REALITY CHECK: BANKRUPT AGAIN

Trump Campaign is Dead Broke and Headed for Defeat


You know how I know Donald Trump’s campaign for re-election is fucked? His actions. I don’t need to see the veritable bevy of polls that have him down by twice as many points as Hillary Clinton enjoyed as she slept-walked through 2016 to ignominious defeat. We’ve already covered that once-in-a-billion fluke that straddled us with this nightmare. Nope. All you need to do is ask yourself, why would the president appear on ABC television, a vastly left-leaning network news organization for a town hall with actual voters, not dead-eyed Fox News MAGA drones, and in the greater Philadelphia area, hosted by a former Bill Clinton communications director? Six weeks before the election? In a state he carried in 2016? When he never ever does this?

Needless to say, Trump was eaten alive. He looked like a chipmunk before any of my three cats turn it into a gore-fest and sounded as if he wandered off a space ship into an alien world beyond his comprehension. He rolled out his standard lying thing and was met with anger, derision and tears. George Stephanopoulos tried in vain to hold back the chuckles while failing to appear concerned for what was happening to his “guest”.  It was so bad that Laura Ingram, dead-eyed drone #4357, wined on her rodeo-clown review the next evening that the president of the United States, a self-proclaimed “very stable genius” that will fix everything “only I could fix”, was somehow sandbagged by middle-class moms and college students. Who could have possibly allowed this to happen?

This is similar to last week’s uproar from the president’s defenders, who blamed the man currently sleeping with Trump’s daughter on the granting of seventeen rambling interviews to Bob Woodward, an entrenched and vengeful reporter who has spent the last half century laying waste to subjects far more capable than The Donald. Predictably, Trump buried himself by openly dreading a pandemic that he then publicly mocked and downplayed to the tune of nearly 200,000 American deaths, on tape. The vilified Jared Kushner, who comes off as a sycophant in the book could, not be reached anywhere for comment. 

Trump took his flaying on ABC because he is losing Pennsylvania, like he is losing Michigan and Wisconsin and also Arizona, and not as badly, but bad enough, North Carolina, and although close, yeah, fucking Florida. I know it’s only mid-September, but a Republican president is ahead in Texas by a percentage point. Texas! 

But more important than all that nonsense is that Trump is out of money. And when you think of Trump before he became one of the most failed presidents of the last one-hundred years, you think of money. And grabbing pussy. But mostly money. He wants you to think of money. Giant gaudy buildings with his name in gold. Casinos. Hotels. A big show of money. This hides the six bankruptcies or scuttled ventures or losses in court to pay millions to people he conned. He has always been a failure with money. Money his daddy gave him. Money he stole. Money he borrowed and had no intention of paying back. Money he has syphoned in and out of Russia that forces him to defend Vladimir Putin against his own country’s interests. Money. The Trump campaign has none of it now. It is bankrupt. Going on ABC is free advertising. Except Trump is a bumbling moron who is working with a broken nation of which he is in charge. 

At the time of this writing, the Trump Campaign, defending an abysmal incumbent purported “billionaire”, has gone belly up. And the word on K Street is that’s the last of it. Big money donors don’t hand over cash to a lost cause. That’s how they gained and kept it in the first place. The money people know Trump is a fraudulent drunken-sailor on a spending binge, whose betting window is closed. Apparently, all those high-priced hookers, and top-shelf liquor, limos, private jets, and bootleg Trump merchandise the executive portion of this shit-show has sold on the black market has ripped through what was once considered an impenetrable war chest. These are the same assholes who embezzled money from what was the most expensive inauguration ever in January of 2017. One former Trump donor told me in confidence this week, “If you listen closely you will hear that familiar sound; the bottom of the barrel being scraped.”

Campaign spending is an excruciatingly boring and annoying subject, but to put it bluntly, right now former VP Joe Biden’s campaign is currently outspending Trump three to one in battleground state ads, and in some cases the president has already conceded the airwaves in Michigan, another state he carried in 2016, and for some reason Ohio, which no Republican since the last presidential fatty, William Howard Taft has failed to win and end up in the White House. The twenty-seventh president was not welcome even in his place of birth, Cincinnati, something his biographers still have trouble explaining. This has happened to Trump in New York. He had to decamp to Florida. Not even Taft was as shunned as the president in his own home town. He will, of course, lose the state by nearly thirty points.  

But explaining the last gasp of this political abortion is far easier. Trump is acting like a man in the rear, as he acted like he was already guilty before the private investigator ever made his way into the Russia Investigation. Less than twenty-four hours in the president was calling it a “hoax” and a “witch hunt”, as he repeatedly charges that mail-in voting, something as common as his lying and will be all the rage in our pandemic year, is corrupted. It is not. Of course, he says this, because he is about to get smoked. 

Let me just say, even someone as stupid as Trump would not be bashing tried-and-true voting methods if he and not Biden were up by seven points nationally and well outside the dreaded “margin of error” that dumped his last sorry excuse for an opponent.

Woodward’s infamous Deep Throat once presciently counseled him to “follow the money” when tracking Nixon’s crimes. He and his buddy Carl Bernstein, who told me years ago at a Mets game in Trump’s hometown of Queens, “Nixon wanted to get caught, because he was finished as a serious statesman” worked that axiom to its rightful conclusion; the president tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail. And if Woodard’s latest tome on this absolutely criminal administration, Rage, which I am nearly done with and require a shower to recover from, tells us anything, is that everyone who worked with the man, EVERYONE, thinks he is an insane idiot and goes on the record to express this. Loudly. 

The jig is up for Trump. He tells you this with every tweet and speech he gives about voter fraud and secret silent vote and other things that still has him underwater nearly everywhere. And now his war chest is bare. And no one wants to sink anymore of their hard-earned money into this car wreck. Not even him. He says he will spend one-hundred million of his own money to win. He won’t. He said that in 2016, and actually embezzled money from his own campaign like he did with his fake charities. That figure comes as a result of his buddy, Michael Bloomberg, who despises Trump like few others, pumping that much into Florida to see the president humiliated. 

The president has six weeks to make something happen. And that should make you shudder, because he clearly has zero regard for public safety, health, the constitution or anyone other than himself and the three or four people left in the White House whose gig now is to tell him what he wants to hear. If this were Elvis, he would be face down off the toilet with his head buried in shag carpet.

Trump is bankrupt.

Again.