CT Blue

When you think about it, the Republican Party is one massive grifting operation, inasmuch as even before Trump came along, in fact long before Trump came along, it relied on conning its “base” into not just voting against their own interests, but in ponying up money to aid in their own destruction.

It’s worked really well, but it does have its drawbacks, one of which is that grifters gotta grift; they can’t help themselves, and if that means the grift hurts the Republican Party then that’s the way it goes.

It’s debatable whether Trump could have legitimately won the 2020 election if his campaign had been well run, but it couldn’t have helped that various grifters, possibly including Trump himself, were siphoning money away from the campaign. Here’s the latest:

In August, Salon reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) had paid about $5 million to a mystery marketing services company called Digital Consulting Group LLC, starting with a $2 million expenditure in February, just a month after the company was formed.

Now, filings with the Federal Election Commission show that the RNC paid Digital Consulting Group more than $42 million for media buys, consulting and marketing between February and October. The company went from nonexistent to being the Republican Party’s highest-paid vendor of the 2020 election, all in the space of eight months.

But Digital Consulting Group presents a mystery. No other political campaign or committee has reported any payments at all to the company. While a number of organizations share the name, this particular Digital Consulting Group — a Delaware company founded Jan. 15, 2020 — does not appear to have a website, and a Delaware business entity search does not reveal an owner or location. The RNC’s spending reports list a virtual address in Wilmington, but beyond that the company cannot be traced.

That $42 million in expenditures makes this anonymous company the RNC’s highest-paid vendor of the last two years, pulling in nearly $3.5 million more than the next-largest vendor, the direct-mail firm Communications Corporation of America (CCA), and topping third-place JDB Marketing, another direct mail provider, by about $19 million.

Salon was unable to ascertain the identity of the person or persons behind Digital Consulting Group, but the evidence appears to point to Brad Parscale, the grifter who was officially offloaded as Trump’s campaign manager after, among other things, he suddenly became the proud owner of a very expensive yacht, two million dollar condos, a 24 million dollar waterfront house, and other goodies after he soaked $40 million from the campaign. That’s $40 million that has nothing to do with Digital Consulting, so it’s very possible that his total haul was more than $80 million dollars.

Just think. If the Republican Party were not infested with grifters, that money might have been used to actually try to get Trump reelected. It might have worked, in which case we’d be living in an alternative universe in which the American Republic had already been destroyed. As it is, we’ve deferred that unhappy denouement for at least four years. Here’s hoping the grifters continue to destroy the Republican Party from within.