Presidents making money in office

[GMDino]

Just to keep from clogging up the joke/meme thread I'm moving this post here.

This article gives a good idea of what each one went into office with and then ended up with.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/02/13/donald-trump-george-washington-net-worth-us-presidents/39011559/


Not surprisingly most of the recent (post Reagan) men made more money after leaving office from book deals and speaking fees, but Carter lost money from his business while in office and even he made it up with a book.

And here's a chart of wealth, in current dollars.  With the caveat that the last POTUS admits to making it up depending on how he feels...lol.

EIT: to add the link for the chart.

https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/the-wealth-of-u-s-presidents/



Of course the Trump FAMILY also made a lot of money...somehow...and that is fairly unique.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-family-members-have-gotten-much-richer-president-moved-white-house-975993

Quote:President Donald Trump's family appears to have grown richer since he entered the White House. The wealth is coming in because Trump, unlike past presidents, handed control of his businesses over to his children instead of fully divesting from them. The president's daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have similarly stepped down as bosses of their companies but maintained a hand in them.


Related: Trump Bashes Obama but Increased His Net Worth More Under His Predecessor Than Any Other President: Report


Here are ways the first family has gained since Donald Trump took office:


Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are tens of millions richer
The couple may serve as unpaid senior White House advisers, but they made at least $82 million from their own businesses last year, financial disclosure forms released Monday showed.

Ivanka Trump made $5 million from her namesake clothing company, as well as $3.9 million from her share in the Trump International Hotel near the Capitol, more than $2 million in Trump Organization severance, and a $289,000 advance for her Women Who Work book, according to analysis of the disclosure forms by The Washington Post and Politico.

Meanwhile, Kushner earned at least $70 million from his shares in his family-owned real-estate company Kushner Cos., including $5 million from a New Jersey apartment building it acquired last year.

Ivanka Trump's assets last year came in at an estimated $55.3 million to $75.6 million, and Kushner's between $179 million and $735 million, according to the Post. They have complied with ethics laws, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for the couple's attorney Abbe Lowell, told the Post.


"Their net worth remains largely the same, with changes reflecting more the way the form requires disclosure than any substantial difference in assets or liabilities," Mirijanian added.

Quote:Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump made at least $82 million in outside income last year while serving in the White House, filings show https://t.co/G6WMIXgZjr
— Amy Brittain (@AmyJBrittain) June 12, 2018

Trump Organization run by the president's sons "profitable"


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The Trump Organization's golf courses drew in $221 million in revenue in 2017, the president's latest financial disclosure form showed. The total revenue for the prior year was not disclosed and the president's second oldest son, Eric Trump, would not reveal the figure.


Eric Trump claimed all the golf courses earned more and are "profitable."

"It's a big bet, but it's paid off. We bought well, at good prices and the best locations," he said, according to CBS News, and added that the Doral course in Miami "is on fire" and brought in $75 million last year.


The Donald
Despite his claims of high net worth, Trump did not make the latest Bloomberg Billionaires Index of the 500 richest people in the world. His net worth has taken a $100 million dip to $2.8 billion in the last year, based on his May 16 financial disclosure form, information from lenders, property records and annual reports.

But Trump Organization spokeswoman Amanda Miller contested Bloomberg's methodology in estimating the worth of Trump's buildings in Manhattan. She said borough-wide data waters down their value and that "the location of a property affects the rents it can achieve."


While it is difficult to determine exactly how much the Trumps have raked in from outside the White House, they certainly haven't taken a huge loss from being in the public eye on an international stage.

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

Am I missing something in this image and article you linked? It just shows what they are/were worth, not how much they were worth before becoming President vs right after being President, which would be how much they made while actually in office. The title of the thread.

Side note:
Forbes.com actually has Trump's net worth dropping since 2016.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/donald-trump/?sh=771c93a947bd

$4.5b in March 2016, $2.5b in Sept 2020. (Not just all Pandemic either, they have him at $3.1b in Oct 2019.)



- - - - - - -
(Not that I am saying the Trump family didn't get some money from deals while Trump was in office, or how it's "odd" that so many Presidents/Sentators/Governors/Congress members get rich while in or right after office. I am just saying that the image and article that you posted doesn't really have anything to do with the title of this thread.)

[GMDino]

(04-01-2021, 04:24 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: Am I missing something in this image and article you linked? It just shows what they are/were worth, not how much they were worth before becoming President vs right after being President, which would be how much they made while actually in office. The title of the thread.

Side note:
Forbes.com actually has Trump's net worth dropping since 2016.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/donald-trump/?sh=771c93a947bd

$4.5b in March 2016, $2.5b in Sept 2020.  (Not just all Pandemic either, they have him at $3.1b in Oct 2019.)



- - - - - - -
(Not that I am saying the Trump family didn't get some money from deals while Trump was in office, or how it's "odd" that so many Presidents/Sentators/Governors/Congress members get rich while in or right after office. I am just saying that the image and article that you posted doesn't really have anything to do with the title of this thread.)

No that's what the image shows...forgot to link that article too. Good catch...I went back to added it.

The first link goes over what they started with and ended up with.

[Wes Mantooth]

Either I completely missing something in both the original article and the 2nd link or this thread should be called "Peak Net Worth of Every President."

Admittedly, I quickly skimmed both links pretty quickly. But nowhere in either do I see anything about what they went in with and what they left with.

OP states "this article gives a good idea what each one went in with vs what they left with." Where? I'm not seeing this.

I'm really not sure of the point of this thread. What exactly are we supposed to be discussing about here? Donald Trump was/is a billionaire?

[GMDino]

(04-01-2021, 08:18 PM)Wes Mantooth Wrote: Either I completely missing something in both the original article and the 2nd link or this thread should be called "Peak Net Worth of Every President."

Admittedly, I quickly skimmed both links pretty quickly.  But nowhere in either do I see anything about what they went in with and what they left with.  

OP states "this article gives a good idea what each one went in with vs what they left with."  Where?  I'm not seeing this.

I'm really not sure of the point of this thread.  What exactly are we supposed to be discussing about here?  Donald Trump was/is a billionaire?

The first article gives the background of each President (where available) to show if they had money before entering office and then how they did after.  I did a quick search and went with the easiest to read article for time purposes.  If I have more time over the weekend I'll look for better specifics.

The thread was created because someone wanted to drag the meme/joke thread down with a discussion (we generally do not do that, preferring to leave it to just jokes and memes and such) about *ALL* politicians using their office to become rich and how Obama was just as bad as Trump becuase you can't say anything about Trump or his family without an argument.

So I posted a new thread with the info on what former president's value is, or was after their time in office.

Thanks for asking.

Hopefully the lack of exact clarity on what is in the article (it was very long and didn't want to copy and paste it) is better now.

[Belsnickel]

So, first off, eat the rich. Second, this just highlights, to me anyway, our status as a plutocracy and how that has been an issue going back to our founding.

Now, for the topic at hand. The unfortunate reality is that rich assholes have some complicated finances that are highly difficult to untangle. Ideally, presidents would have to set their assets aside in a trust so that during their time in office they are not constantly keeping an eye towards their finances. They also should not be allowed to seek revenue for themselves or their families while in office. Their salary and the presidential budget is the game. What they do after office, don't care.

All that being said, eat the rich.

[GMDino]

(04-02-2021, 08:28 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: So, first off, eat the rich. Second, this just highlights, to me anyway, our status as a plutocracy and how that has been an issue going back to our founding.

Now, for the topic at hand. The unfortunate reality is that rich assholes have some complicated finances that are highly difficult to untangle. Ideally, presidents would have to set their assets aside in a trust so that during their time in office they are not constantly keeping an eye towards their finances. They also should not be allowed to seek revenue for themselves or their families while in office. Their salary and the presidential budget is the game. What they do after office, don't care.

All that being said, eat the rich.

Spot on.

Reading these and a few I didn't share because they didn't have all the info I was looking for I noticed Carter LOST value while in office because he really did put his business in a blind trust and it didn't get ran the way he did when he made it profitable.  Then he turned it back around after losing to Reagan.

[GMDino]

I mean didn't every President do this? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html

Quote:How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations
Online donors were guided into weekly recurring contributions. Demands for refunds spiked. Complaints to banks and credit card companies soared. But the money helped keep Donald Trump’s struggling campaign afloat.

• 
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By [url=https://www.nytimes.com/by/shane-goldmacher]Shane Goldmacher
April 3, 2021
Stacy Blatt was in hospice care last September listening to Rush Limbaugh’s dire warnings about how badly Donald J. Trump’s campaign needed money when he went online and chipped in everything he could: $500.

It was a big sum for a 63-year-old battling cancer and living in Kansas City on less than $1,000 per month. But that single contribution — federal records show it was his first ever — quickly multiplied. Another $500 was withdrawn the next day, then $500 the next week and every week through mid-October, without his knowledge — until Mr. Blatt’s bank account had been depleted and frozen. When his utility and rent payments bounced, he called his brother, Russell, for help.

What the Blatts soon discovered was $3,000 in withdrawals by the Trump campaign in less than 30 days. They called their bank and said they thought they were victims of fraud.

“It felt,” Russell said, “like it was a scam.”

But what the Blatts believed was duplicity was actually an intentional scheme to boost revenues by the Trump campaign and the for-profit company that processed its online donations, WinRed. Facing a cash crunch and getting badly outspent by the Democrats, the campaign had begun last September to set up recurring donations by default for online donors, for every week until the election.


Contributors had to wade through a fine-print disclaimer and manually uncheck a box to opt out.
As the election neared, the Trump team made that disclaimer increasingly opaque, an investigation by The New York Times showed. It introduced a second prechecked box, known internally as a “money bomb,” that doubled a person’s contribution. Eventually its solicitations featured lines of text in bold and capital letters that overwhelmed the opt-out language.

The tactic ensnared scores of unsuspecting Trump loyalists — retirees, military veterans, nurses and even experienced political operatives. Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars.

“Bandits!” said Victor Amelino, a 78-year-old Californian, who made a $990 online donation to Mr. Trump in early September via WinRed. It recurred seven more times — adding up to almost $8,000. “I’m retired. I can’t afford to pay all that damn money.”

The sheer magnitude of the money involved is staggering for politics. In the final two and a half months of 2020, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and their shared accounts issued more than 530,000 refunds worth $64.3 million to online donors. All campaigns make refunds for various reasons, including to people who give more than the legal limit. But the sum the Trump operation refunded dwarfed that of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign and his equivalent Democratic committees, which made 37,000 online refunds totaling $5.6 million in that time.

The recurring donations swelled Mr. Trump’s treasury in September and October, just as his finances were deteriorating. He was then able to use tens of millions of dollars he raised after the election, under the guise of fighting his unfounded fraud claims, to help cover the refunds he owed.


In effect, the money that Mr. Trump eventually had to refund amounted to an interest-free loan from unwitting supporters at the most important juncture of the 2020 race.





Image
Russell Blatt’s brother, Stacy, who was a supporter of Mr. Trump, died of cancer in February. Credit...Katie Currid for The New York Times
Marketers have long used ruses like prechecked boxes to steer American consumers into unwanted purchases, like magazine subscriptions. But consumer advocates said deploying the practice on voters in the heat of a presidential campaign — at such volume and with withdrawals every week — had much more serious ramifications.

“It’s unfair, it’s unethical and it’s inappropriate,” said Ira Rheingold, the executive director of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

Harry Brignull, a user-experience designer in London who coined the term “dark patterns” for manipulative digital marketing practices, said the Trump team’s techniques were a classic of the “deceptive design” genre.
“It should be in textbooks of what you shouldn’t do,” he said.

Political strategists, digital operatives and campaign finance experts said they could not recall ever seeing refunds at such a scale. Mr. Trump, the R.N.C. and their shared accounts refunded far more money to online donors in the last election cycle than every federal Democratic candidate and committee in the country combined.



Over all, the Trump operation refunded 10.7 percent of the money it raised on WinRed in 2020; the Biden operation’s refund rate on ActBlue, the parallel Democratic online donation-processing platform, was 2.2 percent, federal records show.



Source: WinRed and ActBlue

By Eleanor Lutz and Rachel Shorey

Several bank representatives who fielded fraud claims directly from consumers estimated that WinRed cases, at their peak, represented as much as 1 to 3 percent of their workload. An executive for one of the nation’s larger credit-card issuers confirmed that WinRed at its height accounted for a similar percentage of its formal disputes.

That figure may seem small at first glance, but financial experts said it was a shockingly large percentage, considering that political donations represent a tiny fraction of the overall United States economy.

In its investigation, The Times reviewed filings with the Federal Election Commission from the Trump and Biden campaigns and their shared accounts with political parties, as well as the donation-processing sites ActBlue and WinRed, compiling a database of refunds issued by day. The Times also interviewed two dozen Trump donors who made recurring donations, as well as campaign officials, campaign finance experts and consumer advocates. Nearly a dozen bank and credit card officials from the nation’s leading financial institutions spoke for this article on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

A clear pattern emerged. Donors typically said they intended to give once or twice and only later discovered on their bank statements and credit card bills that they were donating over and over again. Some, like Mr. Blatt, who died of cancer in February, sought an injunction from their banks and credit cards. Others pursued refunds directly from WinRed, which typically granted them to avoid more costly formal disputes.

WinRed said that every donor receives at least one follow-up email about pending repeat donations in advance and that the company makes it “exceptionally easy,” with 24-hour customer service, for people to request their money back. “WinRed wants donors to be happy, and puts a premium on customer support,” said Gerrit Lansing, WinRed’s president. “Donors are the lifeblood of G.O.P. campaigns.” He noted that Democrats and ActBlue had also used recurring programs.

Jason Miller, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, downplayed the rash of fraud complaints and the $122.7 million in total refunds issued by the Trump operation. He said internal records showed that 0.87 percent of its WinRed transactions had been subject to formal credit card disputes. “The fact we had a dispute rate of less than 1 percent of total donations despite raising more grass-roots money than any campaign in history is remarkable,” he said.


That still amounts to about 200,000 disputed transactions that Mr. Miller said added up to $19.7 million.
“Our campaign was built by the hardworking men and women of America,” Mr. Miller said, “and cherishing their investments was paramount to anything else we did.”

Asked if Mr. Trump had been aware of his operation’s use of recurring payments, the campaign did not respond.
Mr. Trump’s hyperaggressive fund-raising practices did not stop once he lost the election. His campaign continued the weekly withdrawals through prechecked boxes all the way through Dec. 14 as he raised tens of millions of dollars for his new political action committee, Save America.

In March, Mr. Trump urged his followers to send their money to him — and not to the traditional party apparatus — making plain that he intends to remain the gravitational center of Republican fund-raising online.

A small yellow box and a flood of fraud complaints
The small and bright yellow box popped up on Mr. Trump’s digital donation portal around March 2020. The text was boldface, simple and straightforward: “Make this a monthly recurring donation.”

The box came prefilled with a check mark.




Image



Even that was more aggressive than what the Biden campaign would do in 2020. Biden officials said they rarely used prechecked boxes to automatically have donations recur monthly or weekly; the exception was on landing pages where advertisements and emails had explicitly asked supporters to become repeat donors.
But for Mr. Trump, the prechecked monthly box was just the beginning.

By June, the campaign and the R.N.C. were experimenting with a second prechecked box, to default donors into making an additional contribution — called the money bomb. An early test arrived in the run-up to Mr. Trump’s birthday, June 14. The results were tantalizing: That date, a seemingly random Sunday, became the biggest day for online donations in the campaign’s history.

Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chairwoman, crowed to Fox News about the achievement without mentioning how exactly the party had pulled it off. “Republicans are thinking smarter digitally,” she said, and were poised to “outwork, outdo, and outmaneuver the Democrats at every turn.”





The two prechecked yellow boxes would be a fixture for the rest of the campaign. And so would a much larger volume of refunds.

Until then, the Biden and Trump operations had nearly identical refund rates on WinRed and ActBlue in 2020: 2.18 percent for Mr. Trump and 2.17 percent for Mr. Biden.
But from the day after Mr. Trump’s birthday through the rest of the year, Mr. Biden’s refund rate remained nearly flat, at 2.24 percent, while Mr. Trump’s soared to 12.29 percent.


In early September — just after learning that it had been outraised by the Biden operation in August by more than $150 million — the Trump campaign became even more aggressive.

It changed the language in the first yellow box to withdraw recurring donations every week instead of every month. Suddenly, some contributors were unwittingly making as many as half a dozen donations in 30 days: the intended contribution, the “money bomb” and four more weekly withdrawals.

Image


“You don’t realize it until after everything is already in motion,” said Bruce Turner, 72, of Gilbert, Ariz., whose wife’s $1,000 donation in early October became $6,000 by Election Day. They were refunded $5,000 the week after the election, records show.

Around the same time, officials who fielded fraud claims at bank and credit card companies noticed a surge in complaints against the Trump campaign and WinRed.

“It started to go absolutely wild,” said one fraud investigator with Wells Fargo. “It just became a pattern,” said another at Capital One. A consumer representative for USAA, which primarily serves military families, recalled an older veteran who discovered repeated WinRed charges from donating to Mr. Trump only after calling to have his balance read to him by phone.

The unintended payments busted credit card limits. Some donors canceled their cards to avoid recurring payments. Others paid overdraft fees to their bank.



All the banking officials said they recalled only a negligible number of complaints against ActBlue, the Democratic donation platform, although there are online review sites that feature heated complaints about unwanted charges and customer service.

The Trump operation was not done modifying the yellow boxes. Soon, the fact that donations would be withdrawn weekly was taken out of boldface type, according to archived versions of the president’s website, and moved beneath other bold text.




Image


As the campaign’s financial problems became increasingly acute, the yellow boxes became dizzyingly more complex.

By October there were sometimes nine lines of boldface text — with ALL-CAPS words sprinkled in — before the disclosure that there would be weekly withdrawals. As many as eight more lines of boldface text came before the second additional donation disclaimer.




Image


Even political professionals fell prey to the boxes.

Jeff Kropf, the executive director of the Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation, a conservative group, said he had been “very careful” to uncheck recurring boxes — yet he missed the “money bomb” and got a second charge anyway.


“Until WinRed fixes their sneaky way of adding additional contributions to credit cards like they did to me, I won’t use them again,” he said.

Mr. Brignull, the user-experience designer who also serves as an expert witness in legal cases involving misleading advertising, noted that a Consumer Rights Directive in Europe prohibits companies from deploying a defaulted opt-in tactic for recurring payments.

“It is very easy for the eye to skip over,” he said. “The only really meaningful information in that box is buried.”




Banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints last fall from the president’s supporters about donations they had not intended to make.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The ‘Gary and Gerrit’ operation
By last summer, the Biden campaign had begun outraising Mr. Trump’s team, and the president was hopping mad. For months, years even, his advisers had been telling him how he had built a one-of-a-kind financial juggernaut. So why, Mr. Trump demanded to know, was he off the television airwaves just months before the election in critical battleground states like Michigan?

“Where did all the money go?” he would lash out, according to two senior advisers.

Inside the Trump re-election headquarters in Northern Virginia, the pressure was building to wring ever more money out of his supporters.

Perhaps nowhere was that pressure more acute than on Mr. Trump’s expansive and lucrative digital operation. That was the unquestioned domain of Gary Coby, a 30-something strategist whose title — digital director — and microscopic public profile belied his immense influence on the Trump operation, especially online.


A veteran of the R.N.C. and the 2016 race, Mr. Coby had the confidence, trust and respect of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, who unofficially oversaw the 2020 campaign, according to people familiar with the campaign’s operations. Mr. Kushner and the rest of the campaign leadership gave Mr. Coby, whose talents are recognized across the Republican digital industry, wide latitude to raise money however he saw fit.

That meant almost endless optimization and experimentation, sometimes pushing the traditional boundaries. The Trump team repeatedly used phantom donation matches and faux deadlines to loosen donor wallets (“1000% offer: ACTIVATED…For the NEXT HOUR”). Eventually it ratcheted up the volume of emails it sent until it was barraging supporters with an average of 15 per day for all of October and November 2020.

Mr. Coby, who declined an interview request for this article, outlined his philosophical approach when offering advice to other ambitious young strategists after he was named to the American Association of Political Consultants’ “40 under 40” list in 2017: “Asking for forgiveness is easier than permission.”

Mr. Coby’s partner in fund-raising was Mr. Lansing, the president of WinRed, which had been created in 2019 as a centralized platform for G.O.P. digital contributions after prominent Republicans feared they were falling irreparably behind Democrats and ActBlue.

The Trump and WinRed operations had been closely aligned since the platform’s inception — Mr. Trump reportedly helped come up with the firm’s name — and the president’s re-election operation amounted to a majority of all of WinRed’s business last cycle, when it processed more than $2 billion.

Inside the Trump orbit, “Gary and Gerrit” became something of a shorthand term for Mr. Coby and Mr. Lansing, according to multiple senior Trump campaign and White House officials.

The two strategists were already well acquainted: They had worked together at the R.N.C. in 2016, when Mr. Lansing oversaw its digital operations and Mr. Coby was the director of advertising. And they were business partners in Opn Sesame, a text messaging platform, which Mr. Lansing co-founded and served as chief operating officer for; WinRed said he stepped away from its day-to-day operations in early 2019.

Top Trump officials said they did not know specifically who had conceived of using the weekly recurring prechecked boxes — or who had designed them in the increasingly complex blizzard of text. But they said virtually all online fund-raising decisions were a “Gary and Gerrit” production.

“The campaigns determine their own fund-raising strategies and make their own decisions on how to use these tools,” Mr. Lansing said in WinRed’s statement.

Unlike ActBlue, which is a nonprofit, WinRed is a for-profit company. It makes its money by taking 30 cents of every donation, plus 3.8 percent of the amount given. WinRed was paid more than $118 million from federal committees the last election cycle; even after paying credit card fees and expenses like payroll and rent, the profits are believed to be significant.

WinRed even made money off donations that were refunded by keeping the fees it charged on each transaction, a practice it said was standard in the industry, citing PayPal; ActBlue said it does not keep fees for refunded donations. WinRed’s cut of the Trump operation’s refunds would amount to roughly $5 million before expenses. (Archived versions of WinRed’s website show it added a disclaimer saying it would keep its fees around when refunds surged.)

There is another reason Mr. Trump’s refund rates were so high: His campaign accepted millions of dollars above the legal cap, a problem exacerbated by recurring donations. A pianist in New York, for instance, contributed more than 100 times in the months leading up to Election Day, going far past the legal limit of $2,800. She was refunded $87,716.50 — three weeks after Election Day.

While every large-scale campaign winds up accepting and returning some donations above the legal limit, including Mr. Biden’s, the Trump situation stands out. Records show that Mr. Biden’s campaign committee issued roughly $47,000 in refunds larger than $5,000 after Election Day; Mr. Trump’s campaign issued more than $7 million.

Trump officials attributed the excessive donations to enthusiastic supporters and said the surge in postelection complaints was a result of losing the election, not of the recurring donation tactics.

The use of prechecked boxes is not unprecedented in politics, and WinRed said it was simply adopting tactics that ActBlue put in place years ago. ActBlue said in a statement that it had begun to phase out prechecked recurring boxes “unless groups were explicitly asking for recurring contributions.” Some prominent Democratic groups, including both congressional campaign committees, continue to precheck recurring boxes regardless of that guidance. Still, Democratic refund rates were only a small fraction of the Trump campaign’s last year.

Republicans widely hailed WinRed as one of the standout successes of the 2020 cycle, and in a memo last October the company declared itself the “trusted, recognizable platform” for Republican giving. “Scam PACs, shady operators and outright fraud is unfortunately a common occurrence in the online political donation world — particularly on the right,” the memo stated. “WinRed helps civilize the Wild West of the G.O.P. donation ecosystem.”

But for some Trump supporters like Ron Wilson, WinRed is a scam artist. Mr. Wilson, an 87-year-old retiree in Illinois, made a series of small contributions last fall that he thought would add up to about $200; by December, federal records show, WinRed and Mr. Trump’s committees had withdrawn more than 70 separate donations from Mr. Wilson worth roughly $2,300.

“Predatory!” Mr. Wilson said of WinRed. Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling The Times, “I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.”

Trump was just the beginning
All told, the Trump and party operation raised $1.2 billion on WinRed, and refunded roughly 10 percent of it.
Whatever blowback it received, WinRed was not deterred. Soon after the November election ended, the two Republican Senate incumbents in Georgia, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, deployed prechecked weekly recurring boxes in advance of their January runoffs.

Predictably, refund rates spiked.

Keith Millhouse, a transportation consultant in California, intended to donate once to Mr. Perdue, with the aim of keeping Republicans in control of the Senate. He wound up a recurring contributor and called the practice “repugnant” and “deceptive.”


“I’m busy like a lot of other people during this Covid era and I just wanted to get in, make a donation, get done and move on to what I needed to do next,” he said. “I thought I had done that. Then I find out that, you know, I’m getting these other charges.”




Keith Millhouse wanted to make one donation to David Perdue, the Georgia Senate candidate, but unwittingly made an extra donation.Credit...Jessica Pons for The New York Times
He canceled the repeating charge when he saw the reminder email. But by then WinRed had already processed his second $100 “bonus” contribution. He figured it was not worth the hassle to protest. “Don’t try to sucker it out of me,” he said.

In the final 2020 reporting period, from Nov. 24 through the end of the year, Mr. Perdue and Ms. Loeffler refunded $4.8 million to WinRed donors — more than triple the amount refunded by their Democratic rivals via ActBlue, even though the Democrats had raised far more money online. The refunds have stretched into 2021 and have been a source of frustration for the Loeffler campaign, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Now WinRed is exporting the tools it pioneered during the Trump re-election across the Republican Party, presaging a new normal for G.O.P. campaigns.

Today, the websites of various Republican Party committees and top congressional Republicans, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, include prechecked yellow boxes for multiple or recurring donations.

And after Mr. Trump’s first public speech of his post-presidency at the end of February, his new political operation sent its first text message to supporters since he left the White House. “Did you miss me?” he asked.

The message directed supporters to a WinRed donation page with two prechecked yellow boxes. Mr. Trump raised $3 million that day, according to an adviser, with more to come from the recurring donations in the months ahead.


Rachel Shorey contributed reporting and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

[BigPapaKain]

(04-04-2021, 02:14 PM)GMDino Wrote: I mean didn't every President do this? 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/03/us/politics/trump-donations.html

Breaking news: known grifter grifts.