Fox News political analyst Juan Williams is sounding the alarm on what he calls a major scam being perpetrated by former President Donald Trump and the Republican party.
In an op-ed for The Hill, Williams writes that “Trump and his disciples in the GOP are really putting the “con” in modern conservatism these days, citing the amount of money they have raised using shady tactics to fool supporters into donating multiple times without their knowledge using false claims of election fraud.
Williams quoted a report by The Washington Post that revealed that Trump raised a whopping $82 million in the first six months of 2021.
“It is extraordinary for an ex-president who has been booted off social media,” to raise that amount of money, The Washington Post noted.
“Trump has continued to vigorously solicit donations from supporters, based mostly on false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election,” the Post added.
In Congress, Trump’s success in raising money with lies has led to shameless imitators following his road to the gold.
In the first six months of 2021, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and QAnon fanatic, raised more than $4 million.
“Greene is raising money despite being stripped of her committee assignments earlier this year because of her penchant for extremism. Greene in the past has endorsed the idea of assassinating Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and engaged in antisemitic nonsense about space lasers causing wildfires to the benefit of the Rothschild banking family.
In the same period, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) raised about $1.8 million. Her appeal for GOP dollars centers on her bragging that she carries a gun.
And then there is Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.). He also raised $1.8 million so far this year.
His pitch is to distort Biden administration efforts to get people vaccinated with a door-to-door outreach effort. To Cawthorn, this is the precursor to a plot to take Bibles and guns away from Americans.
Trump’s grifting game is also being mimicked by powerful, well-funded conservative donor networks.
As The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported last week, those groups are also relying on Trump’s “Big Lie.” They tell donors they need money to uncover voter fraud.
And when they fail to find any fraud, these dark-money organizations then tell donors they need more cash for more probes in search of fraud. They never find any and so they ask again.
It is a never-ending pitch.
Williams cited Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation with Common Cause, telling The Guardian that “Donald Trump is a one-man scam PAC.”
“Bait-and-switch is among his favorite fundraising tactics,” Ryan added, pointing to Trump’s Save America PAC which told “supporters he needed money to challenge the result of an election he clearly lost, and then wound up not spending [anything] on litigation last year.”
“Trump is calling the tune for a frightening game of grifting that has robbed the GOP of its principles,” Williams wrote before asking: Where is the Republican willing to call out this scam?
