Live from the Republicans' Self-Made Gehenna: : The Desperate and the Fail: Inside Trump's June Fundraising Blitz: "I still can't quite believe that even as big a huckster as Donald Trump...
...thinks he can get away with this. But... Trump was probably lying when he announced with great fanfare a week ago that he was converting some $50 million of loans to his campaign into simple contributions.... Back on June 23rd, on the heels of the Trump campaign's catastrophic and humiliating May FEC report, he grandly announced that he was forgiving the debt and that he would file the relevant paperwork with the FEC that day. But that apparently never happened. The FEC has no record of such a filing....
They now claim that they're filing those documents in their June FEC reports.... With Trump, I'm pretty confident they're lying, or at a minimum playing for time, hoping that some opportunity presents itself where forgiving the loan becomes unnecessary. But this new wrinkle to the loan story points to a bigger picture which is probably the best way to understand this bizarre and still totally unexplained story of the emails to MPs in Northern Europe.... Trump's dismal May FEC report was only a little more than a week ago.... Since then, Trump's been... spamming people all over the world... desperate to raise money fast.... The June FEC report is baked as of today. And then everything is frozen in place until that report is released on July 20th... during the Republican convention which runs from July 18th to the 21st. If the June report is anything like as awful as the May report it's catastrophic. And that catastrophe will land right during the convention....
He needs to convince Republicans that his campaign isn't a joke. So he's got until midnight tonight to raise as much money as possible. If the number ain't good, it's a PR time bomb set to go off during the GOP convention. Put this all together and you start to get a sense of why Trump has gone from fundraising indifference into a kind of manic fundraising blizzard in a matter of days. It also likely gives us a sense of why he's sending his emails to parliamentarians in Iceland and Finland and Australia. No, not because he's that desperate that he wants their money but because they're in a such a panicked rush they're throwing everything at the wall they can.... It seems... these were lists simply floating around the Trump Organization, tied to some earlier business venture.... This seems like a preposterous theory. But all the conceivable explanations are equally preposterous. And yet one of them must be true....
Perhaps Trump's June report will show great numbers. It wouldn't be for lack of trying. But for now, all signs point to the familiar mix of incompetence, lies and desperate nonsense, all aimed at avoiding another massive embarrassment three weeks from now in Cleveland.
