Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, and the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels

| 10:45 pm EST January 17, 2018
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The sheer spectacle of the President of the United States being blackmailed by a porn star is so salacious, it’s threatened to obscure the more salient points of the story. First, it demonstrates that Trump is willing to do the bidding of those who try to blackmail him over his sexual escapades, which tells us a lot about the “Pee Pee Tape” scandal. Second, it raises the question of how Trump managed to come up with $130,000 to pay off Stormy Daniels. Trump is, after all, broke.

Trump does have assets worth billions of dollars. But his self-admitted debts alone serve to largely wipe out the value of those assets. Throw in the overseas debts that he’s gone to such great lengths to try to hide, and it’s not difficult to figure out that Trump has a negative net worth. When you’re upside down financially, you have a hard time getting your hands on cash. Even if you don’t want to accept that Trump is broke, you’ll have to agree that he’s a cheapskate. He does everything he can to avoid paying anyone what he owes or promises. When he does occasionally pay his bills, he typically finds someone else to pay them.

For instance, it’s already been documented that Trump has been using the money he raised for his supposed 2020 reelection campaign to pay for his son’s legal fees in the Russia scandal. In addition, he was using funds from the Republican National Committee to pay his own legal fees in the Russia scandal (link). It turned out those funds were being funneled through an RNC Super PAC from a Kremlin oligarch with dual U.S. citizenship, which makes the whole thing even more suspicious. In fact it was such a bad look that once it was exposed to the public, the RNC shut down the entire money funneling operation.

So let’s stop and ask where Donald Trump would have gotten his hands on $130,000 in the final month of the campaign. If he had taken the money from his own campaign funds, it would have shown up in FEC filings long ago. If Trump didn’t pay the money out of his own pocket, and he almost never does, was this payment also made by a Republican National Committee Super PAC? If so, then the Republican Party paid blackmail money to an adult film actress just before election day to try to keep its candidate in the game. This must be investigated further.