All that Money in Politics: It's About Trump

By Joel Connelly

The instruments of American politics used to include congealed pizza slices and stale doughnuts — the fare fueling staff and volunteers putting together political fundraising appeals. It was a laborious process, but in words spoken by California’s House Speaker Jess Unruh, money is the mother’s milk of politics.

Technology has transformed all that. Instead of volunteers addressing envelopes, pressing an index finger on a computer screen can send out thousands of appeals for bucks. The process is governed by one iron rule: The more you demand, the more you get.

My email box is driven these days by Donald Trump, for him and against him. Witness this appeal from a leading Democrat: “We will retake our democracy from our new King George,” in the words of an appeal from former U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein Suzi LeVine. Trump counters with a cornucopia of lies and the claim that the Democrats would “destroy America.”

Limits on money date back 120 years to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. The U.S. Supreme Court, in ruling in the 2010 case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, stripped all limitations and restraint for political fundraising. The underlying premise, as Mitt Romney put it speaking at the Iowa State Fair, corporations are people.

https://www.postalley.org/2026/02/28/all-that-money-in-politics-about-trump/