So punative damages are meant to scale with the wealth of a defendant so as to act as a proper punishment/deterrent of future offenses. Trump being able to crowd fund this punishment defeats the purpose of it. As such, either Trump should not be allowed to crowd fund at all (for anything, because he can always use that to undercut his punishment), or the court should compensate for this and multiply the damages to reflect this money stream into his net wealth.
GoFundMe’s Terms of Service specifically forbid fundraising for “the legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes,” so this fundraiser should be taken down. The next step would be for Trump to set up the equivalent sort of thing in-house, the way he made his own Twitter, then I really don’t know how this gets regulated.
At 2.9% of $355M, I’d bet $10.3M in fees will win out.
It’s been up for about two weeks. TOS doesn’t matter if you’re Trump - remember r/thedonald, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube…
To be fair, this isn’t for defense, it’s to pay the fine, or post the bond at least.
Plus, it’s their site, they can ignore their own terms of service.
Yeah isn’t this benefit from a crime?
It would be a shame if people reported this fundraiser to be a violation of GoFundMe’s terms of service…
https://www.gofundme.com/c/terms
"PROHIBITED CONDUCT
…
Without limiting the foregoing, you agree and represent, warrant and covenant:
A. not to use the Services to raise funds or establish or contribute to any Fundraiser with the implicit or explicit purpose of promoting or involving:
…
- the legal defense of alleged financial and violent crimes;"
I thought they already have a statement saying it doesn’t violate their TOS. Which seems definitely wrong but who knows.
Same reason why Twitter didn’t ban him till after he stopped being the President… The attention brings cash
With respect, I think this is a waste of time. This is probably the biggest fundraiser on the site right now. They’re aware and making fat bucks off of it, so they are not going to shut it down because of a TOS violation.
I would love to report but why do they need name and phone number?
Possibly to prevent frivolous reports? Without a verifiable identity, anyone can create numerous reports with fictitious identities.
Those are easily detectable via other means.
They’re collecting people’s information so they can sell it.
I guess I could just input garbage data, but imo it should be enough to just report at give a reason.
Does paying the judgement count as paying for the defense?
Devil’s advocate:
Your average Trumpie has never heard of a predatory loan and believes students got themselves into debt, let 'em hang.
Meanwhile they also believe Trump is the victim of malicious, politically motivated, prosecution. It’s not his fault he owes 1/2 a billion dollars in fines!
Yeah they are gullible morons that can be tricked into believing literally anything.
I literally 10 minutes back said the same thing to one such specimen, here on lemmy.
Honestly sometimes it scares me how easy it would be to make money with various scams. It’d be so easy to come up with a scam suppliment with the correct mix of pseudoscientific bullshit with some heavily implied but legally non explicit nods to popular conspiracy theories. As for ingrediants you just need water, starch, caffeine and whatever mystical/rare sounding bullshit you can find.
Niacin for tingle. That’s how you know it works.
Conservatives are terrible at business and economics. Their entire strategy is to enable and promote nepotism, monopolies and exploitation of the vulnerable.
They should have taken out loans and went to school like me lol
The more they contribute to Trump’s judgements, legal fees, and lawyers fees, the less available to use to finance his general election campaign.
He doesn’t need a general campaign. The outrage machine will provide it for him.
I’m more interested by the idea that he will drain other candidates of their funds by gobbling up the RNC coffers.
That might be true, but I am sincerely, genuinely, worried about where the money will come from instead.
This isn’t some principled elder statesman we’re talking about here. He’s not going to pass the hat around, see that it’s not enough money, and pass it back saying “well, we tried.” No, winning is the only move he’s left himself in this obscene farce of a career he’s built, and there’s no low he won’t stoop to in order to get there. He’d sooner put the entire campaign, and by extension The White House, up for sale than lose.
Did you miss the foreign governments paying for rooms in Trump properties at far above the normal rates for their areas, and then not even having anyone actually stay in the rooms? How about the special access to Trump depending on how much you pay at Mar a Lago? Or the lenders that write loans for him and then don’t go after him when he doesn’t repay them?
Trump has been up for sale since his first presidential campaign, so this won’t suddenly make him vulnerable to corruption, as he’s already one of the most corrupt individuals in politics.
Oh no, I’m fully aware of all that. But there’s no reason why he couldn’t double-down or seek additional buyers.
The broke college-mans just need to pull themselves up by their gold-crested bootstraps, and sell Trump branded paraphernalia to delusional idiots to pay off their college debt.
The longer I look at this kind of crap, whether it be Trumpism or the Canadian far-right equivalents, the more tempted I am to try and join in the grifting.
This would make me human garbage, obviously, but human garbage with no student loan payments and a down payment for a home. I think I could live with that.
Does this mean he doesn’t have the money? Hmmnnn. Looks like he DID lie about how much money he has.
Rule number one of being rich, don’t spend your own money when you can spend someone else’s money.
I’m no fan of Trump but one of these things is voluntary. If idiots want to choose to give him their post-tax earnings then I pity them but they should be able to do that.
The other is arguably a great benefit to society but is involuntary. We are taxed under threat of violence and have essentially no say in where the money goes. Our entire government is super broken and lawmakers very rarely make laws. Also why tf do we have to fund the world police? Our infrastructure is crumbling and our people are struggling to pay for basic needs.
I think the rationale is the same as those donation-based religious cults; by taking down the head, it’s possible to better point out to victims the misinformation they’re working off, that causes them to offer up their life savings. Eg, previously there were some complaining that he’s reneged on prior promises after old donations.
Certainly less of a concern if people are actually donating “spare” money and can survive without it, but some people really buy into the “day of promise” evangelism.
Yeah, this meme is funny but a false equivalence. Student loans are also voluntarily taken on to pay for education, while Trump’s bill is from a legal judgement that in the minds of those donating has been falsely given by a corrupt court.
Yeah im balls deep in Trump’s rural maga America and these two topics are never discussed in shared company lol. There’s plenty to bitch about why make up new ones?
It looks like the GFM is just about on par with the interest so far, but it’s worth noting that while it racked up a million in the first day or two, it’s gone up about 4k in the last day or so.
“Hey look Dad we just got a $1000 anonymous donation. And another one! And another!!”
Is that hosted on angelfire?
When you took your loan, you should have known you’ll have to pay it off eventually. When Trump performed his net worth fraud, how could he reasonably know that he’ll eventually get caught?
Doesn’t seem like a good comparison for the sake of the meme.
It’s not perfect. But:
Students who rack up debt: students must pay!
Presidents who rack up debt: society benefited, society should bear the cost.
Eh, something like that.
Yeah I mean as much as I love to rag on Drumpf at every possible opportunity, it’s not like he chose to have a fine imposed on himself. In fact, he paid a lot of money to try to stop it
I feel like he accepted the risk of a fine when he committed a bunch of crimes.
Or did I woosh real hard there?
Well he’s not super bright and he relies on shitty lawyers he doesn’t always pay so it might be arguable that he didn’t think he committed crimes.
It’s like they always told us in school: if you don’t know it’s a crime you can’t be charged!
/s, because Poe’s law is a thing.
