You may have noticed there’s a bit of a spat going on right now between Donald Trump, the oversized, small-handed orange sex predator who’s almost certainly going to get his butt handed to him on a platter on November 8, and Speaker Paul Ryan, who, well, will not be losing his race next month, and handily beat the pants off his Trump-ish primary opponent earlier in the year.
As part of this feud, Trump is trying to convince everyone that Ryan is a loser incompetent (sad!) who doesn’t do anything for the Party, whereas Trump is a selfless martyr who is responsible for everything good the GOP is experiencing right now (i.e., not much) and has nothing whatsoever to do with any of the Party’s travails (look, no one ever said Trump wasn’t a comedic genius).
Anyway, as you might expect, this message is not merely being put out by Trump and his actual campaign, but also by his surrogates, including ex-campaign manager and lady-grabber Corey Lewandowski, who now spends his free time worshipping Trump and echoing all his talking points live on CNN. Yesterday, Corey went on CNN and made the totally insane and laughable claim that Trump is personally, directly responsible for bringing $350 million into Republican Party coffers (no word on how much he’s dissuaded big donors from chipping in, of course, or how much credit for monies raised by the GOP is actually owed to other, non-orange humans) and that Ryan has raised only “three or four or five millions dollars.” Seriously:
Without having regard to Corey’s specific “6 months” timeframe, here’s what people actually familiar with Ryan’s fundraising record or, indeed, a thing called Open Secrets, as opposed to people just making stuff up on CNN, will tell you:
- Ryan has raised a boatload of cash through his Team Ryan PAC—Open Secrets puts the amount at $38.5 million and change thus far this cycle, but that may not take account of the most recent donations and the number could be closer to $50 million by now;
- Of that $38.5 million, Open Secrets shows $18 million of it going to the NRCC—though again, that number is almost certainly higher at this stage in the cycle;
- Open Secrets also shows Ryan’s actual campaign having put $2.1 million into the NRCC this cycle;
- Ryan also regularly does events for House candidates; one source put the amount raised since the beginning of this year at close to $10 million, over the course of 80 or so events; a recent event—just one event— for Barbara Comstock is said to have brought in more than $400,000;
- this cycle, via his Prosperity Action PAC, Ryan has donated over $1 million to federal candidates;
- Ryan already has allocated the next month to campaign events and fundraising, so these numbers are the “floor,” not the ceiling.
The truth is that Trump is doing everything he can, not just to hand the presidential election to Hillary Clinton, but to hand control of the House back to Democrats (no surprise, he agrees with them on most areas of policy, just not the ones involving anything touching on, like, racial issues).
That probably won’t happen, and to the extent it does not happen, it’s going to be because candidates were smart, ran good campaigns totally independent of the presidential campaign and the RNC, and—yes—in a good number of cases, benefited from a very large amount of money and personal assistance from Ryan. Some of that includes, you know, Ryan being a stand-up family guy advocating a generally conservative policy agenda, as opposed to, you know, an admitted sex predator who thinks socialized health care schemes are cool, wants to add $5.3 trillion to the deficit over ten years, and generally can’t get through a week without saying or doing something overtly offensive to anyone who isn’t a non-college educated white male who thinks taco trucks might be a sign we’re letting the terrorists win.
Just some food for thought, as we all watch this debate play out…
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