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You are here: Home / Politics / Republican Stupidity / Amateur Hour

Amateur Hour

by | 55 Comments

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It’s a little more than 4 months before the election, and Trump’s campaign is learning how to send email:

Since members of the British Parliament have complained about receiving several fundraising emails from Donald Trump, politicians in several other foreign countries have revealed that they’ve also been flooded with email requests for donations from Trump.

Members of parliament in Australia, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland have all received the emails, according to news reports and tweets from the politicians.

That’s illegal.  This is simply stupid:

Trump’s campaign made an elementary mistake in its first digital solicitation for donations last Tuesday: it used a new domain, Because Trump’s email solicitation was sent from a new domain, a lot of spam filters caught the campaign.
From a digital marketing perspective, it was a disaster: due to spam filters, an incredible 60 percent of Trump’s appeals never even made it to individual inboxes, per Return Path’s data.

Even if Trump wants to send email from a dozen different domains, this problem is easy to solve, and I’ve solved it many times for clients (I don’t do email solicitation, btw, so I’m certainly nothing close to an expert).

Reader Interactions

55Comments

  6. 6.

    Alex.S

    But don’t worry, once Trump is President he will be surrounded by smart people who will offer the best advice and he’ll get things done.

  7. 7.

    Waldo

    Yeah, it looks like more of the same Trump camp bungling, but has anyone proved that’s where the emails originated?

  10. 10.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    @Alex.S:

    Just so. Trump has the best words and will win bigly. HRC’s campaign is a disaster. Very sad.

    We live in interesting times, yes?

  11. 11.

    Schlemazel Khan

    Its really sweet of him to do this. Think of all the time & effort he is saving bust Americans when his email automatically delete themselves instead of requiring human intervention.

  12. 12.

    ET

    I know little about the arcane of the FEC rules but even I know you can’t solicit money from foreigners (wasn’t there a big scandal involving the Clinton’s?). That is bush league. I wonder if that didn’t get delegated to some Trump fan-boy (or girl) in college or who had just graduated that someone impressed someone (i.e. Trump) and they didn’t know diddly about squat. This sounds like a Lewandowski amateur hour move because I can’t imagine that Manafort would have done this – he has enough experience to know that.

  14. 14.

    nutella

    @Waldo:

    Yeah, surely someone has forwarded one of the actual emails with all its headers so the question could be investigated.

    It’s one more stupid thing where wild allegations are flying but no one is doing a minute’s worth of investigation. We’re in the post-truth millennium now.

  15. 15.

    smith

    And of course the Trump campaign crowed that their huge, tremendous, very excellent fundraising email, the one that got trapped 60% of the time, raised more than $3 mil. Or maybe not. His upcoming FEC report is likely to be hilarious.

  16. 16.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    I forget who it was here who asked when Trump is going to stop shitting his pants, but it was a front pager, a few weeks ago. I think this just shows that Trump can’t stop shitting his pants. This is who the guy is. He thinks he can talk his way into anything, even the presidency. The force of his AWESOMENESS!!! and his tremendous, tremendous personality are going to take him all the way to Washington. And, to be fair to him, it’s worked up till now. Shit, he won the Republican nomination by doing nothing but talking shit about people and pointing out his own AWESOMENESS!!!

    I think he’s gone too far down this road to turn things around. Everything these guys do is incompetent, since all Trump, or the kind of people he chooses to have around him, know how to do is bluster their way around New York’s building industry, and that’s a long way away from what you need to do to win elections.

    To be sure, if there’s a cataclysmic war, or Britain sets off a worldwide depression, or if there’s some terrorist attack that kills 1000 Americans in one go, then politics might swerve and we could end up with Trump as president. But I think that at this point, that’s really all the hope he has of winning. He has to root for the apocalypse to have any hope here.

  17. 17.

    hovercraft

    Looks like the Big Tuna has his own e-mail problem

    This is what is missing from the federal investigation into Bridgegate:

    The cell phone in Gov. Chris Christie’s pocket during the 2013 George Washington lane closures.

    Text messages the governor sent and received during the ensuing legislative investigation.

    And now, according to new court filings, a personal email account he used as the scandal enveloped his administration.

    None of this evidence was provided to federal criminal investigators probing the Bridgegate scandal, according to court documents.

    For two and half years, Christie has insisted that both his personal and government email accounts were searched by investigators, and there was nothing to indicate he knew anything about the lane closures scheme. He also claimed he never did government work on his personal email account.

    But new court documents indicate that a personal email account he shared with his wife, Mary Pat, was never searched — and he used that account to send at least one Bridgegate-related government email to David Samson, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which oversees the bridge. That email forwarded an article with the comment “per our earlier conversation” that discussed a phone conversation Christie had with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo concerning the lane closure investigation.

    Christie’s own taxpayer-funded attorneys from the Gibson Dunn law firm, which has so far billed more than $10 million to the state, were in charge of responding to federal and legislative subpoenas seeking such emails. The lawyers simply ignored this account, even though Christie regularly used personal email accounts, including the one shared with his wife, for government business, sources say. He even used this account to email journalists concerning state business.

  19. 19.

    the Conster, la Citoyenne

    I may have missed it, but this wasn’t covered on ABC World News Tonight – but something about Huma Abedin something something Hillary’s email something something was. The thumb is on the scale so hard, I can’t imagine what the MSM will be using on the scale by November.

  21. 21.

    Patricia Kayden

    @Alex.S: Trump is certainly doing a bang up job of hiding all of these smart people who will come out of the woodwork to help him only after he’s elected to the most powerful position in the entire world. I’ll give him credit for that.

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.): The bottom line with a rich dude like Trump is that he’s lived his entire life surrounded by Yes Men. Now that he’s actually under intense scrutiny from people who aren’t beholden to him, he cannot stand up to the pressure and is melting before our very eyes. Fascinating trainwreck.

  22. 22.

    FlyingToaster

    @jl: Howie Carr is not a shock jock. He’s a Herald columnist, a right-wing afternoon drive time talk-show host who wanted to be Barnicle. Even after the plagiarism came out.

    And he’s from Swellesley. ‘Nuff said.

  23. 23.

    hovercraft

    So the Dumpster is saying any one of his primary opponents who refuse to endorse him should be banned from ever running for office again.
    From TPM

    “But just remember this, they signed a pledge saying they will abide, saying they will back the candidate of the party. And now they sit back,” Trump said. “They broke their word. In my opinion, they should never be allowed to run for public office again. Because what they did is disgraceful.”

    We joke about fascism, but this man is scary, what will be the penalty for citizens who criticize president Trump. This man is a danger to the country and the world.

  24. 24.

    Thoughtful David

    Trump is going to hire the Best People, doncha know. The Best. He always hires just the best, the best at doing everything.

    I’m just wondering when he’s going to start?

    Trump delenda est

  26. 26.

    singfoom

    Well, we can only hope that Drumpf keeps punching himself in the dick like this every day until November 7th. Given that he’s behind on fund raising and is sending e-mails that are illegal, there’s plenty for him to fuck up until then.

    It’ll be interesting to watch that 80%/20% estimation by 538 creep up to 90% by election time.

    It’s going to be the yoougest, classiest, best concession speech you’ll ever hear.

  27. 27.

    singfoom

    @hovercraft: If politicians at any level were barred from politics for life for doing something “disgraceful”, no one anywhere would have a functioning government.

  28. 28.

    ? Martin

    So 538 has Texas at R+5, South Carolina at R+3, Mississippi at R+4, Georgia at R+2.

    Lot of new potential swing states on the map.

  29. 29.

    ThresherK

    @FlyingToaster: He’s too old and “white” for “shock jock”. Screaming old curmudgeon affhole.

    @smith: Hey, sounds like Trump’s fundraising emails reached a lot of Nigerian princes.

  33. 33.

    Davebo

    It’s almost as if Trump hired every retread from Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq to manage his campaign effort.

  36. 36.

    Enhanced Voting Techinques

    @Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (Formerly Mumphrey, et al.):

    To be sure, if there’s a cataclysmic war, or Britain sets off a worldwide depression, or if there’s some terrorist attack that kills 1000 Americans in one go, then politics might swerve and we could end up with Trump as president.

    Actually, I disagree. I think if things went bad the voters would go to Hilary because the name Clinton means the roaring ’90s, Trump is just a leap into the unknown. Like with Bush jr in 2001 I think Trump would do better if the economy was doing well because secure voters worry about nonsense like is America American enough .

    In a depression everyone wants a job, in a boom everyone wants to be told how awsome they are.

  40. 40.

    Thoughtful David

    @? Martin:
    What makes this good is that it could start forcing Trump and the RNC to have to start pouring money into states they’ve never had to defend before. And that means less in other states. And the problem isn’t symmetrical. With it already close, Clinton and the DNC don’t have to put much money into force the Republicans to have to pay big.

  41. 41.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    Maybe Trump should talk to Sec. Clinton about setting up email stuff, I hear she’s an expert on these matters.

    /snark

  42. 42.

    Mnemosyne

    @jl:

    The Native American vote is small and already solidly Democratic, but I feel confident that they’re another member of the Obama coalition that will crawl over broken glass to vote for Hillary in November.

  43. 43.

    hovercraft

    @the Conster, la Citoyenne:
    Actually I was wrong, according to bloomberg there was a release of a deposition of Huma Abedin about Hillary’s e-mails to the RWNJ Judicial Watch

    A top aide to Hillary Clinton said the former secretary of state’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business on at least one occasion got in the way of Clinton’s work and left the aide frustrated, according to a transcript of the aide’s deposition released Wednesday.
    Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and now the vice chair of her presidential campaign, was being deposed about the context of a November 2010 e-mail she sent Clinton that they “should talk about putting you on state email or releasing your email address to the department so you are not going to spam.” Prompting the note, according to the e-mail chain released last week by the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act, was a missed scheduled phone call, one of a number of communications mishaps detailed in Clinton’s 55,000-page e-mail record.

  44. 44.

    ThresherK

    @debbie: I have listened to a lot of On Point when I was not a day-shift fellow.

    I can’t declare but would guess the number of hours they’ve spent BothSiding the Benghazi and the emails still puts them in the debtor side to Hillz. I would like to think that they’ve learned anything about how the GOP and the right do things.

  46. 46.

    TOP123

    @ThresherK: Ah, the EnjoyIng the Sound of Tom Ashbrook’s Voice show? He often has potentially interesting guests; if they only had a chance to talk.

  47. 47.

    debbie

    @ThresherK:

    Not so on this show. It was three reporters and they reviewed how the report dispelled the bullshit spewed by the GOP. I tell you, it really was surprising. And they got plenty of air time.

  48. 48.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: I think calling Warren ‘Pocahontas’ and war whoops will send up warning flags for a lot of groups, including a lot of moderate White voters, as well as indigenous peoples.

  49. 49.

    Luthe

    @Mike J: Having attended the American Hogwarts (google Bryn Mawr College for pics), I can tell you Defense Against the Dark Arts is actually being taught by a man who looks like Gilderoy Lockhart. He has the mind of Rowena Ravenclaw, thankfully.

  51. 51.

    Shana

    Hubby made the point this evening about the foreign emails – that it takes the attack on Hillary about the Clinton Foundation fundraising off the table as anything like an effective (or potentially effective) line.

    I know we’re talking about Rs here and when have they ever let facts get in their way, but still.

  52. 52.

    SFAW

    @efgoldman:

    He’s still an asshole shitweasel; always was, always will be.

    Why the hate for shitweasels? Carr would consider himself honored to be included in that cohort.

    Actually, no, he wouldn’t, because he has no self-awareness re: how big of an asshole he is.

  53. 53.

    Villago Delenda Est

    “Contempt” is about 1/10th of the intensity of the emotion I feel towards these motherfuckers.

  54. 54.

    Stan

    @hovercraft: “….a phone conversation Christie had with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo concerning the lane closure investigation…”

    I keep wondering when Cuomo is going to be taken down with Christie. The “Port Authority of New York and New Jersey” is run by BOTH states. No way that crap happened without Cuomo knowing about it.

  55. 55.

    J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford

    Aren’t slavers and traitors two of the worst things on earth to be? Confederates are right up there with Nazis.

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