Trump Is Overdoing It With The Barrage Of Emails
Even for an epic sore loser, this is a remarkable volume of emails in a ridiculously short period of time. I thought getting an email almost every day from L.L. Bean was obnoxious. Trumps outreach is pathetic.
I signed up many years ago for emails from both Democrats and Republicans as a journalistic pursuit. I never contribute money, nor do I respond to surveys and petitions. Often Ive laughed at the sophomoric pleas and the basement-level marketing approach. But this is different, and it seems to be growing with each day, rather than fading.
Trumps latest emails ask $30 in return for a tee-shirt on which is printed: Count All Legal Votes. Even as recounts confirmed his loss, and courts rejected his pleas, Trump emailed the other day: I concede NOTHING.
Trump missives still include links to the Trump 2020 App, as well as to Trumps Twitter feed and Facebook page. They all end with: We appreciate your support and with your help, well secure FOUR MORE YEARS!
Trump’s schemes:Trump wants to make money off the fake ‘stolen election’ crisis he created. Don’t let him.
For all the blather there is one thing I cant find in the fine print something even those who voted for Trump would probably appreciate at this point. The Trump emails, like Trump himself, dont seem to offer a way to unsubscribe. Maybe I need a better magnifying glass.
Peter Funt is a writer and host of “Candid Camera.”
Trump Asked His Supporters To Donate To A Nonexistent Election Defense Fund
On November 15, for instance, the Trump campaign sent out an email that framed its post-election fundraising pitch around the presidents failing legal fight to overturn the results.
President Trump is FIGHTING BACK to defend the integrity of this Election, but he cant do it alone, the email said. He needs YOU to step up and join him by contributing to our critical Election Defense Fund. This is so important that hes giving YOU the opportunity to increase your impact by 1000%.
Trump Fundraising Emails
Theres just one problem: There is no such thing as Trumps Election Defense Fund. Instead, as Josh Dawsey and Michelle Ye Hee Lee detailed for the Washington Post, the majority of the money raised by email pitches of that sort goes to the leadership PAC Libowitz mentioned:
According to the fine print in the latest fundraising appeals, 75 percent of each contribution to the joint fundraising committee would first go toward the Save America leadership PAC and the rest would be shared with the party committee, to help with the partys operating expenses. This effectively means that the vast majority of low-dollar donations under the current agreement would go toward financing the presidents new leadership PAC, instead of efforts to support the party or to finance voting lawsuits.
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Former Trump White House Lawyer Reacts To Fbi Mar
The Trump campaign directed a group of Georgia Republicans to meet in secret and obscure their objectives in an email obtained by federal prosecutors as part of their recent investigation into Donald Trump‘s efforts to overturn the election in several swing states.
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Donald Trump Campaign Overview
- See also: Donald Trump presidential campaign, 2020
Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States. Former Vice President Joe Biden defeated Trump in the 2020 presidential election on November 3, 2020. Biden received 306 electoral votes, while Trump received 232.
Trump assumed office on January 20, 2017, and filed to run for re-election on the same day. He crossed the delegate threshold necessary to win the Republican nomination1,276 delegateson . He was formally nominated at the Republican National Convention on August 24, 2020.
Trump’s running mate was Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump’s re-election campaign focused on the economy, jobs, immigration, and foreign policy. He described his platform, which he named America First, during his inaugural address: “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs.”
Key policy initiatives during Trump’s first term included the United States withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and First Step Act in 2018, reducing the size of the ISIS caliphate, and establishing the Space Force as an independent military branch. Trump made more than 200 federal judicial appointments, including three U.S. Supreme Court justices.
New Email Shows How The Trump Campaign Instructed Fake Electors In Georgia To Secretly Infiltrate The State’s Capitol To Cast Electoral College Votes
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The Washington Post obtained an email from Trump’s campaign to fake GOP electors.
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The email outlined how these electors could infiltrate Georgia’s Capitol and sign certificates.
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It also asked the scheme’s participants for “complete secrecy and discretion” to ensure Trump’s win.
A bombshell email obtained by The Washington Post and CNN has unveiled new information on a scheme concocted by former President Donald Trump’s campaign in Georgia that involved getting fake electors to cast electoral votes for him.
The email, dated December 13, 2020, contained instructions on how the electors could position themselves to cast electoral college votes in favor of Trump, despite President Joe Biden’s victory in the state. Despite the plan, all 16 electoral votes for the state were cast in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket the following day.
In the email sent by a Trump campaign staffer, fake electors were instructed on how to infiltrate the Georgia State Capitol, sign certificates declaring they were there to cast the votes for the state, and ultimately defy the will of the state’s voters by voting for Trump instead.
“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” wrote Robert Sinners, the Trump campaign’s elections operations director in Georgia, per the outlets. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result a win in Georgia for President Trump but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
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Trump Supporters Are In Some Ways In An Abusive Relationship With Him
I noticed is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to establishing intimacy between Trump and his email recipients. Every rhetorician I spoke to for this story says that with his emails, Trump is attempting to construct a personal relationship with his audience. And its a very specific, very emotionally charged relationship.
Bostdorff argues that by building a sense of exclusivity around his donor list join the Trump Army, join the patriots, join me Trump is flattering his supporters, letting them into a secret elite. This flattery toward Trump supporters is matched by intense vitriol directed at all those who stand against Trump. And because Trump supporters are now in the club with Trump, they are also now against everyone he is against.
He doesnt have opponents, he has enemies, says Bostdorff. These are not people for his supporters to disagree with. They are enemies that have to be stopped at all costs.
Theres an implied personal relationship, says Stuckey. Which is a thing for Trump voters. She points to the prevalence of fundraising emails signed by Eric Trump and Don Jr. with variations on the line my father needs you.
Theres that contradiction there in general, with Trumps communication. Its assertive and aggressive on the one hand, and super needy and emotional on the other, says Stuckey. These emails fit that pattern. They imply this relationship where I already believe you to be strong, so its okay to cry in front of me.
Dark Patterns At Work
It turns out that I’m not the only one who has been collecting and dissecting Trump’s campaign emails. There’s a veritable cottage industry in this line of work.
A group of researchers at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy has just into a collection of 100,000 political emails, including those from the Trump campaign.
It found that the majority of emails used “dark patterns” to manipulate voters and trick donors.
Dark patterns are deceptive designs or messaging intended to dupe users into doing things they might not otherwise do.
The study found that most of the emails used at least one of six tactics identified by the researchers that are “geared towards nudging recipients to open emails” and manipulating them to donate.
“Deceptive and manipulative tactics are the norm in our , not the exception,” the researchers conclude.
These six tactics are:
- Using sensationalist or clickbait subject lines to encourage the recipient to open the email
- Using forward referencing or information-withholding terms designed to trigger curiosity
- Creating a false sense of urgency to create a “fear of loss” response
- Obscuring the name of the sender to encourage the reader to open the email
- Using false threads, a trick which makes the email look like it’s part of an ongoing conversation
- Inserting bogus Re: and Fwd: markers to make it seem like the email was a reply or forwarded.
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The Trump Campaign’s Unorthodox Email Tactics
The 2020 Trump reelection campaign has been anything but traditional and this has extended to their email practices as well. Political campaign email in the US is notorious for breaking general email best practices. Political email is explicitly exempted from compliance with CAN-SPAM, and so it is often a bit of Wild Wild West in regard to list acquisition and unsubscribe maintenance. Even when viewed through that lens, though, the 2020 Trump campaign is extremely unorthodox.
As the election started to come to a crescendo in mid-October, and possibly as a result of the Trump campaign falling behind the Biden campaign in fundraising in early October, the Trump campaign began ramping up the cadence of contact to individuals, peaking at 26 mails per day. Thats not a typo: the Trump campaign on the eve of the election was mailing their respondents an average of 26 times per day. Here you can see how that cadence built over the past few months, looking at traffic from joebiden.com and victory.donaldtrump.com, the primary sending domains for the two campaigns:
- VOTER FRAUD
- Can you chip in?
- , we need to re-launch the Biden Fight Fund
- A victory for We the People
- I am honored and humbled to be your President-elect
- Keep the faith
Trump is also mailing a larger portion of his overall list on any given day, though those lists are slightly shrinking as the daily cadence has gone up.
Trump Didnt Send Fundraising Email About Nuke Codes
CLAIM: Image shows a fundraising email by former President Donald Trump sharing nuke codes, following the federal search warrant executed at his Florida residence.
APS ASSESSMENT: Altered photo. Trumps team did not send that email, a representative confirmed. An actual email with the same subject line and banner image contained different body text.
THE FACTS: The former president has indeed been sending fundraising emails to supporters following the FBIs raid on his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
But Trump did not send an email in which he shared nuke codes as part of that fundraising campaign, as social media posts are claiming.
NEW: Donald is fundraising by giving us nuclear codes, read one tweet Friday, shared by thousands. This is a f—— joke to him.
The email has a subject line reading, MAR-A-LAGO: RAIDED, and contains a red banner with Trumps image.
Trumps team did send an email Tuesday with the same subject line and banner, but the body of the email didnt make any reference to nuke codes.
Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington confirmed in an email to The Associated Press that the version circulating online is fabricated.
This is totally fake, Harrington said. She also forwarded the actual Tuesday email with the same subject line.
The false claim is spreading amid unfolding news about the search at Mar-a-Lago.
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The Kinds Of Appeals That You Would Expect To Be Used If He Were Selling Trump Ties And Trump Steaks
The first presidential candidate to truly harness the power of email fundraising was the young upstart candidate Barack Obama in 2008, says Mary Stuckey, a professor of communication at Penn State. Obamas campaign unlocked the potential of precisely targeted fundraising.
Obamas campaign got all this credit, deservedly so, for all the ways they managed data, says Stuckey. They could tell if you opened an email. They could ask questions like, were women over 40 with blue eyes more likely to open emails that had their first names in the subject line?
Recent reports reveal that Trumps campaign has a similar ability to microtarget data but appears to be using that ability mostly to try to dissuade Black voters from heading to the ballot box. When it comes to his fundraising emails, Trump casts a wide net, to the point that people who actively despise him can still end up on his contact list and will still receive emails in which he informs him that he knows they are some of his most loyal supporters.
That wide net is one reason for the sense of aggression often associated with these fundraising emails: If you havent already bought into the Trump message, it can feel disconcerting to receive wounded-sounding missives with his name in the signature asking you why you havent given him your money yet.
In The 2016 Presidential Campaign Chants Of Lock Her Up Lock Her Up Were Regular Features At Trump Rallies
Soon after FBI agents raided his Mar-a-Lago estate, former President Donald Trump posted a statement decrying the weaponization of the justice system. He called the search political targeting at the highest level, and contrasted what was happening to him with what happened to his 2016 Democratic opponent.
Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 emails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress, Trump said Aug. 8 on his social media platform, Truth Social. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable.
In the 2016 presidential campaign, chants of lock her up, lock her up were regular features at Trump rallies.
While she was never charged, Clintons use of a private email account for exchanges with her staff during her time as secretary of state drew an FBI investigation.
Now, according to news accounts, the Justice Department is probing Trump and the classified documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago after he left office. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the search, so we dont know what if anything was removed from the property.
We explore the legal risks Trump faces in a related article. Here, we ask, how do the Clinton and Trump situations compare?
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Send A Letter To The White House
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The White HouseWashington, DC 20500
Meeting Wasn’t Ultimately Secret
It is unclear if the individuals who received Sinners’ directions even read the message or followed its calls for secrecy, one person familiar with it told CNN.
The email was sent a few hours after Trump campaign and GOP state operatives discussed how some state legislatures would be difficult for GOP electors to access. In Wisconsin — another state where Trump put forward fake electors after his loss — the electors also met in secret, CNN previously reported. One Trump elector in Wisconsin said the secrecy was for security reasons, though the Wisconsin Republican Party disputed that those electors met secretly.
Sinners told CNN this week that in late 2020 he was working at the direction of Trump campaign attorneys and the Georgia GOP chairman David Shafer, who was an elector. “I was advised by attorneys that this was necessary in order to preserve the pending legal challenge’s longevity,” Sinners said.
“Following the former President’s refusal to accept the results of the election and allow a peaceful transition of power, my views on this matter have changed significantly from where they were on December 13,” Sinners added. He now works in the office of Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who resisted pressure from Trump after the election.
Shafer’s attorney told CNN that his client did not try to keep things secret.
He was not.
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Election Day And Beyond
Early on November 4, despite the fact that no clear winner of the election had been determined, Trump declared victory from the White House, stating that he “did win the election”. At that point, results from states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia were unclear. Although Trump was leading in the vote count of those states at the time, experts believed that many of the still-uncounted voteswhich included votes from large cities and mail-in ballotswould turn out to favor Biden.
On November 5, the Trump Victory in Wisconsin group declared it would be “chasing our absentee ballots over in Pennsylvania” for people who had yet to vote. Also that day, the Kenosha For Trump group sent an email urging “volunteers to make phone calls to Pennsylvania Trump supporters to return their absentee ballots”. However, votes had to be postmarked by November 3 to count as legal votes in Pennsylvania, and Trump himself has described late votes as election fraud.
By November 6, a growing number of Trump officials had admitted that the incumbent’s loss was probable. On that day, election-calling organization forecast that Trump had lost the election to Biden.
