Inside the grift that could cost Donald Trump the election

02 November 2024

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump attends a campaign event in Gastonia, North Carolina, U.S. November 2, 2024. REUTERS/Megan Varner

If Kamala Harris and Tim Walz win the White House on Nov. 5, the Democrats may owe their triumph to the notorious character flaw that plagues the Republican Party of Donald Trump: an irresistible urge to grift.

In an election likely to be determined by a very narrow proportion of votes in a few states, the difference between winning and losing could very well depend on what politicians have long referred to by the initials "GOTV" -- getting out the vote -- a process that involves calling people at home, knocking on their doors, letting them know how and where to vote, and perhaps even providing transportation to the polling place. It is a complex, demanding and essential campaign function that requires literally tens of millions of individual interactions to be orchestrated with exceptional attention to detail. To perform those tasks poorly (or not at all) can transform incipient victory into certain defeat.

It is also a potentially expensive element of a national election, even when most of the job is undertaken by volunteers. That's where the opportunities for grifting arose, after members of the Trump gang realized his campaign's field operations would attract big money from wealthy supporters. And at the forefront of the would-be chiselers in the 2024 campaign was Charlie Kirk, the aging leader of the MAGA movement's youth organization, Turning Point USA. (Kirk's personally profitable stewardship of Turning Point is examined in my recent book "The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism.")

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While the "ground game" for a Republican presidential ticket has been traditionally overseen by the Republican National Committee, Kirk used his close connections with the Trump family, especially Don Jr., to seize effective control of the party apparatus. (No doubt the president's eldest son was grateful to Turning Point for bulk buying copies of his book "Triggered.") He succeeded in pushing out RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and promoting his Turning Point PAC as the Trump campaign's principal field operation. (He also persuaded Trump to install daughter-in-law Lara Trump, with no discernible credentials, as RNC chair so she could advance his fortunes.) He announced he would raise $108 million to "chase every vote" in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin.

The wholesale abandonment of McDaniel's extensive planning provoked deep skepticism among veteran GOP operatives. They saw no reason why Kirk would need so much cash to get out the vote in three states -- or why anyone should invest in his dubious project. They noted that Turning Point's previous election organizing efforts in Arizona's elections in 2022 had not ended well: Every Republican running statewide that year lost.

But Turning Point's lousy midterm results didn't discourage Trump, who was drawn to Kirk's emphasis on turning out "low-propensity" far-right MAGA base voters, rather than seeking to persuade the unaffiliated or undecided. That strategy has lately devolved into a crusade for the support of alienated young men, who may or may not actually show up at the polls. How Kirk plans to motivate them is unclear.

Not long after McDaniel's ouster, Kirk and his allies began to pressure state and local Republican officials to shift their voter outreach and canvassing programs onto a new platform -- an app marketed by Superfeed Technologies, a private firm that happens to be owned by Tyler Bowyer, Turning Point USA's chief operating officer. Just to keep it all in the family, Kirk's mother-in-law sits on the Superfeed board of directors.

Now perhaps this web of conflict and profit is all perfectly legitimate. And maybe the Superfeed app and Kirk's ambitious vote-herding plan will prove to be a brilliant success. But election experts told the Associated Press in early October that they doubt Turning Point can mobilize enough new or infrequent Trump voters to affect the outcome. They pointed out that record numbers of voters cast ballots in 2016 and 2020, which doesn't leave a large share of likely voters to be organized.

Another sign of weakness is that Turning Point has turned over its outreach campaign in Michigan, which reportedly collapsed, to Elon Musk's America PAC. The Musk effort has suffered from its own widely mocked technical glitches and flaws -- including a scam that allowed its employees to falsify their canvassing records.

Contrast all that sleaze with the Harris-Walz campaign, bolstered by tens or even hundreds of thousands of unpaid volunteers. They are motivated not by love of money but love of country.

We don't know which side will win yet -- but we already know who deserves to win.

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