We don’t talk enough about Trump’s $850M pay-to-play slush fund

There’s actually three things that are pretty certain in life: death, taxes, and the fact that the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution explicitly bars Donald Trump from seeking a third term as president.

Even Trump, for all his occasional pep-rally bluster and online merch about running in 2028, has kind of, sort of, begrudgingly acknowledged this reality. “You know the law is very strong on that,” the president admitted to reporters during a gaggle just last month.

That’s actually a good answer for Trump, because it avoids the obvious follow-up of how a president who’ll be 82 on Election Day in 2028, can barely stay awake now during important moments like a 9/11 memorial service, has probably consumed more Big Macs than the late Morgan Spurlock — and, oh, has a 32% approval rating — could expect to win, or even make it up the steps of his Qatari bribe jet in two years.

Still, I wish that one of those tarmac journalists would throw on a Peter Falk-style overcoat and ask, Columbo-like, just one more thing of the 47th and possibly last president:

If you’re not running for office ever again, why have you raised some $850 million — and counting — in campaign funds since your last and supposedly final campaign? Why are you sitting on most of this money? Are you planning to take it with you on Jan. 20. 2029?

I’d been mulling this column for a while when it was announced late last week that Trump’s best-known political action committee, the super PAC called MAGA Inc., with about $400 million in the bank, is finally cracking open the vault, slightly.

MAGA Inc. just transferred $49 million to yet another new PAC, No Going Back Inc. — the more money laundering the better, apparently — that’s actually going to buy ads supporting some GOP candidates in the November midterms, especially in tight Senate races in Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and New Hampshire.

Indeed, expenditures like that are the only legitimate argument for Trump to have such a large political slush fund — to elect sympatico lawmakers who can support the president’s agenda, whatever that is. Whatever else happens in this election, two more years of a Republican-led Senate would allow Trump to keep appointing right-wing judges and at least limit the investigations of his gross misconduct.

Still, even some Republicans are acknowledging the $49 million, and presumably some additional funds over the next seven weeks, are too little, and too late. In August, when voter opinions tend to harden ahead of the fall campaign season, MAGA Inc. spent a piddling $825,000, to prop up the new, Trump-supported South Carolina Sen. Darlene Graham in a GOP primary battle, and nothing more.

“Our threat level should be up and people are going to have an expectation that you deploy all your resources,” one GOP donor told Politico, before the $49 million drop was announced. “He’s sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, not doing that. We’re in September.” Interestingly, MAGA Inc. has spent virtually nothing on House races, even though a Democratic House is likely to impeach Trump for the third time in 2027.

Republicans should be alarmed. We all should be alarmed, for a number of reasons. Boomers like me remember, vaguely, an old-school TV game show that was called You Don’t Say, with a tagline that I’ve never forgotten: “Remember, it’s not what you say. It’s what you don’t say.”

When it comes to MAGA Inc. — and several other massive piles of Trump-connected cash — political reporters ought to realize it’s not what you spend. It’s what you don’t spend.

If Trump is freeing up $49 million to try and sway close Senate races, where is the other $800 million going? And where am I getting this figure? It was buried in a recent MS Now article, which noted, correctly, that there is a separate, so-called “dark money” arm of MAGA Inc. called Securing American Greatness, that’s believed to hold as much as $450 million, most from secret donors.

That figure comes from Trump himself, who told reporters last month at an airport press gaggle: ”I’ve raised a lot, and nobody knows what it is, but I will tell you it’s about $850 million. I’ll be spending a lot of that money for — and my own money — but I’ll be spending a lot of that money for candidates that I think are good, Republican candidates.”

Nobody knows what it is. You can thank Trump’s pals on a right-wing rogue Supreme Court for a generation of bad rulings that have sold American elections to the highest, secret bidders.

The other thing about Trump’s comments is that, despite what he said, he’s actually so far not spending a lot of that money. Even though, by laws that are now honored in the breach, there’s supposed to be a clear separation between Trump and these super PACs, the president sees these funds as his own money.

“This is my money, that I control,” Trump told reporters earlier this month. Increasingly, anxious Republicans and other political observers worry that Trump is hoarding the money not to elect GOP candidates but to spend on his legal defense once those candidates lose and investigation-minded Democrats retake the House and maybe the Senate.

The law does say that Trump can’t legally pocket the money when he leaves office. And we all know what a stickler Trump is for following the law, right?

It’s worth noting that there are other piles of cash we know far too little about. For example, Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee raised a staggering $250 million — more than double his 2017 record — from the usual assortment of billionaires, tech companies, etc., and yet there’s been virtually no accounting of how that money was spent. And Team Trump is hoping to raise a gobsmacking $950 million by next year for his utterly amorphous plans for a presidential library, honoring a POTUS who doesn’t read.

Add it all up, and you’ve got a potential slush fund of roughly $2 billion. That’s appalling, but even worse with the knowledge that — and this cannot be repeated enough — with Trump never running for office again, the donors to these funds are almost all millionaires and billionaires who simply want something from the government for themselves or their corporations.

Earlier this year, reporters used tax records and other available reports to sleuth out three of the donors to the secretive Securing American Greatness, Inc., including the Bitcoin Advocacy Project, which gave $2 million as Trump was boosting that industry through deregulation. The tech firm Qualcomm had been outed earlier as a $1 million donor to this massive fund that is largely a mystery.

There are numerous examples of donors giving money to MAGA Inc. around the time of favorable government actions. For example, a subsidiary of the private-prison giant GEO Group gave $1.4 million to the Trump-aligned PAC in June at the same time that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was awarding the firm $165 million in additional contracts. Michelle D’Souza, the chief executive officer of Pentagon contractor Unified Business Technologies, gave MAGA Inc. $4 million last October.

That’s in addition to the family members of those seeking presidential pardons, who made huge donations to MAGA Inc. right before Trump granted clemency to their relatives. That tally includes $3.5 million from the daughter of a Venezuelan billionaire who’d reached a plea bargain on federal bribery charges before he was freed by Trump, or Paul Walczak, a convicted tax chart pardoned after his mom gave $1 million to MAGA Inc.

» READ MORE: Trump’s insane pardons are killing any faint flicker of justice in America | Will Bunch

Many of MAGA Inc.’s donors are billionaires, and while some surely share Trump’s authoritarian worldview, many of them want something from the White House — and they are getting what they want. It is legal graft, a massive pay-to-play scheme that gets a giant shrug in the unholy world created by a right-wing master plan.

It’s time to stop shrugging. When Democrats retake the House, an almost certainty at this point, an investigation into Trump’s $1-to-2-billion in assorted slush funds, and whether any corruption laws were violated in raising all this cash, needs to pole vault to the top of their very long list of possible probes into this rogue president.

It’s kind of nuts when you think about it: a president corruptly raising hundreds of millions of dollars that he’ll end up spending to hire lawyers to defend himself from the looming corruption charges. Maybe it would have been better — not just for the sake of democracy, but for Trump himself — not to have gone down this road in the first place?

But then, nothing makes sense anymore. And nothing makes less sense than the lack of energy, so far, in accounting for Trump’s pay-to-play dollars and how they are being spent. Keeping an American republic depends on answering these questions, and then making sure this never, ever happens again.

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