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THE MAGA PARTY!,,, the GOP is dead, republicans are going down with the dems,, get ready for THE MAGA PARTY lefty's
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2021-04-02 at 4:26 AM UTC
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2021-04-02 at 4:32 AM UTC
Originally posted by POLECAT well thatnks for that enlightenin assesment of what you think i know and how it cumpaires to the rest of the stupid fuknuts out there on the interweb.
I been rackin my feble mind for years wonderin if u think I was one of the smart ones,, now I kin rest easy knowin what you think.
ur time wood be better spent gettin back to ur bag O diks
Why does everyone here double-down on shit when they get called out ? Lol
Come on. Its like voting for yourself in the loser contest instead of just not casting a vote at all.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2021-04-02 at 4:38 AM UTC
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2021-04-02 at 2:24 PM UTCGood Job, Joe! Keep It Up ! ! !
The Washington Post
The U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs in March as recovery gains steam again
Eli Rosenberg
The U.S. economy added 916,000 jobs last month, as vaccine distribution improved, Congress approved a $1.9 trillion stimulus package and states lifted restrictions on businesses.
The unemployment rate edged down to 6 percent from 6.2 percent in February, according to the monthly report, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The report comes a year after the pandemic threw the U.S. economy into a tailspin.
The labor market recovered about 12 million of the 22 million jobs lost in the first two months of the pandemic by October. But pace of the recovery slowed through the winter as the virus surged through the holidays and into the New Year.
But the March data — the largest number of jobs added since August and the third straight month of growth — may signal a turning point. The survey was taken the week of March 12th, the same week that the stimulus package passed by Democratic majorities in the House and Senate was signed into law by President Biden.
“This is a wonderful report. Hopefully we have many more months like it ahead,” said Nick Bunker, the economic research director at Indeed, a jobs listing service. 'It’s fantastic to see the big bounce back in job gains."
The increase was driven by gains in industries that have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic.
The leisure and hospitality sectors added 280,000 jobs last month as coronavirus restrictions eased around the country. Most of that increase, about 176,000 jobs, came from hiring at restaurants, bars and other food service establishments. Arts, entertainment and recreation facilities gained 64,000 jobs, and hotels, about 40,000.
The sector still remains about a 3 million jobs short of where it was in before the pandemic.
Elsewhere, employment rose 126,000 in public education at the state and local levels, and 64,000 in private education. Construction added 110,000 jobs after reporting a disappointing decline in February.
Biden jobs plan seeks $400 billion to expand caretaking services as U.S. faces surge in aging population
Transportation and warehousing added 48,000 jobs, and retail added 23,000 jobs, driven by growth in clothing stores, motor vehicle and parts dealers, and furniture and home furnishing stores.
There is much work to be done before the economy returns to its pre-pandemic strength. There are still about 8.5 million less jobs now, than in February 2020, and that doesn’t include the growth in the labor market that would have likely occurred over the last year under normal circumstances.
At the current rate of jobs growth it would take until June 2022 to return the economy to where it would have been had the pandemic not occurred, Bunker said.
And some economists warn that the unemployment rate is misleadingly low, noting that about 4 million people who have left the labor force in the last year are not included in the calculation. -
2021-04-02 at 2:43 PM UTCA very vocal Trump supporting Republican Congressman from the "Party Of Family Values".
Newsweek
Matt Gaetz, Mired in Scandal, Faces Mounting Calls to Resign
Jacob Jarvis
Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) is facing mounting calls to resign amid scandal as he faces a federal investigation over accusations of a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old.
Gaetz is under investigation over allegations of a relationship with a 17-year-old girl. He has faced calls to resign though he has denied any accusations made against him.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the Department of Justice was investigating whether Gaetz had a sexual relationship with the girl and paid for her to travel with him.
The Associated Press also reported this, citing two people familiar with the matter. It outlined that the investigation is looking at whether he violated federal sex trafficking laws.
Gaetz has denied accusations against him and suggested he has been victim of an extortion plot.
"No part of the allegations against me are true," Gaetz said in a previous statement.
While he has denied the accusations, a backlash has mounted against him over his alleged conduct.
Meghan McCain, conservative commentator and daughter of former Republican senator and presidential nominee the late John McCain, tweeted a CNN article citing anonymous sources alleging Gaetz showed nude images of women he had slept with to other lawmakers. McCain urged him to quit his position.
"This is vile, abhorrent and beneath the office he holds. No woman in congress should feel comfortable working with him. Resign. (also don't start with the cancel culture bulls***, any man in any place would be fired for this garbage)," McCain tweeted.
Bill Kristol, of the Republican Accountability Project, shared images of billboards urging Gaetz to resign in the aftermath of the January 6 Capitol riots. Gaetz faced a backlash for having supported former President Donald Trump's baseless claims of voter fraud having altered the election outcome. There is no evidence of such irregularities on a scale that would have done so.
Kristol tweeted: "The Republican Accountability Project put these billboards up in Rep. Gaetz's district two months ago. Now it's even more imperative that he resign. So we at @AccountableGOP say once again to Rep. Gaetz: Go, before you further disgrace your office. Go, now!"
The Republican Accountability Project put these billboards up in Rep. Gaetz's district two months ago. Now it's even more imperative that he resign. So we at @AccountableGOP say once again to Rep. Gaetz:
Go, before you further disgrace your office. Go, now! pic.twitter.com/bst9fV3Mqa
He also shared a TV ad criticizing Gaetz and said: "I guess we'll have to update it a bit with all the fresh evidence emerging of his unfitness for office."
Sarah Longwell, who was a co-founder of the Republican Voters Against Trump group, also shared an image of one of these billboards and wrote: "This holds up."
There have been extensive calls for Gaetz to resign across social media. This comes as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Gaetz would keep his committee seats for the meantime as he faces investigation. McCarthy said Gaetz would lose these if accusations against him are proven true.
Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu (D-CA) said if the accusations are true, Gaetz should resign.
In a tweet aimed at McCarthy, he said: "If it's true Rep Matt Gaetz engaged in sex trafficking, he needs to resign and be prosecuted. In the meantime, you can't have Gaetz sitting on the Congressional Committee that has oversight over the Department that is investigating him."
Gaetz has a seat on the House Armed Services Committee and the Judiciary Committee.
Newsweek has contacted Gaetz's office for further comment. -
2021-04-02 at 7:49 PM UTCDonald Trump Called on to Pay $144,000 in Legal Fees for 'Meritless' Wisconsin Election Lawsuit
Alexandra Hutzler Newsweek
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has called on former President Donald Trump and others to foot the bill for their failed legal challenges to overturn the state's 2020 election results.
Trump has been called on by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to pay $144,000 in legal fees over a failed lawsuit to challenge the state's election results.
In motions filed Wednesday by Evers' attorneys, Trump and La Crosse County Republican Party Chairman William Feehan were asked to pay a total of $250,000 for cases brought to federal court in the wake of the presidential contest: $144,000 from Trump and $106,000 from Feehan.
The governor's legal team deemed the litigation "meritless" and argued in court documents that it was "built on inscrutable conspiracy theories."
"Although Trump's claims were bereft of legal or factual basis, the stakes were immense. Governor Tony Evers had no choice but to defend zealously against the claims and to engage with Trump's scattershot litigation tactics," Evers' attorneys wrote.
"The litigation imposed significant costs on the taxpayers of Wisconsin. Those costs were needless, because Trump's suit never had any merit, this litigation was precluded by exclusive state-court proceedings, and the costs were exacerbated by strategic choices made by Trump and his lawyers.
After flipping red as a key swing-state victory for Trump in the 2016 election, Wisconsin turned blue again for Joe Biden in the 2020 contest. Biden won the Midwest state by roughly 20,000 votes.
Last month, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected taking up Trump's case in Wisconsin—officially marking an end to four months of election-related litigation.
The suit alleged election officials in Wisconsin failed to abide by the rules for the election set forth by the legislature and therefore invalidated thousands of ballots. Trump's team asked the court to allow the Republican-controlled state legislature to determine a remedy.
Trump and his Republican allies filed dozens of legal challenges to election results in key swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all of which were won by Biden.
Despite the losses in court and a declaration from his own Justice Department that there was no widespread voter fraud or irregularities, Trump has continued to make baseless allegations that the race was stolen since leaving office on January 20.
In his first major post-presidency appearance, headlining the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Trump again revived the narrative.
"This election was rigged," Trump said.
In a reference to the Supreme Court's refusal to take up his election cases, the former president added: "They didn't have the guts or the courage to make the right decision."
Newsweek reached out to the Office of the Former President for comment on the motion filed by Evers but did not receive a response before publication. -
2021-04-02 at 8 PM UTC
Originally posted by stl1 Donald Trump Called on to Pay $144,000 in Legal Fees for 'Meritless' Wisconsin Election Lawsuit
Alexandra Hutzler Newsweek
Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers has called on former President Donald Trump and others to foot the bill for their failed legal challenges to overturn the state's 2020 election results.
Trump has been called on by Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to pay $144,000 in legal fees over a failed lawsuit to challenge the state's election results.
In motions filed Wednesday by Evers' attorneys, Trump and La Crosse County Republican Party Chairman William Feehan were asked to pay a total of $250,000 for cases brought to federal court in the wake of the presidential contest: $144,000 from Trump and $106,000 from Feehan.
The governor's legal team deemed the litigation "meritless" and argued in court documents that it was "built on inscrutable conspiracy theories."
"Although Trump's claims were bereft of legal or factual basis, the stakes were immense. Governor Tony Evers had no choice but to defend zealously against the claims and to engage with Trump's scattershot litigation tactics," Evers' attorneys wrote.
"The litigation imposed significant costs on the taxpayers of Wisconsin. Those costs were needless, because Trump's suit never had any merit, this litigation was precluded by exclusive state-court proceedings, and the costs were exacerbated by strategic choices made by Trump and his lawyers.
After flipping red as a key swing-state victory for Trump in the 2016 election, Wisconsin turned blue again for Joe Biden in the 2020 contest. Biden won the Midwest state by roughly 20,000 votes.
Last month, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected taking up Trump's case in Wisconsin—officially marking an end to four months of election-related litigation.
The suit alleged election officials in Wisconsin failed to abide by the rules for the election set forth by the legislature and therefore invalidated thousands of ballots. Trump's team asked the court to allow the Republican-controlled state legislature to determine a remedy.
Trump and his Republican allies filed dozens of legal challenges to election results in key swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all of which were won by Biden.
Despite the losses in court and a declaration from his own Justice Department that there was no widespread voter fraud or irregularities, Trump has continued to make baseless allegations that the race was stolen since leaving office on January 20.
In his first major post-presidency appearance, headlining the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Trump again revived the narrative.
"This election was rigged," Trump said.
In a reference to the Supreme Court's refusal to take up his election cases, the former president added: "They didn't have the guts or the courage to make the right decision."
Newsweek reached out to the Office of the Former President for comment on the motion filed by Evers but did not receive a response before publication.
Neither you nor that journalist have any idea how the law works.
Aren't you even slightly ashamed? -
2021-04-02 at 10:50 PM UTChe don't know nuff to feel the shame
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2021-04-03 at 12:44 AM UTCAll they know is what Lester Holt and Anderson Cooper tells them to know. For real.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2021-04-03 at 2:12 PM UTCDid Boehner Tell Ted Cruz ‘Go Fuck Yourself’ in New Audiobook?
The former speaker of the U.S. House blamed some of the off-script vulgarities on his wine consumption.
Dan Evon
Published 2 April 2021
An audio clip features former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner telling U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz to "go fuck yourself."
In April 2021, as media outlets started previewing former U.S. House Speaker John Boehner’s new upcoming audiobook “On The House,” a clip started circulating on social media that supposedly captured Boehner telling Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz to “go fuck yourself”:
On Feb. 25, 2021, Boehner posted a picture on Twitter that showed him recording part of his audiobook while holding a glass of wine. In that post, Boehner wrote that you can “blame the wine for the expletives.”
The following day, Axios reported on some of the expletives. The news outlet said Boehner went “off script” for a few moments while recording this book, including one aside in which he said, “Oh, and Ted Cruz, go fuck yourself.”
John Boehner has been going off script while recording the audio version of his new memoir, using expletives and asides not in the book — such as the former Republican House speaker saying, “Oh, and Ted Cruz, go fuck yourself.”
“I can confirm there were some off-script moments during his recording of the audiobook,” Boehner spokesman David Schnittger said. “He pretty much just let it fly, as he did when he was working on the book itself. He’s not really interested in being anything other than himself these days. That is kind of the spirit of the entire project.”
On April 2, 2021, as media outlets started to publish excerpts of Boehner’s upcoming book, Swan posted an audio clip confirming that Boehner had truly issued the curse-laden insult at Cruz:
When @SpeakerBoehner was recording his audiobook I was told by sources that during these wine-soaked sessions he would deviate from the book’s text and insert random violent attacks on @tedcruz. Well, here’s some tape (listen to the end): pic.twitter.com/NFCQ2QFdTT
While this is certainly a genuine audio clip of Boehner insulting Cruz, we’re not entirely certain if it made it into the final version of the audiobook. We reached out to Swan for clarification and we will update this article accordingly.
Boehner’s book contains a few other choice words for Cruz. In an excerpt published by Politico, for example, Boehner writes:
Under the new rules of Crazytown, I may have been Speaker, but I didn’t hold all the power. By 2013 the chaos caucus in the House had built up their own power base thanks to fawning right-wing media and outrage-driven fundraising cash. And now they had a new head lunatic leading the way, who wasn’t even a House member. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless asshole who thinks he is smarter than everyone else. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Senator Ted Cruz. He enlisted the crazy caucus of the GOP in what was a truly dumbass idea. Not that anybody asked me.
Republicans eating their own. Gotta love it! -
2021-04-03 at 4:46 PM UTC#45
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2021-04-03 at 5:03 PM UTCBiden...
#1 -
2021-04-03 at 5:04 PM UTC
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2021-04-03 at 5:14 PM UTCMaking
America
Gay
Again -
2021-04-03 at 5:15 PM UTC
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2021-04-03 at 5:21 PM UTCI'm definitely not a little boy child molester supporter.
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2021-04-03 at 7:23 PM UTCu kinda r doe
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2021-04-03 at 9:24 PM UTCMAKING
AMERICA
GRIFTED
AGAIN
The New York Times
How Trump Steered Supporters Into Unwitting Donations
Shane Goldmacher
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.”
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.
DO YOU FEEL SCAMMED YET? -
2021-04-03 at 9:30 PM UTCNo refunds, fuckers. It's all there on the terms and conditions you agreed to.
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2021-04-03 at 10:52 PM UTCTo any sensible person, it's WinRed guilty of criminal activity, not Trump.
