Trump Blows Donor Money To Make Jared Kushner A Best Selling Author

Jared Kushner's White House memoir hit the shelves in late August, but it struggled in the early weeks to gain any traction. Then, all of a sudden, the book became a bestseller, and now we know why. According to spending documents, Donald Trump's PAC spent $131,000 on copies of the book in order to catapult it onto the bestseller list, something that is far more common than most people realize. Farron Cousins explains what happened.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

So about two months ago, at the end of August, actually, August 23rd, Jared Kushner released his book, Breaking History, A White House memoir. And for the first two weeks, not much happened, right? Nobody cared what Jared Kushner had to say about his time in the White House. Nobody has ever really cared what Jared Kushner has had to say about well, anything. So nobody was buying his book. So he did what anybody in trouble of not having a best seller would do. He went crying to a wealthy individual, in this case, his father-in-law, Donald Trump. And through a joint political action committee, Donald Trump spent $131,000 at books a million to buy copies of Jared Kushner's books. And four days after that purchase took place, wouldn't should know it. Jared Kushner's book that nobody wanted to read ended up on the New York Times Bestseller list, but apparently that wasn't good enough.

The $131,000 purchase at Books a Million just wasn't quite what they wanted, right? He got on the bestseller list, but you not a number one yet. I mean, I don't even know if you're in the top five. So once again, through Donald Trump's joint Political Action Committees, they spent another $27,000 on his books, You know, to kind of bump him up that list, maybe keep him on there another week or so, whatever it was, nobody wanted Jared Kushner's books. So he had to get daddy in law to go out there and buy a bunch of copies of his books from Books A Million. Now here's the thing again, we're talking about, you know, uh, 1 31 plus 27. So we're talking about $158,000 of donor money that Donald Trump used to bail out his little son-in-law. Now, I wonder if all those people who've been donating money to Donald Trump's political action committee know about this, or if they even care about it.

I mean, at this point, you gotta assume those people know they're getting ripped off, right? Like there's no way in hell anybody sending money to Donald Trump and alleged billionaire thinks that their money is making a difference, right? They're not like, Okay, I'm gonna send him this money, and then finally things are gonna turn around. No, like you have to know you're being conned at this point. You're just okay with it because you enjoy it, right? You feel like it gives you some attention from a guy that wouldn't even let you through the back door of his country club. But, but sure, go ahead and keep sending him your money so he can keep Jared Kushner's book on the best seller list, I guess. Now, the problem is, this happens all the time. It happens with Democrats, it happens with Republicans, Basically anybody in politics with a well funded machine behind them, whether it's a campaign machine, whether they're running a political

Action committee, or whether they're running an organization that has millions of dollars to throw around, uh, throw around all of them can put out a book and then immediately shoot up to the top of the number one best seller list, because they're all buying copies of their own books. The books aren't selling based on their merits. They're not selling because people actually want to read it. They're selling because of these massive bulk purchases by right wing organizations, by campaigns, by whatever it is. And in order to legally be able to do this, they then use the book says Giveaways, right? Like, Hey, you know, you donate money to my campaign. I'll send you a copy of my book. Hey, you showed up at my event. We're gonna give you a free copy of the book, even though the organization that you know is Shadow Operating my, my group here, they're the ones who purchased a hundred thousand copies of it so I could look like a best seller.

That's what happens with these groups and these individuals and these politicians, they buy their own books, so they can look like big, massive bestsellers, but there is a catch, at least for politicians or people buying, uh, books with political action committees. You can't do it from any group that gives a percentage of the sales back to the individual.