This MAGA PAC Raised Nearly $2 Million Off the Trucker Protests. Where Did All the Money Go?

[Nevilledog]

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/12/this-maga-pac-raised-nearly-2-million-off-the-trucker-protests-where-did-all-the-money-go/

Alex Phillips was standing one block from the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, when he warned an interviewer that members of Congress who went along with certifying the results of the presidential election would suffer the consequences in the midterms. As President Donald Trump’s speech at the Ellipse echoed from the loudspeakers, he told the far-right Citizen Media News, “2022 is coming up fast. I’m going to make it my point to do what I can to get these people gone.”

The owner of a small Virginia rural broadband company, Phillips is the founder of American Priority, an outfit that in 2018 started hosting an annual pro-Trump convention known as AMPFest for MAGA fans shut out of more traditional Republican confabs. He had been involved in organizing some of the “stop the steal” rallies in the runup to the insurrection and had been on the permit for and spoken at the “Rally to Revival” in DC on January 5 the night before.

Just hours before a pro-Trump mob rioted at the Capitol behind him, Phillips announced in the interview that he was starting a political action committee called the Great American Patriot Project (GAPP) to get more involved in elections. “We’re going to raise money and we’re going to fund candidates and we’re going to fund corrupt GOP out. We’re going to fund new people in,” he continued, giving out the website and asking for donations. “We’re going to build this organization one state at a time, one candidate at a time.”

On paper, Phillips seemed to make good on his promise. Since then, the PAC has raised nearly $1.8 million, largely from small donors, which would have been a sizable chunk of change in a midterm election where the balance of power in Congress was decided by a razor-thin margin. But that assumes his PAC actually spent any money on political campaigns. How GAPP raised all that money and what it spent it on is an unusual story even in the wild west of campaign finance, where political action committees that raise millions but spend little of it on elections are a major scourge, particularly on the right. The story of GAPP involves trucker convoys, bouncy houses, and country western stars. It also involves exactly zero election campaigns.

*snip*

[republianmushroom]

1. Damn, don't get pickle now.

[TheBlackAdder]

2. Rubes stealing from Rubes who were repeatedly warned, but didn't care. I really don't care. Do You?

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[gratuitous]

3. How many people fell into the GAPP?

I liked this sentence: "How GAPP raised all that money and what it spent it on is an unusual story even in the wild west of campaign finance, where political action committees that raise millions but spend little of it on elections are a major scourge, particularly on the right."

The conmen have to see Republican voters as the most fertile field of suckers they could ever hope to see.

[Torchlight]

4. Poor saps contributing are so blinded by their tin gods

that being sold a bill of goods is a self-honor trumpeted from the mountaintop (or the back of a primer-gray full-sized pickup; whichever seems more plausible).