Political Fundraising Groups Are Using Panicked Texts And Recurring Donations To Rob Seniors Blind

If you sell phony stock to dementia patients, you go to jail. If you sell faulty aluminum siding to elderly people, the consumer police come after you and you lose your business because you get fined from here to Jupiter. What, then, should be the penalty if you sell a vulgar talking yam to those same people as a presidential candidate? From CNN:

Deceptive fundraising including those that trick elderly donors, in the wake of the 2020 election, older Americans tend to lean more Republican, both parties have continued to rake in donations from elderly voters. And mainstream Republican candidates have only doubled down on this strategy, using more aggressive and predatory tactics than those used by Democrats, according to donor complaints, interviews with experts and a review of solicitations. The Republican fundraising machine has been subject to more than 800 complaints to the Federal Trade Commission since 2022 — nearly seven times more than the number of complaints lodged against the other side.

There’s some boilerplate both-siderism thrown into this story, but it’s pretty plain that the GOP have taken a tawdry fundraising tactic and turned it into a vast predatory network.

Donors identified by CNN were often in their 80s and 90s. They included retired public workers, house cleaners and veterans, widows living alone, nursing home residents and people who donated more money than they paid for their homes, according to records and interviews.

The money they gave came from pensions, Social Security payments and retirement savings accounts meant to last decades. Donors took out new credit cards and mortgages to pay for the contributions. In some cases, they gave away most of their life savings. Their cell phones and email inboxes were so full of pleas for money that they missed photos of their grandkids and other important messages. At least one person continued to be charged for contributions after his death.

Warning! Shocking surprise coming!

The biggest beneficiary of the small-dollar donations from unwitting donors identified by CNN was Donald Trump. His current and former campaigns and affiliated political committees brought in more than $400,000 from these elderly consumers between July 2019 and June 2024, which included multiple election cycles. The national committees which raise money to support House and Senate races across the nation also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from such donors, according to CNN’s analysis, and in all, the long list of Republican candidates and causes took in nearly $4 million.

A spokesperson for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee noted that fundraising efforts over the years have varied and said Trump ads were designed to be respectful, including such language as “don’t sweat it” if donors couldn’t afford to contribute on a regular basis.

Well, that certainly would make all the difference in the world to people who are losing their language skills, one after another.

Richard Benjamin, an 81-year-old from Arizona, believed he had been in personal communication with former president Trump through all the messages he was receiving. At one point, he told his children the former president invited him to a luxurious reception at Mar-a-Lago. He had grown up on a farm and worried he would feel out of his element at such a fancy venue. But when he received what he described to his children as an invitation to be a VIP at a rally in Arizona, he was thrilled he would finally meet the former president himself. He started making travel plans and asking his sister-in-law if she would like to accompany him, since his wife had passed away in 2018.
Later, he told his son how angry he was that Donald Trump Jr. wouldn’t call him back even though the former president’s son had sent Benjamin so many nice messages.

“He was old, lonely and isolated,” his son, Jason Benjamin, told CNN, saying the pandemic only compounded that isolation. “’Save America, help save America,’ that was the constant message. He would get thanked for helping to save America.”

Richard Benjamin, who now lives in a memory care unit at an assisted living facility, would look forward to the emails and texts, and especially to the ones thanking him for being a true American and patriot when he donated his money. This eventually led him to give about $80,000, leaving him tens of thousands of dollars in debt and his children angry at the campaigns who they say tricked their dad and took advantage of his compromised state of mind. “He really, in his heart, believed that Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and other politicians were personally reaching out to him,” Jason Benjamin said.

There’s a special place in hell for people who would do this. No political office is worth doing this to people fighting this horrible end. And I hope someone at least found a way to let that dead donor vote. There are precedents, after all.