Georgia Domestic Financial Affidavit: Fill & Download for Free

It’s complicated. Trump probably started his endgame during the election doing the same thing most modern campaigns do these days: planning for teams of well-funded lawyers just in case something goes wrong. Why? Well, as we saw in the 2000 election, there can be a grey area in an election decided by hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of votes, and that might require legal action. But legal actions take time, and you have about a month before the Presidential vote is certified.So Trump started raising money for his legal team as a separate ask from his main campaign funding. That’s also pretty common. Most of these campaign fundraisers are “passthroughs,” meaning that you’re asked for money for one specific thing, but what actually happens is that money comes in and gets split up into various funds and accounts. That’s necessary in a large part because there are hard rules about how much money can go from any individual into campaigns, PACs, etc. and also hard rules about what can be done with that money once actually paid to a political entity. Nothing terribly unusual here, either. Biden also had a legal defense fund for his campaign.Thing was, Trump started bringing in a pretty huge pile of cash, outperforming is rather lackluster fundraising in the heat of the election. I suppose the MAGAs started to actually fear that Trump might lose. Or was it something else?If you recall the 2016 election, near the end, Trump added a new lie to his list of “greatest hits” of lies and grievances that he’d discuss at every new rally: “If I lose, the election was rigged.” No facts, no evidence, nothing at all to suggest this was real, but it got repeated a few thousand times anywhere Trump was speaking.You could write this off as Trump launching a salvo to blow up a little of his loss of face if he lost. But it was a bit more than that. For one, Trump’s business education started with his ruthless father Fred, who did not accept failure in anyone or anything. If you fail, if you lose, that’s you being pathetically weak. Next was Roy Cohn, the famously corrupt New York lawyer who was Trump’s mentor. Cohn’s rules were simple:Never settle, never surrender.Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately.No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.So Trump has been conditioned his entire life to believe that any failure, any loss, even any mistake is a sign of weakness. Think about how petty that’s got in Trump’s public life.Remember Sharpiegate? I mean, the guy obviously just misspoke. I occasional do that, and admit it, so do you. But Trump just couldn’t admit his mistake… no hurricane for Alabama. So he went on television and looked like a silly child, he ordered the National Weather Service to stop telling people the truth, etc. Over NOTHING!So now in 2020, Trump was back up to his old tricks: claiming without evidence that the election was a fraud, but only if he didn’t win. Did he believe this? Well, that’s a hard one to know for sure. On the one hand, he did actually make up the story about a corrupt election for 2020. It originated with him entirely. All of the actual election officials, security experts, etc. felt they had done a far better job at election security than any time in the past.But you might have noticed: that idea of a corrupt election wasn’t Trump’s first lie. He tried every cheat he could come up with in 2016 to win, and it worked. Now sure, it’s actually difficult to work any single cheat to effect an election. Trump also got lucky on the timing of some things, Hillary made her own share of mistakes and that is how elections usually go. It’s never one thing.What’s special about Trump is that for him, cheating isn’t a last-gasp effort to turn over a losing effort. Well, okay, sure it is… but it’s also his first recourse. His opening move. Trump has always been too lazy and stupid to put in the hard work to achieve something honestly. In business, he had Fred and/or Roy knowing who to bribe, who to intimidate, who to extort. It’s a well-known factor in human psychology that a person who lies, cheats, or steals pretty much expects everyone else to lie, cheat, or steal. Trump may honestly believe that cheaters win and honest men lose, because that’s been all he’s ever known — for every scam that brought Trump his fortune, honest people paid the price, and he never has. He always got away with it. And so, if Trump’s defeated, his only rationalization is that whoever beat him had the better cheat. He can’t accept that an honest man — in his universe always a loser — could defeat him on the straight and narrow path.So on with the election, and while it’s not decided overnight, Biden emerges the winner. Trump has this white-shoe legal team all assembled, and they spring to life. And he immediately starts fundraising to keep them going. They probably have to buy some recounts, etc. So immediately after the election, 40% of the money coming in through Trump’s various online, email, and other fundraisers goes to his legal team, the Recount Fund. The rest goes to pay off campaign debt. Most of that goes to the Trump Organization, aka, Trump’s pocket. Which seems risky… won’t they need them money?After less than two weeks, all of Trump’s lawyers have quit. There’s no “there” there, no case to make, no corruption, no fraud, nothing. The only election fraud anyone found in Pennsylvania were three people who voted illegally… and they were Republicans. Oops. Lawyers can’t simply being any imaginary case of fraud to a court. Thing Trump invents in his head, conspiracy theories invented by teenagers on 4chan, affidavits claiming that an election worked in PA was “mean”, none of those things actually even get presented in court. In fact, in several court filings in PA, Trump’s legal team had to file a multi-point list of just how much fraud they were not claiming in any way, shape, or form.So Trump hires Crazy Rudy and a couple of Fox News TV Lawyers. These are not the people you bring in to make a legal case… even Trump knows that. These are the people you bring in to rant, rave, and sell a case to low-information voters, on TV. Not surprisingly, at the same time, the money coming in stops feeding the Recount Fund. Ultimately, 25% of it goes to the RNC, the other 75% goes to Trump’s Leadership PAC. Neither of those is paying lawyers. So in this snapshot, it’s very clear that Trump knows he’s lost, but doesn’t want you to give up yet… send $250, quick!How much did Trump bring in? About $495 million between mid-October and the end of November! Now we know why so little went to the election fight… it’s yuuuge! This whole thing, going back to the beginning, maybe not an obvious scam when it began. No one knows Trump’s actual mind but Trump himself. But it clearly became a scam, a con, a grift. Having followed Trump’s activities on and off since maybe the 80s (I grew up in the New York media market, down in Central Jersey, and I lived 45 minutes West of Atlantic City), that was always his thing. I image Trump thinks it’s wrong to not take money from someone stupid enough to give it to you.So … he’s got crazy money coming in, he’s pocketing most of it, and he knows he’s lost. But the electoral college is coming up fast, and he’s got to figure out how to keep this money flowing. Think about this for a moment, too… Trump’s previous job was as a game show host playing a fictionalized version of himself — the successful businessman Trump — for thirteen years. Because he was on the show, owned a piece of it, owned licensing rights for versions in other countries, used “The Apprentice” to boost his name into other scams, er, sales opportunities, he did pretty well. He made a bit over $400 million over those years, pretty good even by TV standards. But this was a frickin’ goldmine!So there has already been a few things in place to keep the money flowing. For example, the web sites promised 1000% matching donations, but only if you beat a count-down timer… hurry, hurry. In very small print was an opted-in box telling you, once you got past a bunch of distractions about THOSE EVIL DEMOCRATS is that you’re the one providing the matching funds. First ten payments. Then they added a second opt-in and one extra payment for December. But now, in early December, with the electoral college looming, they’d need more. So now you if you opted in, you chose monthly payments — no limits.They were not particularly clear, closing in on the electoral college meeting date, as we passed the “Safe Harbor” date by which electors are locked in and lawsuits legally ignored, how to keep the money going. And seriously, how to justify that money… are they literally going to bribe electors?But let’s take a look at another part of the churning caldron of Trump psychological oddities. It was noticed, early on the Trump Administration, that Trump has a tendency to agree with the last person he spoke with. This proved super frustrating in the early Trump White House, as his Cabinet people went to bed thinking they had set Trump straight on various thing, but woke to him all bent around backwards. Why? He had been having late night calls with Sean Hannity and he watched Fox News all morning. The Fox News bosses understood this, and starting tailoring the news to manipulate Trump.But at least he had a few decent people in the Cabinet, smart guys capable of independent thought. Unfortunately, that gradually got them all fired. Trump suggested once in an interview that he always had to be the smartest one in the room, and that meant firing people who spoke up too much (because they knew things and he didn’t, but whatever). So by these latter days, Trump is surrounded by sycophants and yes-men. They don’t dare contradict him — in fact, they chew on the verbal crap Trump spews on them for a bit and spit it back.His only other sources of information are well within the Republican information bubble and noise machine. He watches Fox News, but increasingly, OANN, Newmax, and other tiny conspiracy nut fake news services. These guys are all in hard competition for being Foxier than the far larger Fox, and so they’re also coddling Trump.And so there’s a vicious circle of “fake news” — Trump makes something up, then the kiddies on 4Chan, the nutbaggers on fringe TV, the truth-refugees on Parler, etc. are just spewing these things around in some kind of telephone game for MAGAs. These things all feed back to Trump, but he doesn’t understand that it’s all being launched by what he’s saying and what others make up to seem MAGAier than the next guy. In short, Trump has become his own puppetmaster — and the puppetmaster is barking mad.So it is entirely credible that Trump actually believes there has been corruption and fraud under every rock. He seems to have clearly convinced himself of plenty of other lies he invented himself for, at the time, pure greed, pure politics, etc. But he certainly has been desperate — desperate enough to make several attempts at stealing the election. He sent a mob of ultra-right domestic terrorists to loot the Capitol and shut down Biden’s certification by... well… about four hours, give or take. Four people died, 47 were arrested, several are known have already been charged with fairly serious crimes (at the DC level, nothing Federal yet), and at least dozens more will be arrested in the coming days and perhaps weeks. Law Enforcement has been granted access to a massive amount of social media content related to the attack on the Capitol, and of course, that building itself is full of security cameras.So it’s not just about money, or even just about ego. There’s some clear mental illness here, which is not a thing for anyone to celebrate or ridicule. Hopefully he can get the help he needs when he’s out of office in a 12 days. Hopefully, no one else has to die for Trump in those next few days.The other thing that may be driving Trump’s increasing desperation are the numerous legal troubles facing Trump once he’s out of office. While it’s been a busy week, let’s not forget that he did just shake-down Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger, much as he had Ukrainian President Zelensky, trying to get Raffensperger to just “find” another 11,780 votes two weeks after the electoral college vote was already completed. He could face charges on that at either the State or Federal level. He could still be indicted on the 10-counts of election fraud that landed Michael Cohen in prison. And there are a whole slew of pre-existing financial crimes being investigated in New York and elsewhere.Add to that he’s got something between $350 and $900 million coming due in the next two years, most with Deutsche Bank (from what is known), a bank that will not extend him any more credit. If he’s in serious criminal trouble, they can actually call those loans immediately.Read MoreOpinion | Roy Cohn Is How We Got Trump (Published 2019)https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-fundraising/2020/12/03/3aa1091a-35b6-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.htmlThe Trump campaign just admitted one of the scariest things about its candidateWere you conned into donating to Donald Trump's election defense fund?Dave Haynie's answer to How likely is it that Trump will resist leaving the White House?Dave Haynie's answer to Donald Trump is still soliciting donations from his fan base. At this point, could this simply be a money-making machine for Trump and a way of "legally" bilking his supporters?Dave Haynie's answer to "I would like you to do us a favor." (Trump on phone with Ukrainian President, July 19, 2019) "I just want to find 11,780 votes." (Trump on phone with Georgia Sec. of State, Jan. 2, 2021). Are the parallels between these two statements?Dave Haynie's answer to Why do people forget that Donald Trump is a successful businessman?