Juleanna Glover, the CEO of corporate consultancy Ridgely Walsh, recently took a look at former President Donald Trump's campaign spending reports and delivered a stark warning to anyone who has forked over significant sums to his reelection bid.
Writing in the New York Times, Glover makes the case that giving money to Trump is a highly risky investment, given where donors' money has been going.
"Anyone who has spent time reviewing Donald Trump’s campaign spending reports would quickly conclude they’re a governance nightmare," she contended. "There is so little disclosure about what happened to the billions raised in 2020 and 2024 that donors (and maybe even the former president himself) can’t possibly know how it was spent."
Drilling into specifics, Glover said that an analysis of Trump's 2020 campaign expenses showed that large sums of money went "into a legal and financial black hole reportedly controlled by Trump family members and close associates" and she says that this year's campaign is shaping up to be largely the same.
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In 2020, notes Glover, roughly two-thirds of all money spent by the Trump campaign was shoveled into American Made Media Consultants, a Delaware-based firm whose first president was reportedly none other than Lara Trump, the daughter-in-law of the former president who has since been installed in a leadership position at the Republican National Committee.
Given this, it's little surprise that the same pattern that governed the Trump campaign's spending in 2020 is now being replicated this year.
"This election, the Trump campaign and four of its PACs have paid Red Curve Solutions, another private company, at least $18 million," writes Glober. "The Campaign Legal Center says Red Curve appears to pay Mr. Trump’s legal bills and then gets reimbursed by the PACs. (The law is murky on what types of legal bills can be paid by campaigns, but some are allowed.) The head of Red Curve also serves as the treasurer for the Trump campaign as well as the affiliated PACs. What percentage of donor contributions go to lawyers defending Mr. Trump? It’s impossible to know."
