Furious GOP donors stew over Trump

Whitman, a major GOP giver who ran for California governor in 2010, compared Trump to historical demagogues like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and wanted to know how the speaker could get behind him.

.. This week, Trump slashed his original fundraising expectations, saying he no longer believed he needed to raise $1 billion. Some of his top fundraisers think he’ll struggle to top $300 million, a figure that’s less than a third of what Romney raised in 2012

.. And while they may be reluctant to admit it, some are starting to think about the next presidential election — in 2020. Among those making the trek to Utah this week were Ryan, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — all of whom were seen here as potential future White House contenders. All were mobbed.

.. One option, he said, is for Trump to accept public financing. Under federal election laws, that would allow him to receive a lump sum of government funds while capping how much he’d be able to spend.

.. The prospect of a controversial billionaire accepting taxpayer funding would be one of the more bizarre twists of the 2016 campaign. But for a struggling Trump, it might be worth pursuing — especially with rising doubts about whether he can fill his coffers.

 

2016 Trump’s Qadhafi boast raises questions about charity claim Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/donald-trump-qadhafi-224203#ixzz4BKKo2nRD Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

The episode is one of a series of unverified claims of charitable giving.

Trump’s past pledges that the proceeds of his ill-fated vodka line, Trump Vodka, and of his 2015 campaign book, “Crippled America,” would go to charity are now also coming under scrutiny because of a lack of evidence that he followed through on them. 

 

How Clinton aims to trump Trump on Twitter

Her newly aggressive social media strategy aims to turn the presumptive GOP nominee’s own words against him.

After a long primary campaign in which Trump has used Twitter to pump out an endless stream of taunts at rivals and gobble up news coverage, Clinton’s campaign has rolled out a strategy in recent weeks to turn the presumptive GOP nominee’s own words against him — with some sly sarcasm and snark.

.. The Clinton campaign says it teed up that tweet hours before her speech, assuming — correctly — that Trump would take the bait. And that’s actually a strategy that Twitter advises the campaigns to follow: gaming out future events and storing up especially savvy tweets, including GIFs and video, that might match those situations.

.. “The Clinton campaign is particularly good at planning to be spontaneous,” says Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio.

.. since signing on in 2009. He has amassed 8.8 million followers — some 2 million more than Clinton, who didn’t join until 2013 — and has compiled a large body of work: about 32,000 tweets, compared with Clinton’s 5,900.

.. Trump has talked about his appreciation for Twitter as a tool to confront his critics. “For years, if somebody did bad stuff to me, I couldn’t fight back,” Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity last year. “Now I have @realDonaldTrump and I can sort of tweet some bad stuff about them, and if people like it, it’s all over the world.”

.. Her staff, at the time, noted that she wasn’t comfortable checking messages on a desktop computer.

.. it’s increasingly trying to use the real estate mogul’s voluminous statements against him in a kind of social media jujitsu.

.. Take Trump’s now-infamous tweet showing himself and a taco bowl with the phrase “I love Hispanics!” When he later suggested that a federal judge couldn’t act fairly in a case involving Trump University because of his Mexican heritage, the Clinton campaign took to Twitter to declare: “So much for the taco bowls.”