Swamp Creature

- Andy Kroll

2016 WAS SUPPOSED to be the Dark Money Election, the year when a flood of anonymous campaign cash would dominate news cycles, the internet, and the airwaves, and pick our next president. In January 2015, the Koch brothers declared that their shadowy network of donors and political outfits would spend close to $1 billion. One analyst even predicted that the price tag for the entire election would come to $10 billion, the highest in US history.

Then, according to conventional wisdom, a super rich outsider blew all those predictions away. “In the end, Donald Trump defeated big money,” was how one postmortem put it. It’s true that Trump’s victory has changed what we thought we knew about politics. But does it change what we know about money in politics? Let’s look at the facts.

Trump began his bid for the presidency as a self-proclaimed foe of big donors and outside groups. He called for any super-pac claiming to support him to be shut down. A longtime campaign donor himself, he convincingly criticized the nation’s “broken” campaign finance system and vowed to pump $100 million into his campaign to prevent the type of influence he once enjoyed with his own giving. “I will not be controlled by the donors, special interests and lobbyists who have corrupted our politics and politicians for far too long,” he said in October 2015. (That promise, like many others, went unfulfilled: The actual amount Trump spent on himself was closer to $66 million, to say nothing of the millions his campaign paid to his own businesses.)