Donald Trump may have donated $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation in 2009, but that’s not the only chunk of change critics are currently raving about. The Republican nominee is also under fire for raising the rent on his own campaign offices as soon as donors began footing the bill. That and, according to a new report by The Daily Beast, using just over $55,000 in campaign donations to purchase thousands of copies of his own book from Barnes & Noble.
Olivia Nuzzi and Ben Collins discovered the $50,055 purchase in a recent filing with the Federal Election Commission, and they determined this amount equated to “more than 3,500 copies of the hardcover version of Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, or just over 5,000 copies of the renamed paperback release, Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America.” A Trump spokesperson told The Daily Beast the books were bought “as part of gifting at the convention” and that these gifts were required of the campaign. While the Republican National Committee didn’t respond to a request for comment, convention delegates confirmed they’d received Crippled America in a gift bag, along with “Kleenex and Make America Great Again! cups, hats, and T-shirts.”
Unsurprisingly, the bulk purchase may have been illegal, according to the nonpartisan nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. Paul Ryan, who isn’t the same Paul Ryan we all know and love, told The Daily Beast, “It’s fine for a candidate’s book to be purchased by his committee, but it’s impermissible to receive royalties from the publisher.” So if Trump receives anything in the way of publishing royalties because of the $55,055 his campaign spent, it would “[amount] to an illegal conversion of campaign funds to personal use.” And no, neither the Trump campaign nor Simon & Schuster responded to Nuzzi and Collins’ requests for comment on the matter.
Guess who did respond? Twitter, naturally, and most of them had a common theme.
https://twitter.com/westernseaboard/status/767439102673231873
https://twitter.com/michgirlindc/status/767438780584325121
https://twitter.com/smcslothsloth/status/767440957927071748
@darth They bought Politics For Dummies for everyone in the campaign?
— McBarb 💉af (@hawks_sox) August 21, 2016
Okay, maybe two big themes.
https://twitter.com/AdamKronfeld/status/767436605783146504
Probably doing the same thing Palin did… buying up copies of his own book with campaign contributions.
— OHSportsgirl (@OHSportsGirl) August 21, 2016
https://twitter.com/daveblend/status/767436995098451968
(Via The Daily Beast and Raw Story)