The Despicable Way Republicans Are Scamming Old People

Some of the country’s largest grassroots political donors are handing their money over to Republicans—but they don’t seem to be aware of it.

Hundreds of elderly dementia patients are fueling America’s campaign finance system, collectively shelling out millions of dollars to political candidates while they themselves struggle for cash, according to a CNN investigation published Tuesday.

Some patients, lured by the deceptively direct and aggressive automated messaging strategies utilized by political campaigns, felt that they were taking part in a network of political operatives and had a direct line to either Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris.

“President Trump NEVER does this! He personally tapped YOU to become a MAGA Living Legend!” read one message from the Trump campaign.

“The blunt truth: Kamala is BEHIND, and she’s COUNTING on us!” read a note from Harris’s team.

That presumed and false connection drove the dementia patients to tap into retirement savings in order to contribute six-figure sums to the candidate of their choice, CNN reported. Some even threw themselves into debt over the course of thousands of transactions to politicians they believed they were communicating with directly.

One Baltimore-area victim, an 83-year-old woman whom CNN described as wearing “pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones,” didn’t know she had given Republicans more than $350,000 since 2020.

An 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas was another dementia patient who fell prey to the deception. In September 2022, the unnamed man donated $250 to Ron Johnson’s campaign for Senate over the platform WinRed. But as he was barraged with messages over the next year and a half, the Lone Star senior—who for years had thrifted his clothes and driven an old car in order to save for his retirement—unknowingly made more than 15,000 transactions, amounting to more than $440,000 in donations.

CNN noted that the man’s son had spent weeks trying to “help him get the money back” from WinRed but was only able to secure refunds for a third of his father’s political contributions.

Data from the Federal Trade Commission revealed that WinRed had nearly seven times as many FTC complaints as its Democratic competitor, ActBlue. Trump was the single largest beneficiary of the donations.

The majority of victims identified by CNN were in their eighties and nineties and included veterans, house cleaners, nursing home residents, and widows living alone. Some of the donors had coughed up more cash to politicians than they had paid for their homes.

Donald Trump is either trying to make Pennsylvania sports fans hate him or send cryptic QAnon cues—or perhaps he just needs to hire a proofreader.

In an email to his supporters on Monday night, Trump included a fun typo that caught the attention of many of his critics.

“Working at McDonalds, a town hall, a Stealers [sic] game—no one is working harder than President Trump to Make America Great Again!” the campaign newsletter read.

Trump is trying, and thanks to the typo seriously failing, to paint himself as a fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, named for the city’s steel industry (an industry that Trump ultimately harmed through his tariffs in his previous term). He even went as far as to make a strange AI-generated photo of himself sporting the number 47 jersey. Though the number probably is supposed to refer to him being the forty-seventh president, for real fans it brought to mind ex-Steelers player Mel Blount, who endorsed Kamala Harris.

Similarly, Elon Musk caught flack online after trying to root for both the Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Trump’s “Stealers” flub was seized upon by Representative Adam Schiff, who Trump recently threatened, calling him “the enemy within.” The Democratic representative snarkily called the mistake an “authoritarian slip.”

If the typo was in fact an accident, and not a call to “stop the steal,” perhaps Trump should reconsider his call to destroy the Department of Education, which helps make sure the nation’s children learn how to spell.

Reports of glitchy door-knocking canvassing by Elon Musk’s super PAC just got way more real, spelling serious trouble for Donald Trump, who has almost entirely outsourced his door-to-door efforts in battleground states to the billionaire technocrat.

It was previously reported that the app used by Trump and Musk’s canvassers was plagued by design problems and glitches, making it difficult to determine whether employees in swing states were actually doing their jobs. Now it seems that some employees are exploiting the app’s faulty location functions.

A video made by one Nevada-based canvasser with a vendor working with Musk’s America PAC demonstrated for users just how easy it is to fake door-knocks.

The video shows users how a GPS-spoofing app can make it appear as if the user went to the homes of Trump voters. In reality, they didn’t need to go anywhere, and could simply falsify survey responses. The video, which was obtained by The Guardian, has been shared with hundreds of canvassers, but it’s unclear how widespread the spoofing practice actually is.

America PAC and several of its vendors, including Blitz, the vendor operating in Nevada and Arizona, released a joint statement.

“Every door that is marked leaves unique fingerprints, and the fingerprints of a door marked with a spoofing app leave these fingerprints in neon colors. We have tech-enabled auditing and fraud prevention tools to identify and dismiss the bad apples, the Pac doesn’t pay a dime, and the door gets knocked by the next canvasser,” the statement said.

Blitz, the vendor operating in Arizona and Nevada uses a “Quickbooks Workforce” app to monitor the location of its canvassers, two people familiar told The Guardian, but even that can be manipulated by simply turning off location services.

This poses a particular problem in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona. Leaked data from America PAC, also obtained by The Guardian, showed that roughly 24 percent of door-knocks in Arizona and 25 percent of door-knocks in Nevada last week were flagged as “unusual,” an internal metric that indicates faked door-knocks.

Trump’s allies have been begging him to ditch Musk and his malfunctioning canvassing efforts, as conservative activists and leaders report that they’ve seen little of the efforts Musk has apparently poured $75 million into over the last few months.

A new poll shows Donald Trump with a small lead over Kamala Harris among Arab American voters.

Arab News and YouGov’s poll showed 45 percent of respondents support Donald Trump as opposed to 43 percent for Kamala Harris. Four percent said they would vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein, 6 percent said they were undecided, and 2 percent declined to answer. The new poll has a larger gap than another survey from the Arab American Institute earlier this month, which gave Trump a 42 to 41 percent advantage.

Arab Americans make up a substantive population in Michigan, with more than 300,000 of the state’s residents claiming to have Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. In 2020, the community played a substantial role in delivering Michigan to Joe Biden, who won the state by 154,000 votes. In more bad news for Harris, 39 percent of respondents in the poll said they think a Trump administration would be most likely to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, as opposed to 33 percent for Harris and 8 percent for Stein.

About 46 percent of respondents said that racism and hate crimes against Arab Americans were more likely to go up if Trump was elected in November. But the fact that Trump is still leading despite this should be cause for alarm in the Harris campaign. Instead, Harris has been campaigning in Michigan with former Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

This has not gone over well in Michigan, as the state’s large Arab American population also consists of over 90,000 Iraqi Americans who remember not only the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 but also his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry. Trump quickly seized on Cheney supporting Harris, posting on Truth Social Tuesday that “if Kamala gets four more years, the Middle East will spend the next four decades going up in flames.”

Michigan also boasts large Palestinian and Lebanese communities. Palestine and Lebanon are currently experiencing a brutal Israeli bombing campaign as the Biden administration continues to make no progress on a cease-fire or arms embargo. Harris didn’t do herself any favors when she said that “the first and most tragic story is October 7, and what happened that day, and then what has happened since,” seeming to diminish the massive civilian deaths in Gaza and Lebanon.

More than one month ago, the Democrats held their national convention and neglected to highlight any Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim voices on the stage. It appears that the Harris campaign is continuing on the same path as Biden, and it could cost her a critical battleground state.

Results from a “shock” poll shared by one of Donald Trump’s surrogates started trending on X Monday, telling 1.4 million people that the Republican presidential nominee was gaining ground on Vice President Kamala Harris in New Mexico. 

But none of it appears to be real.

MAGA ally Richard Grennell, who served as the acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s administration, posted the sourceless numbers to his X account, claiming that Harris only had a three-point lead on the former president in the battleground state. But that alleged narrow lead made light of other recent surveys, including one published in the Albuquerque Journal on Monday, which showed Harris with a  nine-point lead, three times more than Grennell suggested.

“Trump surrogates are literally fabricating polls at this point to make their supporters think a victory is inevitable,” wrote Democratic strategist and pollster Matt McDermott in response to Grennell’s post. “No poll shows this in New Mexico.”

Doubts were similarly cast over Harris’s odds on the betting platform Polymarket, which saw Trump suddenly surge ahead of the Democratic presidential nominee with 63 percent of the projected vote compared to Harris’s 36 percent.

One bettor appeared to be behind the switch-up. “Fredi9999” holds more than $20 million in pro-Trump bets on the site, and users have suggested that the same person could be behind several accounts with some of the site’s largest bets on the Republican presidential nominee, reported CCN.