It is often said by his critics that one of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump‘s most effective tactics is — in the famous formulation of Joseph Goebbels — to “accuse the other of that which you are guilty.”
Indicted himself for multiple counts of alleged election interference, Trump has accused Democrats of rampan election interference. Called a racist, Trump contends loudly that Democrats and DEI policies they support are racist. Accused of being against fertility treatments like IVF, Trump oddly claims to be the “father of IVF.” And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.
Now amidst increasing news coverage about the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, flooding Trump’s MAGA movement with hundreds of million of campaign dollars — including a legally suspect million-dollar-a-day-giveaway for registered voters who sign his petition — Trump is still making a populist appeal claiming that he is the candidate being hurt by an elite billionaire class.
In a classic case of “accuse the other” Trump is running the ad below saying “Radical BILLIONAIRES have donated hundreds of millions to DANGEROUSLY LIBERAL Kamala Harris” and differentiating that support from what Trump is asking for: smaller donations from “patriots” who aren’t rich and who purportedly need Trump to fight the billionaires — of which Trump is, notably, one.
Radical BILLIONAIRES have donated hundreds of millions to DANGEROUSLY LIBERAL Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
They will do anything to beat me in November. That’s why I need help from Patriots like you.
If you can afford, please chip in to help keep our campaign going.
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) August 8, 2024
The huge financial support from Musk, who has been promised a powerful role in a second Trump administration and whose various companies (including SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla) have engagements with the federal government that pay out hundreds of millions, is in addition to Musk’s attending Trump’s rallies and sharing pro-Trump posts on X — posts that are so controversial that his own Community Notes fact-checking feature often flags them as misleading and/or plainly false.
Recent reporting has shown that famous billionaires Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg and others have contributed to Harris’s election efforts, either directly or through PAC support. It is a fact that billionaires are more influential in American politics than ever: there are more of them and they have spent more in this election that ever before.
Yet despite his positioning as a populist and the emotional pitch the ad above makes to presumably working class and middle class “patriots,” Trump counts more than merely Musk among his billionaire enablers, with William Ackman, Miriam Adelson, Stephen Schwarzman, and Marc Andreessen among a phalanx of plutocrats who support the former President.