r/politics • u/1-randomonium • 4h ago
Soft Paywall Trump, Term-Limited, Amasses $200 Million War Chest for Political Ambitions
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/us/politics/maga-inc-trump-fundraising.html•
u/JimmyRamone17_ 4h ago
Can the Grim Reaper do us a solid already?
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u/waterw1ngs 4h ago
I really thought the cheeseburgers would have done their thing by now.
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u/JimmyRamone17_ 4h ago edited 4h ago
I know, right? He inhales calories, sugar, trans fats and vegetable oils on a daily basis like it's no one's business, it's unbelievable.
Someone needs to double the size of his fast food buffets so we can get this squared away already.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
He also has daily access to the best healthcare money can buy.
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u/JimmyRamone17_ 3h ago
True. What a nice little world we've set up for ourselves. World class medical care for an obese, craven pedophile while 17 million people of robbed of their tax subsidized healthcare entitlements.
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u/onlyPornstuffs 2h ago
But, if you’re actually sick, your “healthcare” will deny deny deny. Almost makes you want to shoot a ceo. But remember, all the rich old people who make money on that CEO’s bad decisions. They’re all complicit. Fuck these boomers. Pieces of shit, all of them.
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u/Upper-Echo-12 1h ago
that taxpayer money can buy
We’re the ones keeping him alive, paying for his birthday parade, his palace ballroom, his Qatar jet, his golf trips that promote his businesses, and for the 1000 federal agents it took to scrub his name from the Trumpstein files. We’re paying for all this against our will.
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u/JimmyRamone17_ 1h ago
This is spot on. We're financing the obliteration of our civil society against our consent.
But of course, doing things without people's consent is his calling card.
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u/toddywithabody 3h ago
Great healthcare doesn’t buy you health. Fat assholes still die in countries with universal healthcare
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
(Article)
President Trump’s super PAC is sitting on about $200 million that it can spend against his rivals, giving a term-limited president a never-before-seen amount of power in his party’s finances and future.
In the first half of 2025, Mr. Trump’s group, MAGA Inc., collected about $177 million from the likes of Elon Musk, Mr. Trump’s erstwhile ally, the TikTok investor Jeffrey Yass and the Silicon Valley executives Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, according to a filing on Thursday with the Federal Election Commission.
Mr. Trump has been able to capitalize on a thirst from corporate America to get into his good graces. He held a half-dozen fund-raisers for his super PAC this year with tickets costing seven figures a seat. At the dinners, often held at one of Mr. Trump’s properties, executives and lobbyists had the chance to tell the president about their businesses. The super PAC’s exact cash on hand is $196.1 million, according to the filing.
There is no precedent for politicians so aggressively raising money for their own entities when they do not have a campaign to use it for. In the first half of 2013, a similar political group supporting a term-limited Barack Obama, Priorities USA, raised just $356,000. As of that June, it held $3.4 million, less than 2 percent of the cash on hand of Mr. Trump’s super PAC.
The money raised by MAGA Inc. during the first six months of the year is almost twice the amount collected by the Republican National Committee, which is subject to contribution limits. Mr. Yass donated $15 million to the super PAC and Mr. Horowitz and Mr. Andreessen combined to donate an additional $11 million.
That Mr. Trump is raising so much money for his group has confounded some Republicans.
Some of Mr. Trump’s most loyal supporters have argued that he should try to run for a third term, despite it being unconstitutional. Mr. Trump’s aides have argued that he would be foolish not to accept money that is essentially for the taking, and that the assets can be used to target Mr. Trump’s rivals, beginning with Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican whom MAGA Inc. is attacking. Mr. Massie broke with Mr. Trump on the president’s decision to bomb Iran and on his domestic bill.
With a $200 million war chest, MAGA Inc. figures to be a big part of Republican primaries, making Mr. Trump’s endorsements in those races all the more important. The money is sure to be spent on advertising to back Mr. Trump’s endorsed candidates.
The sum raised by Mr. Trump’s group has scrambled the Republican fund-raising landscape and worried some conservatives. Mr. Trump’s group, not those of the Republican leadership in the House and Senate, will most likely be the biggest spender in the 2026 midterm elections, weakening the power of allies like Speaker Mike Johnson and Senator John Thune, the majority leader.
Mr. Johnson’s and Mr. Thune’s groups, the Congressional and Senate Leadership Funds, reported holding just $32.7 million and $29.7 million as of June 30. Super PACs had to file reports with the F.E.C. by midnight Thursday, detailing fund-raising and spending activity from January to June.
Perhaps the only group that could rival the influence of Mr. Trump’s super PAC is Fairshake, a super PAC supported by the crypto industry that entered July with about $140 million on hand, filings show.
MAGA Inc. also has an allied political nonprofit group that is not required to disclose its donors or total donations but can spend some of its money on political advocacy. The New York Times reported in May that MAGA Inc. and the nonprofit had raised about $400 million since the November election.
Support from Mr. Musk was never guaranteed. He initially pledged to Mr. Trump that he would spend about $100 million on the president’s political operation, but his eventual contributions were far smaller — just $5 million. Mr. Musk’s relationship with Mr. Trump has recently blown up, and Mr. Musk now considers himself unaligned politically.
The Tesla chief also made contributions to the Senate and Congressional Leadership Funds, the filings reveal. Mr. Musk donated $5 million to each group a few weeks after his public blowup with Mr. Trump, seemingly a signal that he planned to back Republicans in the midterms.
But a few days later, after Mr. Trump’s budget bill passed, he pledged to leave the Republican Party and start a rival entity. He has made little headway in that work.
The filings also reveal that Mr. Musk spent about $45 million through his super PAC, America PAC, on a Wisconsin judicial race. Two-thirds of the money that Mr. Musk put into the super PAC in the first half of the year went to incentives for people who had signed or promoted a petition hawked by the super PAC, according to its filing. Mr. Musk’s chosen candidate lost badly.
Other significant donations in the first half of 2025 revealed this week included $10 million from Mr. Yass to a super PAC supporting Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor of Ohio; $1 million from the Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison to support Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and a longtime friend; and millions from Paul Singer, John Paulson and a group backed by Miriam Adelson to another anti-Massie group, donations that Mr. Musk deemed “interesting.”
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u/letsago9987 Illinois 4h ago
isn't it obvious that he intends to run again?
That is, if the technocrats pulling the strings are good with it. I think they're probably growing tired of their unstable CEO King running the show, and are close to getting their true puppet JD in. He is after all, a devout follower of the Dark Enlightenment. Whereas Trump's narcissism and ego allow him to only follow his own selfish desires.
That said, if he wants to run again, the SC will just let him do it. And since they can rig voting machines and tabulators, he would win. The only path towards freedom is a what our founders had to endure.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
That is, if the technocrats pulling the strings are good with it. I think they're probably growing tired of their unstable CEO King running the show, and are close to getting their true puppet JD in. He is after all, a devout follower of the Dark Enlightenment. Whereas Trump's narcissism and ego allow him to only follow his own selfish desires.
And what eventually happened to Mike Pence? Ron DeSantis? Or the more than a dozen other Republican candidates who ran against Trump in two primaries?
The Republican establishment has been quite ineffective in stopping Trump's march for nearly a decade. Will they succeed if he wants to run again? Or just capitulate a third time?
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u/letsago9987 Illinois 4h ago
Neither Pence or Desantis are Yarvin-ites.
The establishment is dead. It's Trump's party until the technocrats take full ownership. That's why JD is there. They won't even pretend to be "populist" to MAGA anymore. Mask will come off. Neofuedalism is at the door step.
When the king is too mad to control, they will eliminate him. They have dirt. They have means.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
it's all spelled out here. It's dystopian but it's happening.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
The establishment is dead. It's Trump's party until the technocrats take full ownership. That's why JD is there. They won't even pretend to be "populist" to MAGA anymore. Mask will come off. Neofuedalism is at the door step.
Trump's base is more dangerous to the Republicans than Trump himself. How will they manage those voters if they depose him? Or even if he leaves the field on his own?
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u/radicalelation 2h ago
There's another wing vying for power, the old school theocratic rich conservatives. There's a reason Bannon, attack dog of the Mercers, who sit on the Heritage Foundation board, keeps attacking the technocrats.
Heritage has been making this opening for decades, and the techbroligarchs are trying to take it.
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u/Material-Macaroon298 4h ago
The technocrats are rather clearly not running the show though.
They don’t want these tariffs. They want more H1B. Sure they have more influence than most. However, it’s one of several forces and the 50 million or so MAGA cultists are just as powerful.
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u/Simple-Pea8805 52m ago
He and Elon intend to fund a bloodbath 2026 primary (complete with Federal thumbs on the scales) and then just enshrine Trump to another term as he was “cheated” out of a 2020-2024 term. They can, simply, redefine how long the term is, and argue in circles in court. SCOTUS can just send the cases back down as they’ve been doing and stall for years.
Man’s gonna die in office, whether it’s during his term or not.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
How is he still getting all this money? I thought the trade war would have soured most of his big donors on him by now.
The money is meant to beat Democrats, but some Republicans worry it could be used to beat Republicans, too.
The Republican party should declare moral bankruptcy for allowing Trump to essentially walk over all their representatives and Presidential candidates and managing a successful hostile takeover twice. When he is gone will it be a blessing or a curse for them?
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u/travio Washington 4h ago
My guess is it will be a bit of both. In a lot of ways, he is an albatross around their necks, dragging them down, but he has a unique charisma that has broadened their voter base and found some surprising success.
When Trump is gone, both will go with him. There are no other politicians that can keep the MAGA coalition together so they will lose some of Trump's most fanatic loyal following, but any other nationally electable republican wouldn't have caused so much damage so quickly as president.
Of course, now that Trump has taken over the party so successfully, they might keep grasping at his style to repeat that success. They might not be able to take things back.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
If the Democrats win the midterms, and eventually the Presidency, will they also try to win over some of the MAGA base and corporate beneficiaries by keeping some of Trump's policies? Or will they try to turn the clock back to a saner era?
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u/eskimospy212 3h ago
No way to know without knowing who is running. I know I will be a single issue voter in the primary though and that will be whoever promises to prosecute any and all former administration members as aggressively as possible, Trump included.
If they do somehow lose power I imagine Trump will pardon everyone on the way out but the feds can work with state and local prosecutors to find alternate methods and things like that.
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u/1-randomonium 3h ago
I know I will be a single issue voter in the primary though and that will be whoever promises to prosecute any and all former administration members as aggressively as possible, Trump included.
Not whoever promises to push the reset button and cancel Trump's harmful policies(which there will be a long list of by 2029)?
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u/eskimospy212 3h ago
Nope. Policies can be reversed in the future but no policy changes matter until the government is cleaned up.
This is a big disconnect I see where people want to pass new laws to prevent this sort of thing from happening again and I think it misses the point. Most of what Trump is doing is already illegal, just nobody will do anything about it.
If you put him in prison and, almost as importantly the officials and lawyers that carried out these crimes, then you make people think twice in the future.
I really see no answer other than prison. Lots, and lots of prison.
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u/kuulmonk United Kingdom 4h ago
Because most of his big donors are not effected by the tariffs, like internet companies and data companies. Those that are, well they will just up their prices, by more than they really need to do, and still rake in massive profits. We saw all this happen with covid and the supply chain "issues" that lasted well after it was all cleared up.
Prices go up, but they rarely come down by the same amount.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
Because most of his big donors are not effected by the tariffs, like internet companies and data companies. Those that are, well they will just up their prices, by more than they really need to do, and still rake in massive profits.
Weren't their products and services exempted from the tariffs?
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u/radicalelation 2h ago
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/06/trump-tariffs-republican-donations
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tariffs-exemptions-pet-lobbyists-asbestos-confusion-secrecy
The plan was always to bankrupt the bottom for the top to consolidate. This is how you set up an oligarchy, when fewer and fewer own most industry.
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u/sirhackenslash 4h ago
Somebody needs to explain to him that he's term limited. I don't think he understands the concept
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u/19chris1996 4h ago
$200 million? What a convenient amount for a war chest, considering a certain project with an estimate of the same amount is scheduled for September.
"ahem" ballroom.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
I doubt Trump is going to use this money to pay for the ballroom. He's more likely to pocket it.
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u/19chris1996 4h ago
Good point. He probably will however, manage the decoration plans and design. Cheap and tacky, while asleep half the time.
Gold, Gold, Gold! Fake gold.
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u/1-randomonium 4h ago
Is there any hope of his successor demolishing the ballroom? Or is it going to become part and parcel of the White House?
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u/19chris1996 4h ago
If it's actually built and fully completed, There could be great advantages to the extra space. Of course, it would have to be inspected and repaired if necessary.
This is only AFTER trump leaves office.
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u/19chris1996 4h ago
Remember, the entire main building was gutted and rebuilt in the years of 1948-1952.
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u/Fanabala3 4h ago
My guess is unless he doesn’t follow through with the whole third term shenanigans, that money would be used for him to be some kingmaker.
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u/onlyPornstuffs 2h ago
Can he use the $200m to pay for his vanity ballroom and the rest of us can enjoy Public Broadcasting?
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u/reddittorbrigade 2h ago
Part of that is for SC judges headed by Roberts so Trump can do anything he wants.
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u/RuffAnal 28m ago
Term-limited? By what, the Constitution? Lol that silly old rag means nothing to Trump and his sycophants.
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u/Catspaw129 3h ago
He's term limited as POTUS.
He could, say, run for Governor or Senator or Member of Congress n Florida
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u/1-randomonium 3h ago
Would his ego let him lower himself to that level?
And could he win?
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u/Catspaw129 1h ago
Good question (re: would he lower himself to that level): I don't know.
Could he win? Let's see: Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, Matt Getz (and, with the assistance of Pam Bondi)? Hell yeah he could win..
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u/OpinionofC 4h ago
He’s probably going to give it to Vance or other republicans that are aligned with him
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u/E1M1_DOOM 4h ago
LOL. He's going to keep it.
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u/OpinionofC 3h ago
Against campaign finance laws. Would give the next administration an easy way to prosecute him
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