According to a former top adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, the ex-president is bypassing the traditional fundraising apparatus at the state level and is using what they called a "Ponzi' scheme" to raise cash now that his legal bills have exploded due to his legal woes.
As the Daily Beast's Jake Lahut is reporting, Trump, who was slammed with a 7-count Federal indictment late Thursday, is skipping over paid organizers in multiple states and has set up a pyramid scheme that relies on unpaid volunteers who are expected to recruit ten contributors who are then expected to do the same and so forth.
"There’s a reason presidential campaigns tend to rely on paid talent for the most important organizing gigs. In 2016, Trump ponied up for those positions. While he personally shirked from the nitty-gritty of retail politicking in New Hampshire, his paid field organizers built an effective voter outreach operation that carried the campaign to a resounding victory," the report states.
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This time around, he's cutting out the middle man and that has some GOP organizers at the local level fuming.
One former senior Trump adviser cast a jaundiced eye at how the former president is using people.
“It sounds like a Ponzi scheme. My guess is they’re using these people for optics while they spend money on legal bills… What a f--king s--tshow,” they complained.
During previous campaigns, local staffers were hired at rates like $15.75 an hour, but this time they have been cast aside for a volunteer army of supporters with limited fundraising skills.
One New Hampshire Republican complained, "Let’s be honest, other than the hardcore Trump people, the majority of people now wanna get paid,” before adding, "While we had followers, they were not the intensity that they are now. We had a lot of diversification. Now the Trump people are very hard Trump people with little tolerance for anybody else, so it’s gonna be a hard sell.”
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