The Grift Goes On

Call me crazy, but sometimes it almost seems like all the business the hotel saw during the Trump years was aimed at currying favor with his administration while personally enriching him in the process... https://t.co/L9MC9vGBJ2

— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) March 8, 2021

 Bloomberg thinks Trump needs customers:

Eric Trump, the former president’s second-born son and executive vice president at the Trump Organization, says he is confident the family can convert voters into customers without trying too hard. There are also die-hard Trump fans going out of their way to support his businesses, seeing it as a way to thank him for his service or even fight “cancel culture.”

But Donald Trump built his corporate and political empires around very different groups. While rural voters without college degrees were the core of his constituency in November, his career caters to the coastal elites he mocks from the podium.

“I won’t become a customer, because I won’t become a customer of anybody in his league,” said Jack Murnion, a Targhee sheep rancher in his 70s who’s a former county commissioner in Montana’s Garfield County. More than nine in 10 voters there cast their ballot for Trump in 2020. “I’m never going to stay in a world-class hotel.”

Heather Gibson, another Trump voter in the county, was blunter.

“I don’t give a fig about his business,” said Gibson, a mother of four girls and a superintendent who oversees one-room schoolhouses. “He’s got plenty of money.”

None of the people cited in that article need to spend any money at a Trump property.  Trump will get their money anyway.

Libowitz explained to me that since leadership PACs have “very few restrictions” on how money is spent, he expects “to see a lot of this money going to Trump companies, and I have to imagine it’s just part of the grift.”

Trump could use the money to hold events at his hotels, for instance. But there are other ways it could flow back to the former president.

“There aren’t a lot of restrictions on travel expenses, so he can rent his own plane for himself and pay himself to fly around the country,” Libowitz said. “He can pay Ivanka and the rest of his family very large amounts as consultants for the PAC. He can rent office space for himself.”

It's kinda cute Bloomberg thinks Trump has to make money the old-fashioned way (i.e., the way he did before he ran for President). Come to think of it, this is how he made money WHILE he was President.

The grift goes on.