Trump Still Using Donor Money To Line His Own Pockets

Donald Trump has raised hundreds of millions of dollars since leaving office, and at least $1 million of that has found its way back into his own pockets. Trump is spending donor money at the resorts that he owns (and one that he lives in) and all of this is perfectly legal. He's actually spent more money at his own properties than he spent on supporting Republican candidates last year. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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

According to a new analysis by the HuffPost, Donald Trump has spent nearly a million dollars of donor money since leaving office at his own properties. To put that another way, Donald Trump has basically pocketed close to a million dollars in donor money by managing to spend the money at his own properties. Now, here's why I put that in those little air quotes right there. And that's because at one point after he had left office, he was still paying rent for one of his political action committees at Trump Tower in New York City. But then after it was revealed, 11 months after they had started making rent payments, it was revealed that that group doesn't actually even have an office there. Then those payments stopped. So, yeah, that, that's why I put it in air quotes, like renting or spending money at his own property. Because to me, I don't know, that just straight up looks like money laundering, in my opinion.

You're paying rent to yourself from funds that you can't transfer to yourself, but you can use on legit expenses, but you own the business, so you make it look like a legit expense. So it can go back into your pocket, but you're paying for something you weren't actually utilizing. So, yeah, I don't know if you would call that laundering or if you'd call it fraud, but it sure seems like the kind of thing that probably should be investigated. But thanks to our very lax campaign finance laws here in the United States and our laws regulating super pacs and whatnot, he can get away with it. So it's not illegal when a super PAC does it, so he gets away with it. But here's the thing, Republicans, for many, many months now, going back long before the November of 2022 midterms, were furious over the fact that Trump has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for his own super pacs since leaving office, and he wasn't spending any of it on Republican candidates.

Now, he did eventually give $5,000 in the midterms to 152 different Republican candidates, which amounts to $760,000. So, okay, he gave, gave a little under a million, you know, three quarters of a million to Republican candidates. Surey put nearly a million back in his own pocket, but I also gave them a quarter of a mil, a three quarters of a million. So what are you whining about? I don't know, man. Maybe the fact that you also spent 27 million that you raised from your donors on your own legal teams to fight legal battles that have nothing to do with campaigns at all. You weren't using that money to file election challenge lawsuits as you had told people when you were raising it, you used it to fight off all of the horrible lawsuits and you know, investigations that you are facing.

So, so you lied to donors about what you were gonna do with the money. You've got some really shady expenses that, again, I really think warrant an investigation here, and you gave pennies to Republican candidates. So yeah, it's no wonder Republicans are off here. It's no wonder that people are starting to ask more questions about where is this money really going? Because you can't even use that money that you've raised so far for your presidential campaign. So what are you gonna do with it? You are just gonna keep spending it at your own properties. I mean, technically, legally speaking, there's nothing wrong with that. You can do it so he can keep raising money and he can keep spending it at his own properties. Yeah, I know he doesn't get the whole amount. He is gotta pay utilities and salaries and all that, but any profit off it is his, that's, that's how that works when you own the company and he'll continue to do it because at the end of the day, this has been one big grift by Donald Trump, and unfortunately, there's far too many people in this country willing to give him millions of dollars because they either don't care that they're being conned or they get it.

They just don't mind it.