Twitter… give me those schadendorphines baby!
That’s a change from the traditional fully lowered.
That’s why it’s respectful to their, er, fallen comrade.
Clever idea. Of course, the Repubs would never actually fly their flies at half- (or less) staff . . .
But maybe the Dems should, just to troll them. That would be great!
With shirt tails sticking out… or Stars & Stripes bunting!
All the women should show up with ten foot poles.
Heh. That might even work.
Here’s a stunning but totally unsurprising story about how the Trump campaign- increasingly desperate for cash and humiliated by poor fund-raising numbers- resorted to increasingly dishonest tactics in order to fleece their not-very-smart small dollar donors.
Here’s the link, but it may be paywalled but it’s an exclusive - I’m going to summarize but it’s only April 3rd and it’s worth one of your free NYT views.
Now, most fund-raising platforms give you an option to make a recurring donation. It’s usually a checkbox that you select.
The Trump campaign made the checkbox that authorized a monthly donation the default. But this created a problem for them, because people were able to easily see it and some people, people of wavering patriotism that would rather eat and pay rent than fully commit to Making America Great Again, unchecked the box and just gave $50 or $100 instead of giving ALL their money to Donald Trump.
So they began to deliberately make it more obscure and they added a new feature
Under pre-checked box that said “Make this a recurring monthly donation”, they added another pre-checked box that said, in big bold letters
Help us break a fund-raising record for Trump’s birthday JOIN NOW!
and under that, in tiny print, it said “additional donation will process on 6/14”
And TrumpWorld got all thrilled because hardly anyone saw it and they got to run a bunch of people’s credit cards again! They raised a lot of money that day - so they started making the text above the checkboxes longer and Trumpier.
By October, this was the text on the pre-selected checkboxes - I’ve copied this directly from the article.
This is the FINAL month until Election Day and we need EVERY patriot stepping up if we’re going to WIN FOUR MORE YEARS for President Trump. He’s revitalizing our economy, restoring LAW & ORDER and returning us to American greatness, but he’s not done yet. This is your chance - stand with President Trump & MAXIMIZE YOUR IMPACT NOW
(Then, in small gray print)
Make this a weekly recurring donation until 11/3
President Trump: October 9th marks 25 days out from Election Day and we need your support. American Patriots like YOU inspired me to keep fighting this past week, and I’m not done yet. I’m asking you to join operation MAGA and help me assure VICTORY in November. Join the movement now.
(Then, in small gray print)
Donate an extra $100 automatically on 10/09.
You will notice that they are now taking the recurring donations weekly.
A LOT of Trump supporters were hard hit by this scammy technique. The ones that had scrimped and saved to make a large one time donation of $500 or $750 found they had been billed 5 or 6 times in October. Trump drained their bank accounts and their other checks bounced.
The Trump campaign ended up refunding over 12% of what they took in during the last 6 months of the campaign. The Biden campaign refunded a little less than 3 percent. Apparently 2-3% is normal and most of that is typically contributions that exceed legal limits.
Credit card companies like Amex and Bank of America estimated that 1-3% of their vendor complaints in that time frame involved the Trump campaign. That doesn’t sound like much until you stop to think about how small the Trump campaign is relative to the entirety of credit card commerce, then its huge.
The article has more details.
Trump supporters are marks, plain and simple.
It is one hell of a story. Many of us have been grateful to you, Ann_Hedonia, for your accounts of your adventures in letting the Trump campaign try to bilk you—thank goodness you didn’t ever go so far as to give them any account info!
For those who’ve used up all their NYT views, some of the graphics and other relevant info can be seen here in the Twitter feed of the Times article writer:
There’s the makings of a helluva class action lawsuit there. Would be nice if one hit high gear around primary season next cycle.
I think there’s also a non-paywalled version here:
Little boxes
On the website
Little boxes
Checked by Shit Gibbons
Little boxes
On the website
All my savings
Went away
[with apologies to Malvina Reynolds]
How ticky-tacky Trump and his trumpites truly are.
I know that Amex, at least, can be proactive against companies that use that type of deceptive technique.
I once ended up getting billed for some skin care cream I had selected as a FREE OFFER in exchange for filling out a survey at the website of a large mainstream business (Citibank). I guess the offer was free but not the product, or something like that.
But I never saw the bill.
I got a call from American Express wanting to know if I’d authorized the charge for $79.99 from this company. I told them I had selected a product I thought was free and I was probably guilty of not reading the fine print. I told them I would contact the vendor and they said, “No, you don’t have to do that - we will cancel the charge”.
Which was actually really proactive on the part of AMEX, I guess they’d had complaints about this charge before.
Honestly, if it had just shown up on my credit card statement, I probably would’ve paid it- I would’ve made sure there weren’t any recurring charges but I probably would’ve written off the $80 as a reading comprehension tax.
PLUS
My footnote to this story is that the skin cream was REALLY good. Not $80 good because I’d never pay that much for any skin cream that wasn’t laced will illicit drugs but I might’ve been a regular customer at $25-30. Too bad they had to be so sleazy.
Glad to hear that about American Express. (I had a similar experience with Chase, some time back; not about face cream, but about a subscription.)
You just know that all the cc companies must be looking at Trump’s shenanigans with a very jaundiced eye; he’s costing them money. Giant corporations tend to take a negative view of that sort of thing.
VISA is pretty good about that sort of thing, too. It would not surprise me if many CC issuers, just like a large and growing number of lenders, contractors, lawyers, and many other organizations, including Twitter and the PGA, simply refused to do any business with Trump.
I’m sorry, but Trump ripping off his dipshits is just right.
I enjoy watching the rubes getting scammed, but I hate to see the orange shit-gibbon enriching himself.
Yeah, you know, it’s like a six of of one, or half dozen of the other kind of quandry. The grounding factor is that stupid motherfucking Trump supporters are fucking themselves. It makes me smile.