I know this isn’t going to surprise anyone here, but the numbers are in and they are staggering.
Former President Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party entered this year having stockpiled more than $175 million from fund-raising in November and December based on his false claims of voter fraud, spending only a tiny fraction on lawyers and bills for his effort to overturn the presidential election, according to new campaign finance reports filed on Sunday night.
The picture that emerges in the new Federal Election Commission reports is of Mr. Trump mounting a furious public relations effort to spread the lie and keep generating money from it, rather than making a sustained legal push to try to support his conspiracy theories.
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All told, Mr. Trump’s campaign spent only $10 million on legal costs — about one-fifth of what it spent on advertising and fund-raising, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings from Nov. 4 through the end of the year.
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The Republican National Committee ended the year with more than $80 million in the bank after the fund-raising blitz, and Mr. Trump had $31 million in the new political action committee he formed in November for his post-presidential political ventures.
Esquire Magazine has already weighed in with their take on it...
The Republican Party was profiting off performative sedition right up through the moment when it became real and deadly. This became quite literally blood money. Thousands of Grampas and Meemaws, sending in their ten-buck checks to pay for an event that ultimately ended with the killing of a cop. (For the moment, we'll leave aside the rich lycanthropes who also donated.) The poison leached down to the country's political groundwater.
I’d call that an accurate assessment.