Trump's MAGA PAC is now just a slush fund for his legal bills—and it's running dry

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The news has been terrible of late, full of war and bloodshed and an unending series of American meatheads and godbotherers combing through libraries to find new books to ban, so here’s a moment of actual good news to bask in for a moment. Remember Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again PAC,” aka the remnants of his campaign fundraising committee? It reported yet another loss this last fundraising quarter, and at the rate things are going, it will run dry of cash in just a few more quarters.

Instead, Trump’s MAGA PAC has been reduced to that most primal of all Donald Trump-adjacent schemes. It’s an entity that pays Donald’s legal bills so that Donald doesn’t have to. The people still donating to Donald Trump can be assured that little to none of their money will be going to Make America Great Again. Nope! They’re just acting as Donald’s walking checkbooks.

The Daily Beast reports that MAGA PAC lost $1.2 million in 2022’s first quarter, the third straight quarter of deficit. $1.1 million of that loss was “legal fees.” The PAC now has roughly $5.5 million of remaining cash on hand, which means that if their fundraising efforts continue to (ahem) suck, they won’t have any cash left to pay Donald’s legal bills around this time next year. That’s assuming that Donald does not start ordering his lawyers to screw around with challenges to whatever midterm voting totals his most devoted suck-ups convince him are “suspicious.” We all know the chance of Donald not ordering spurious election challenges is approximately zero, so long as he personally doesn’t have to write the checks.

It may be a way to the 2024 presidential season, but these aren’t the fundraising numbers of someone who’s trying to retain his status as the King of Republicanism. This is just Donald scraping up whatever’s left in the cash barrels to throw towards his lawyers.

Trump continues to have a whole lot of legal expenses for a whole lot of things. He has to defend himself against evidence-gathering probes of his role in a violent assault on Congress. He’s got New York investigators breathing down his neck for that whole lifetime-of-financial-crimes bit. But he’s also got to pay all the lawyers filing asinine claims disputing the results of his election losses.

So yeah, there you go. It’s not so much a Make America Great Again fundraising PAC as it is a Pay Donald’s Legal Defenses PAC, and while there are apparently still enough Trump allies around to have given the PAC $1.4 million in donations last quarter, that’s … not a lot, right? It feels conspicuously like the whole thing’s coasting on Trump voters who forgot to uncheck the “donate this amount every month” box on one of Trump’s dodgy fundraising sites and now don’t even know they’re being charged.

There you go, then. Some genuinely good news. Donald Trump’s Pay My Legal Bills PAC is running so dry that it will soon not be able to pay Donald’s legal bills, all the money it is raising is coming from pro-Trump Americans who we don’t have to feel bad for because they chose to be scammed of their own free will, and Donald will have to spend actual effort coming up with a new grift. Maybe he’ll form a new PAC, one with blackjack and overpriced drinks. Maybe he’ll turn Mar-a-Lago into an unlicensed casino.

He’s fortunate he’s turned the whole Republican National Committee into a cash machine for the rest of his legal bills, because with all the criminal and civil probes poking at him those bills will be going away approximately never. And maybe the even the Republican National Committee will at some point figure that out, and maybe they won’t. It’s no skin off our noses. If they want to spend less money on getting Republicans elected and more money on Donald Trump’s personal legal grooming, who are we to object.