Running for dollars

Why wait till you're elected to grift the public?

© 2019 Roy Edroso

I’ve talked on Twitter recently about campaigns as grifts. I’m sure that in the past many candidates with no hope of being elected solicited funds for campaigns with the intention of turning those funds to other uses. Back in the bad old days no one kept track, of course, but even since the time of campaign reform there have been and remain huge loopholes — the FEC won’t let you employ contributions for personal use, for example, but you can pay yourself a salary, and carry contributions forward to another campaign, and you can also use leftover funds to make contributions to your political party, which can be a powerful motivator for that party to do you favors, such as giving you jobs or preferment.

But the Trump era offers even greater opportunities for hucksters.

For one thing, there’s the example of the President himself, who has transferred millions in campaign contributions to himself via rental and leasing charges. If anyone looked at the graft opportunities in political campaigning and licked his lips before, the idea that one might even break such laws as exist and get away with it might make the prospect more attractive.

For another, there’s the lowering of barriers to entry represented by Trump’s election. The ascension of an obviously unqualified, corrupt scumbag to the highest office in the land is as a dinner bell to scam artists. It’s like The Armory Show or The Year Punk Broke or any other such watershed in public taste — an announcement that, as Herman Mankiewicz allegedly told Ben Hecht in the early days of Hollywood, there are millions to be made and your only competition is idiots.

This seems as good an explanation as any for the many sketchy characters who have recently offered themselves as candidates.

Take Laura Loomer. She’s a conservative performance artist primarily known for making a fool of herself with stunts like interrupting a Shakespeare in the Park performance of Julius Caesar because she thought it was a plot to get Trump assassinated; claiming her tires had been tampered with when her evidence photos merely showed them to be worn out; handcuffing herself to the door of Twitter headquarters to protest losing her account, and other such fameball exploits.

In August she announced herself running as a Republican to challenge Democratic Rep. Lois Frankel in Florida’s 21st Congressional District. Frankel was unopposed in her last race, her would-be challengers withdrawing before Election Day. Loomer’s chances of winning seem faint. But her chances of getting that cake seem pretty good.

Islamophobic harpy Michelle Malkin has praised Loomer in her syndicated column as “at the vanguard exposing what I call Silicon Valley Sharia.” Judge Jeanine Pirro says Loomer “must win. She’s the only one who can take on the squad,” referring to the young progressive Congresswomen who particularly enrage conservatives. (In August Judicial Watch, a rightwing nuisance litigant and mentor of fake moderate Republicans, claimed that Minnesota Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib “battered conservative female Jewish journalist Laura Loomer during a campaign event in Minneapolis” and announced Loomer had filed a $2 million suit against her. Loomer “did not bring this complaint for political purposes,” they said.)

Many of the MAGA yahoos who will be stirred by this publicity are probably not in Loomer’s jurisdiction, but that hardly matters — they can still send her cash. And her mailing list must be formidable — GOP Rep. Jim Jordan has reportedly used it to drum up contributions for himself (“the deranged Dems and their powerful, deep-pocketed friends are gunning for me, and I need you to help me fight back!”). Jordan’s district is in Ohio.

This is a big, rich country, full of grifters, and it’s also full of people who love their grifts and who — due to a peculiarly American capitalist form of masochism — are willing even to let themselves be robbed by them in order to keep those gifts going. Those people are going to have plenty of takers, in every sense.