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.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment for this story.
His new strategy may have created an opening for Democrats, if Vice President Kamala Harris and her campaign can seize it.
In a survey released before the presidential debate, the Pew Research Center found the presidential race tied, 49% for Harris to 49% for Trump. Buried in those results, Pew noted one area where most Americans said they had little faith in either presidential candidate: Just 37% of Americans thought they could trust Trump to get money out of politics, and only 32% said the same of Harris.
‘His Most Salient Message’
Trump’s image as an outsider/businessman, unafraid to upset political apple carts, powered his run through the 2016 GOP primaries. He took special aim at former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the beneficiary of the outside group Right to Rise, which had stunned observers with its explosive fundraising.
“They will be bombarded by their lobbyists that donated a lot of money to them,” Trump told a crowd in Iowa of his primary rivals, not long after his campaign’s launch. “Jeb raised $107 million, OK? They’re not putting that money up because it’s a wonderful charity.”
Standing on a debate stage in Boulder, Colorado, that October, Trump decried how super PACs were corrupting his fellow candidates.
“Super PACs are a disaster,” he said. “They’re a scam. They cause dishonesty. And you better get rid of them because they are causing a lot of bad decisions to be made by some very good people.”
Republicans who worked on the campaigns against Trump remember the message as particularly devastating, if not especially novel. Alex Conant, who was then the communications director for the presidential campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), noted plenty of candidates had tried to run as outsiders taking on the establishment before, but said the tactic was far more effective for a New York real estate developer.
“That was his most salient message in 2016,” Conant said. “He was a uniquely good messenger for it, because he was such an outsider, and it also kind of excused all the unconventional stuff — attacking John McCain, attacking Republican Party leaders. A more typical politician, if they were doing that, you would think they were idiots. For him, it was part of what made him so authentic.”
In the general election, Trump relied more on outside groups and traditional fundraising than he did during the primary campaign. But as he took on a rival from a second political dynasty ― Democratic nominee Hilary Clinton, who was battling scandals about her email account and a trio of paid speeches she delivered to Goldman Sachs — he still ran as an insurgent.
“The donors and the lobbyists, who are used to getting their way, are trying to do everything they can to help crooked Hillary Clinton, and to cling to their power,” Trump said at a rally in Novi, Michigan, in October 2016.
‘Always Will Be A Con Man’
Despite his rhetoric, Trump did little to “drain the swamp” upon taking office. He failed to follow through on a promise to divest his business holdings. His hotel quickly became a gathering spot where those hoping to win Trump’s favor could also line his pockets. He appointed lobbyists to key government positions overseeing defense, trade and environmental protection. He took in up to $160 million from international business deals while he was president.
“He has and always will be a con man who’s really only looking out for himself and whatever helps him to obtain power,” said Tiffany Mueller, the president of the Democratic campaign finance group End Citizens United. “All his promises went out the window. Instead of draining the swamp, he brought the swamp to him and his properties and cashed in.”
Trump’s corruption was not a central issue for President Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020. Once Biden was in office, Democrats pitched their signature government reform legislation mostly as a way to protect voting rights.
Trump, meanwhile, has continued to intermingle his political and business interests since leaving the presidency, even though he sold his hotel. Beyond the crypto project and Truth Social, Trump is also selling Bibles, NFT trading cards, sneakers, and as of this week, silver coins. It’s enough to make even some of his allies uncomfortable.
Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), one of the Senate’s biggest crypto advocates, told HuffPost this week the crypto project made her “a little uncomfortable.”
“If I were a Trump adviser, I’d say, ‘Mr. President-elect, put it in a blind trust,’” she said.
Four years later, as Trump runs to reclaim his old job, he has faced a consistent cash crunch. His legal costs diverted huge amounts of money from his campaign in 2023, and Biden began the general election with a significant financial advantage.
Trump closed the gap after winning the GOP nomination, in the wake of Biden’s disastrous debate performance. But Harris’ selection as the Democratic nominee set off a massive wave of enthusiasm and fundraising, significantly setting Trump back. And Trump’s small-dollar fundraising is not close to the levels it was in 2020.
While Harris has raised about 42% of her campaign cash through July from donors who gave less than $200, according to the campaign finance website OpenSecrets, Trump has raised just 32% from small donors.
Trump’s solution has been to aggressively fundraise from the wealthy, often making them explicit promises in return. In one of his first major fundraisers after seizing the GOP nomination, Trump went to the house of a billionaire hedge fund manager and told the crowd he would extend the tax cuts he passed in 2017, most of the benefits of which flowed to the wealthiest Americans.
In March, Trump backed down from calling for a ban on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok after embracing the conservative group Club for Growth and Jeff Yass, a billionaire TikTok investor and one of the Club’s major donors. Trump adviser Steve Bannon, in a post on social media, was explicit about why Trump’s position changed: “Yass Coin.”
In April, Trump promised to make a “deal” with the oil industry, telling executives from Chevron, Exxon and other companies that if they raised $1 billion for his campaign, he would, if elected, promptly reverse environmental policies put in place by the Biden administration. (For what it’s worth, the industry has not raised close to $1 billion for Trump’s campaign.)
Most recently, Trump said during an economic speech in New York City that he would pick Tesla CEO Elon Musk to lead a “government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.” Musk has said he will donate at least $45 million to a super PAC backing Trump.
“I look forward to serving America if the opportunity arises,” Musk, whose companies SpaceX and Starlink receive government contracts in the billions annually, wrote on the social media site he owns following Trump’s offer. “No pay, no title, no recognition is needed.”
And far from disowning them as a “scam,” Trump has embraced super PACs wholeheartedly as he tries to reclaim the presidency.
Musk and other wealthy conservatives are funding America PAC, which is focused on turning out GOP voters in swing states. Trump’s official super PAC, MAGA, Inc. is airing attack ads targeting Harris with more than $100 million from Timothy Mellon, a somewhat reclusive banking heir with far-right politics. And Miriam Adelson, the widow of gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, is pouring tens of millions into Preserve America, another super PAC targeting Harris with attack ads.
Trump seems thankful for their help. When Trump implied the Presidential Medal of Freedom, handed out to civilians, was better than the country’s top military honor, he did so while praising Adelson, to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he was in office.
“It’s actually much better because everyone [who] gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers,” Trump said at his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey in August. “They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. [Adelson] gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.”
Harris, of course, has her own wealthy supporters. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, for example, gave $4 million to the super PAC backing her campaign, Future Forward, which received more than $150 million in commitments just in the 24 hours after Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket. But in public, Harris has not been nearly as obsequious to large donors, save for a decision to trim back a Biden proposal to increase taxes on capital gains.
Donors, for instance, have openly pushed for Harris to fire Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan if she’s elected president. But Democrats close to Harris have suggested such a push has only made it less likely that Harris will oust Khan, a progressive who has chilled mergers and acquisitions with an aggressive approach to antitrust.
On a recent Sunday morning, Trump seemed baffled as to why any rich person would donate to Harris’ campaign instead of his own.
“All rich, job creating people, that support Comrade Kamala Harris, you are STUPID,” he wrote on Truth Social.
What This Means
Polling from End Citizens United conducted by the Democratic firm Impact Research in August found 55% of voters in congressional swing districts rated “cracking down on corruption” as very important to their vote, ranking it alongside top issues like crime. While a slim plurality said they trusted Democrats more to fight corruption, roughly a third of respondents said they did not trust either party to do so.
“Voters don’t think either party has an advantage in taking on corruption,” Mueller told HuffPost. “Whoever wins that messaging with independent voters wins the election. It needs to be part of Democrats’ closing message in the last days.”
Right now, neither campaign is dedicating much energy to it. Harris does talk about standing up to companies who are engaged in price gouging, but rarely speaks about the specific root causes of corporate power in Washington. When Trump talks about cleaning up Washington in 2024, he means getting rid of bureaucrats by gutting civil service protections, not the lobbyists and donors he used to inveigh against.
“Donald Trump went from bragging that he couldn’t be bought to begging for donations from his billionaire friends and promising them massive tax giveaways — all while running to gut Social Security and hike taxes on middle class families by nearly $4,000 a year,” Harris spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said. “The American people deserve a leader who will lower costs for the middle class, not line the pockets of billionaires. That’s Vice President Harris.”
Jeff Hauser, a progressive strategist who runs the Revolving Door Project, said Democrats need to do more to turn Trump’s corruption into a campaign narrative and force Republicans to respond. He suggested that Senate committees, for instance, could subpoena oil executives who attended Trump’s fundraiser.
“The Democratic Party needs to understand they need to be provocative when you’re raising a winning issue,” Hauser said.
Conant, for one, thinks Trump could revive his efforts to demonize the swamp, and seemed surprised Trump has not emphasized the fact Harris and Walz are both career politicians. He noted Trump did not say “Washington” or promise to “drain the swamp” in his lengthy speech at the Republican National Convention.
“He could still do it. He should still do it,” Conant said, when asked if Trump could run as an outsider. “He’s running against two politicians who were hand-picked by Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to be their party’s nominees. People are just as upset with Washington now as they were in 2016.”
But he said Trump, who has been the GOP’s de facto leader for a decade, may no longer see himself as the outsider.
“Clearly, his self-image has changed,” Conant said. “He thinks of himself as the head of a machine. Someone who ran Washington can run it again. He has members of Congress who wouldn’t be caught dead with him nine years ago who now do whatever he wants them to do.”
Igor Bobic contributed reporting.
