Trump Can Be Bought

Plus: Republican Voters Against Trump launches its 2024 campaign.

Politico reports:

“Donald Trump’s newly installed leadership team at the Republican National Committee on Monday began the process of pushing out dozens of officials, according to two people close to the Trump campaign and the RNC. All told, the expectation is that more than 60 RNC staffers who work across the political, communications, and data departments will be let go.”

It was Trump’s party before; it’s really, really Trump’s party now.

Special Counsel Robert Hur is testifying before Congress today; the Washington Post has the transcript of his interview last year with President Biden. Happy Tuesday.

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(Photo illustration by Jaap Arriens / NurPhoto via Getty Images.)

Trump’s TikTok FlipFlop

It was a centerpiece of Donald Trump’s 2016 pitch: I’m so rich I can’t be bought. Other candidates, Trump suggested, marched to the tune of their donors and lobbyists, but what did a billionaire with a real-estate empire need donors and lobbyists for? Trump did the buying, not the other way around. The notion was—and remains—an enduring part of Trump’s mythos on the right; voters were bringing it up to reporters to justify their support for Trump as recently as the New Hampshire primary.

Except, well, Trump’s suddenly very hard up for cash: “The danger posed to Donald Trump’s finances by two recent judgments against him has been, if anything, underappreciated,” David A. Graham wrote in the Atlantic last week. “The size of the awards, the structure of the former president’s business empire, and the condition of the real-estate market combine to create a truly perilous moment for the former president’s company and, by extension, for Trump’s personal finances.”

This at a time when the distinction between Trump’s personal and political finances has essentially collapsed: Trump is paying tens of millions of dollars of his personal legal bills with funds from his Save America leadership PAC, much of which was routed from his super PAC, MAGA Inc. It’s no exaggeration: Anybody who donates to Trump’s affiliated action committees is putting money directly into the former president’s pocket.

So what are we to make of Trump’s gobsmacking about-face on banning TikTok, which he himself tried to ban via executive order just three years ago? And what are we to make of this about-face coming just days after he took a meeting with hedge fund manager Jeff Yass, a Republican megadonor whose fund owns a $33 billion stake in TikTok and has donated heavily to Republicans who publicly oppose efforts to ban it?

In a CNBC interview Monday, Trump insisted his change of tune had nothing to do with the Yass meeting. But asked to explain why he’d flip-flopped, he could only offer up this linguistic slurry:

So, I had it done. And then Congress said—well, they ultimately usually fail. You know? They are, like, extremely political, and they’re extremely subject to people called lobbyists, who happen to be very talented, very good, and very rich. I could have banned TikTok; I had it banned just about, I could have gotten it done. But I said, you know what? But I leave it up to you. I didn’t push it too hard, because let them do their own research and development. And they decided not to do it. But as you know, I was at the point where I could’ve gotten it done if I wanted to. I sort of said, you guys decide, you make that decision.

Because it’s a tough decision to make. Frankly, there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users—there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok.

But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger. And I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.

He went on in this vein for a while; by the end, he had somehow worked his way around to a kvetch that conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza was charged with and convicted of a campaign finance crime a decade ago. (Remember, kids: It’s Joe Biden who supposedly has trouble stringing sentences together.)

There’s a reason anti-TikTok legislation has gotten so much bipartisan backing lately: The app vacuums up alarming amounts of its users’ data, and its parent company ByteDance has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party—ties that are apparent in TikTok’s demonstrable suppression of content on topics unsavory to China’s rulers. The bill currently under consideration would offer ByteDance a choice: Sell the app to a company less cozy with the CCP or see it banned from U.S. app stores.

ByteDance has been certifiably freaking out over the bill: It pushed out notifications to all U.S. TikTok users last Thursday warning (falsely) that Congress was about to ban the app, beaming users the phone numbers of their congressional offices, asking them to call and complain. If anything, these heavy-handed tactics, which swamped Hill offices with calls, only redoubled representatives’ alarm over TikTok’s political influence: The bill passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Thursday on a 50-0 vote.

Whether Trump’s sudden appreciation for TikTok will change that calculus remains to be seen. (In fact, Joe Perticone will have some fresh reporting on this front in his Press Pass newsletter later today.) But the whole episode is a striking illustration of a remarkable inversion: There may be no politician more susceptible to donor influence today than Trump.

—Andrew Egger

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Never Again Trump!

Breaking news—and, for a change, good news!

The Republican Accountability PAC, which is helmed by Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell, this morning launched the 2024 iteration of Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT). As many of you will remember, the 2020 effort targeted swing voters in key states with messages from Republicans and ex-Republicans who explained why they couldn’t vote for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.

That campaign proved to be among the most effective advertising of the election cycle. (I say this not just because I was part of the effort, but because I think it’s true.)

Now Republican Accountability PAC has announced a $50 million campaign for 2024, starting off with more than 100 new, first-person video testimonials of former Trump voters. These are not just former Republican voters, but are former Trump voters. And they explain in their own words, usually in videos recorded on their own cell phones, why they can’t support Trump in 2024.

Take a look at some of these testimonials at rvat.org, which will be featured in ads on TV, radio, billboards, and digital media in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. They’re a remarkable watch: Americans from very different backgrounds giving different reasons, in their own voices—some of them pensive, some solemn, some emotional—for why we can’t risk another term of Donald Trump.

“I voted for Donald Trump in 2020. January 6th was the end of Donald Trump for me,” says Ethan from Wisconsin. “The peaceful transfer of power is one of the defining pieces of our democracy, and I could not believe that someone I had formerly supported would get behind an effort that would throw that under the bus . . . Donald Trump is not a viable option. I will vote for Biden.”

And here’s Dave from Pennsylvania: “I’m a two-time Trump voter. I do not plan on voting for Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Do you want a guy like this leading the oldest democracy in the world, the world’s number one superpower? Do you want this guy leading us? I don’t.”

During the 2020 campaign, as RVAT’s testimonials got quite a bit of attention, I’d get calls from friends from Biden world or Democratic organizations expressing surprise, even a little horror: Why were we featuring voters who had made the mistake of voting for Trump? Why were we publicizing people who spent some of their time explaining why they hadn’t voted Democratic in the past? Why were there testimonials from voters who acknowledged they weren’t altogether enthusiastic about Joe Biden?

That’s the point, I’d explain. To win the election, you need not just to win the true believers. You need to win over hesitant or even reluctant voters. And these voters respond to people like themselves, saying things that resonate with them, and sounding different from the normal cheerleading one (understandably) hears in political ads.

I’m a Never Trumper. And I welcome with open arms all Never Again Trumpers.

—William Kristol

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Catching up . . .

• How the special counsel’s portrayal of Biden’s memory compares with the transcript: New York Times

• Hur to defend report’s assessment of BIden’s “poor” memory in opening remarks: Politico

• Inflation picks up to 3.2 percent in unexpected turn higher: Wall Street Journal

• Anti-abortion advocates condemn GOP as insufficiently “pro-life” on IVF: Politico

• Blue cities go red with conservative policies on crime: Axios

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Quick Hits

1. New RNC Doubles Down on ‘Election Integrity’

What do the Trump ultra-loyalists now helming the purged-out RNC have planned for the institutional apparatus of the GOP? “I’ll tell you right now what is already underway,” Lara Trump told Fox News on Sunday. “We have, for the first time ever, an election integrity division. This means vast resources dedicated solely to this cause.”

Turning over huge chunks of party staff in the middle of an election is certainly a strategic choice, as is a deeply cash-strapped party pledging “vast resources” to chase voter-fraud phantasms. We’ll see how it goes!

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2. Let Joe Cook

On the pod yesterday, Tim had some gripes to get off his chest about Democrats’ po-faced denunciations of Joe Biden’s ad-lib use of the term “illegal” during his State of the Union to refer to Jose Ibarra, the migrant whose suspected killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley has become a political flashpoint this year: 

After this great State of the Union, where Biden’s showing vigor, where even Bill Kristol’s starting to come around—Democrats started complaining. Here’s the headline: ‘Progressives fume at Biden’ . . . In the context of this speech, does anybody actually think that he was trying to be offensive? Like, obviously not! Does anybody think that Joe Biden was in this exchange the one that was not being on the side of immigrants? Not being on the side of migrants? . . . This supposed gaffe isn’t going to change anything. It isn’t going to change anybody’s life to make him apologize. It’s not gonna change his worldview. It’s not gonna change the policies or the treatment of anybody. It’s gonna do nothing. These liberals are just shouting ‘do better’ at him, trying to berate him, and the net result of this is Biden apologizing . . . all the news is about how he apologized about this, everyone in my MAGA Twitter field is dunking on him, and like—the people that criticized him for this . . . what did they get? At best they achieved nothing; at worst they gave a news cycle to the person that is planning mass deportation camps!

Listen to the rest:

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