Alvin Bragg: World Champion Fundraiser
By John J. Duncan Jr.
duncanj@knoxfocus.com
If Donald Trump is able to win the 2024 presidential race, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will deserve a significant part of the credit.
The Democrats have been the party of the super-wealthy for many years, and Trump was running far behind Biden in fundraising.
However, there was such a reaction against Trump’s conviction in the “Stormy Daniels” (fake name) case, the former president raised $53 million in the next 24 hours.
This brought his total for May to $141 million, because he was also helped by the ridiculously excessive fine leveled against Trump by the publicity-loving Judge Arthur Engoron.
The earlier case was for civil fraud and was brought by the New York Attorney General, Letitia James. She said the fine plus interest would amount to $450 million, an amount which the Associated Press described as “staggering”.
It was especially ridiculous considering that the “fraud” was victimless. The banks and companies supposedly defrauded wanted to do business with Trump and his companies and did not lose money by doing so.
Both Bragg and James ran campaigns pledging to “get Trump” and to use their offices and the New York legal system to do so. This is, or should be, very improper and unethical.
If you google the Lady of Justice statue, it says “the blindfold represents the impartiality and objectivity of the law and that it doesn’t let outside factors, such as politics, wealth, or fame, influence its decisions.”
This description of “Justice” would be a cruel joke now to Trump and his family, at least in New York.
Just before the verdict in the Bragg case was announced, the former New York Times reporter, Alex Berenson, said in his online publication, Unreported Truths, that the trial was a “show trial” and said the “outcome…. seems preordained.”
He wrote that a guilty verdict would do nothing “except to further undermine confidence in the legal system.” When the jury came back, Berenson wrote that it was “the least surprising verdict ever.”
In addition to the more than $70 million Trump raised in the three days after this latest verdict, he received pledges of $130 million more. Trump raised just $700 million in his entire 2020 campaign, while Biden raised $1.7 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, spent $400 million more in an independent expenditure to get out the Democratic vote.
When Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, Obama received four times more than Romney from Fortune 500 executives.
Democrat J. B. Pritzker spent $323 million in his two winning races for governor of Illinois, and his Republican opponents had only a fraction of that much. Pritzker is worth at least $3.6 billion as one of the heirs to the Hyatt fortune.
Jon Corzine, a Goldman Sachs executive, spent over $60 million to be elected governor of New Jersey in 2004. His Republican opponent, Congressman Bob Franks, was able to raise only about $3 million.
In a race last year for the Supreme Court in Wisconsin, the Democrat won after raising $14 million to the Republican candidate’s $2 million. I could give many, many more examples like these, and unfortunately about 95% of elections are won by the candidate with the most money.
Going back to Alvin Bragg – he went to such an extreme to get Trump that he did something never done before. To turn a false business records case into a felony, he had to allege that Trump broke a federal campaign finance law that the Federal Election Commission had already ruled Trump did not break.
This caused such a reaction in Trump’s favor that the Capitol Hill newspaper, The Hill, reported that most Trump critics like Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and others were now getting behind Trump.
So, unwittingly, in their blind partisanship and hatred for Donald Trump, Bragg and James have helped him unify the Republican Party, raise many millions, and may have helped him be re-elected as president.
Many people are saying that if the election was held today, Trump would win by a very large margin. However, that is the biggest IF in the world.
The election is still five months away, and I have seen many elections turn in the last week or two.
Trump has said or done things that his strongest supporters wish he had not said or done. But the issues are much more important than the personalities. And on all the big things – the things that really matter – Trump was a very good president and could be once again.
