: the democratic equivalent ActBlue only had to repay 2.2 percent.

For Trump, this meant that he received an interest-free loan from his voters at the critical moment of the election campaign. Additionally, WinRed did not refund the 30 cents per donation plus 3.8 percent of the amount that was offset as fees. That adds up to about $ 5 million.

Trump did not stop collecting donations with previously checked checkboxes after his electoral defeat. According to the “New York Times,” he may have used the donations he raised for the “fight against bogus elections” to offset the refunds.

Other Republicans, like Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader, are now using these previously checked checkboxes. And although the victims told the New York Times that the WinRed donation platform was “predatory,” no one wanted to blame Donald Trump for it. One of those slapped said, “I am 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”