In the days since Donald Trump named Mike Pence as his running mate, the Hillary Clinton campaign has subjected Trump to a relentless pounding on the air, on the Web, and via her many surrogates. The pounding continued on Sunday, when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack accused the Trump campaign of being the political equivalent of a Ponzi scheme.
Vilsack, who is on the short list to be Hillary’s running mate, was in his hometown of Mount Pleasant, Iowa, for the rededication of a memorial to that town’s former mayor, Edd King. King was murdered in 1986 during a city council meeting, and Vilsack was elected his successor a year later. That launched a career that took Vilsack to the Iowa Senate, Iowa’s governorship, and ultimately Obama’s cabinet.
Normally a soft-spoken fellow, Vilsack minced no words when asked his feelings about Trump.
“Donald Trump is sort of to politics what Bernie Madoff was to investment. He is selling something that people don’t fully understand and appreciate what it actually means.”
Translation: at bottom, Trump is no different from the man responsible for the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.
How’s that, you ask? Well, Vilsack thinks that most Americans don’t know what Trump really means when he brays, “Make America great again!” It means trickle-down economics, bringing back torture, and allowing more nations to have nuclear weapons. He believes that many Americans are in for “an eye-opening experience” once they see what Trump is really trying to sell to this country.
The more I think about it, the comparison between Trump and Madoff is very apt. Like Madoff, Trump is trying to be someone he isn’t. It’s rather ironic that a guy who is the definition of the entitled and privileged one-percenter is selling himself as the Joe Sixpack candidate. Sounds a lot like saying that you’re using a “split-strike conversion” when you’re doing little more than entering figures in a computer, then pulling money out of your bank account to pay your investors.
Additionally, Trump has no campaign infrastructure worth mentioning, which is unheard of at this stage for a major-party campaign. A number of state operations either have no Website or no functioning telephones. Again, it’s really no different from saying you’re using a complex investment strategy when you’re really just putting numbers in a spreadsheet.
There may be another parallel between Trump and Madoff. As we all know, a Ponzi scheme is doomed to collapse whenever there’s not enough new money to pay the old investors. That moment may be at hand for Trump. As we all know, he managed to get the nomination by using as much free television and radio airtime as he could get, as well as using Twitter to bludgeon everyone in his way.
But Trump is learning the hard way that free airtime and social media can only get you so far in a general election. We already know that Hillary is boatracing Trump in the fundraising department. At last report, Trump had raised a grand total of $66 million–not even a fourth of Hillary’s $314 million war chest.
The Washington Post asked the forecasters at Good Judgment if they think Trump will raise $1 billion–more or less the standard for a major-party campaign. In Good Judgment’s view, there is literally no chance he’ll get to that figure. Most forecasters think he’ll spend anywhere from $250 million to $750 million–nowhere near enough to keep from getting pounded by Hillary on the ground and on the air in September and October. Am I the only one who thinks this is no different from the times Madoff was scrambling to get more money anywhere?
Madoff’s Ponzi scheme ended with him being nationally disgraced and what amounts to a life sentence. The way things are going, Trump’s campaign will also end with him being disgraced nationally. It may also end with the financial equivalent of a jail sentence. After all, given the way he’s acted on the campaign trail, it’s going to be hard to see how his brand survives. When you’ve spent the better part of three decades trading on just your name, losing that name can be the equivalent of a death sentence. It would be what Trump deserves, and then some.
