Not Even Professional Republicans Trust Trump And His Family When It Comes To Money

A new new poll from Quinnipiac shows the whole country is of one mind when it comes to the real Robert Mueller Report rather than William Barr's absurd press release. Now that Republicans have been lulled into believing the report exonerates Trump-- which it doesn't-- they join normal people in wanting to see it. 84% of Americans want to see it made public, while just 9% think it should stay sealed. Even 75% of Republicans want it publicly available, although 17% must have a feeling Barr's press release will be exposed as a fraud and they want the full report kept secret. (I wonder what percent of those 17% are, witting or unwitting, Russian moles.)

Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac poll: "We want to know more, say voters who have read the bullet points and believe the Mueller investigation was fair, but would like to read it in full." The same poll found Trump's job approval at 39% and his disapproval at 55%, about the same as early in March. By a margin of 72% to 21% voters agree that Trump would be a bad role model for their children. (Can you imagine who that 21% is?)

48% of voters believe Trump is mentally stable

Most voters do not trust Trump. And you know who else doesn't trust him? The Republican Party establishment's operatives don't trust him either-- and try to keep important data away from him and away from the grifter family members.Tom LoBianoco, reporting for Yahoo News about the latest attempt of the GOP to replicate the Democrats' hugely successful ActBlue: "The Republican Party’s efforts to build a small-dollar donation machine to keep up with the Democrats has hit a wall: a deep mistrust of President Trump and his campaign among Republican operatives." Hilarious, huh? But no stupid.

Some GOP operatives who would be the ones to purchase the tool don’t want Trump and his family raiding their campaign lists for their own benefit, said campaign consultants reached by Yahoo News.

“They’re scared of adopting it. Imagine Trump owning our data-- handing everything over to that guy, the guy who fucks with everybody, who has destroyed our party,” said a senior consultant for a conservative political group with national clients.

Republicans involved with the effort say there are no delays and everything is moving smoothly, and dismissed concerns about Trump stealing data as sour grapes from consultants who will lose money because they didn’t win the work on the project, now known as WINRED.

...Architects of the new project guaranteed that vendors data would be safe against intrusion or poaching by Trump and his campaign. “We’re an open book on what The Data Trust can and can’t do,” said Gerrit Lansing, one of the main architects of the new WINRED. “No one can get any donor data from Data Trust at anytime.”

The project recently changed its name from “Patriot Pass” to “WINRED,” after New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft called President Donald Trump and complained the project sounded like it was affiliated with his football team, according to a Republican familiar with the call from Kraft.

The fight over WINRED and online fundraising marks one of the last holdouts of the Republican establishment against Trump.

At the center of the problem is the very lifeblood of political operations-- donor lists and voter data. Campaign consultants, many of them former staff for the party’s major political committees and veterans of presidential bids, sell their services to candidates based on their success-- and their success is built on helping the candidates raise money and reach voters.

The Republican political ecosphere is filled with veterans of the Bush, McCain and Romney campaigns-- many of them still deeply distrusting of Trump. But the concerns extend to converts to Trump, including staunch conservatives, afraid that Trump’s main operatives will steal their business, because they would have backdoor access to their clients and donors via the new operation.

On the other side is a loose political collaboration formed by the Trump campaign, the RNC and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top political aide, racing to plug a glaring hole in the Republicans’ operations heading into the 2020 elections.

WINRED was crafted to bring the GOP back up to speed in fundraising by merging the party’s voter data vault, the Data Trust, with an online payment system, Revv. WINRED is set to be the official online fundraising tool for the Trump reelection campaign, the RNC, the official campaign arms for House and Senate Republicans, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Campaign Committee.

But that doesn’t guarantee the vast ecosphere of Republican operatives and campaign consultants outside the official party committees will adopt the new tool for their candidates.

“It’s basically letting Trump sabotage our lists, and we know we can’t trust [Trump campaign manager] Brad Parscale. ... It would be stored in Data Trust-- which Brad has complete access to. ... He has every incentive to not protect our data,” said a senior campaign consultant.

In short, the problem is Trump. “If this was [conservative mega-donor] Sheldon Adelson starting this, I would have no problem with it,” said the consultant.

The RNC’s Data Trust forms the base of the WINRED system, a massive vault of information on voters and donors built in the wake of the 2012 loss by Mitt Romney. Revv would connect with the information in the Data Trust to form the payment processor for WINRED.

But the Republican political ecosphere is filled with large consulting firms who have built and maintained their own vaults of information about donors and voters. The consultants who raised concerns said they worried that they would have to provide access to those vaults to the Data Trust, thereby creating backdoor access to their information by Trump and his campaign.

...The term “small-dollar” is a bit of a misnomer because the fundraising from small donations has become massive in recent years. And it is also a lucrative business for the consultants who run the online payment processing systems.

ActBlue reaped $18.9 million in fees in the 2016 campaign cycle, according to FEC records. But that number catapulted in 2018, as ActBlue collected roughly $50 million in fees, according to the FEC.

Revv, founded by former RNC digital director Gerrit Lansing, did booming business with the Trump campaign in 2016. In just under six months running Trump’s online fundraising, Revv was paid close to $3 million by the Trump campaign, according to FEC reports.

The scrap over small-dollar fundraising is just one of many that the GOP has had to contend with as they gear up for the 2020 elections.

In the wake of the 2018 losses, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former Trump adviser David Bossie launched a whisper campaign to try to oust Trump campaign manager Parscale, according to Republicans familiar with the effort.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has been trying to snuff out the sparks of an insurgency before they can catch fire. Bossie met with Maryland Republicans earlier this month to try to quash a possible challenge by Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan. And party officials in South Carolina and Kansas have begun trying to axe their Republican primary contests altogether, an effort to protect Trump that critics have decried as frighteningly anti-democratic.

Yes, frighteningly anti-democratic-- like Cheri Bustos, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and the DCCC. The Democrats and Republicans are different on many policy matters-- like Choice and gays-- but when it comes to grotesque corruption and dysfunctional careerism, any prison for corrupt politicians would be overflowing with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. I hope it starts soon-- and that it's run by a private prison firm... because we all know how well they treat their charges.

In a Washington Post OpEd yesterday about Trump and the Mueller report, George Conway wrote that "If the charge were unfitness for office, the verdict would already be in: guilty beyond a reasonable doubt... On the facts, obstruction turns on what's in a defendant's mind-- often a difficult thing to determine, and especially difficult with a mind as twisted as Trump's. And complicating things even more, paradoxically, is the fact that some of Trump's arguably obstructionist conduct took place in full public view-- something that, with a normal person with normal moral inhibitions, would have indicated a lack of criminal intent. But in the head of Donald J. Trump, who knows?... [W]hether the Mueller report ever sees the light of day, there is one charge that can be resolved now. Americans should expect far more from a president than merely that he not be provably a criminal. They should expect a president to comport himself in accordance with the high duties of his office."