Maybe Money Is Speech After All: How Donald Trump’s Finances Measure His Legitimacy as a Candidate
The disastrous finances of Donald Trump’s campaign has gotten a lot of attention these past two days. The Times reports:
Donald J. Trump enters the general election campaign laboring under the worst financial and organizational disadvantage of any major party nominee in recent history, placing both his candidacy and his party in political peril.
Mr. Trump began June with just $1.3 million in cash on hand, a figure more typical for a campaign for the House of Representatives than the White House. He trailed Hillary Clinton, who raised more than $28 million in May, by more than $41 million, according to reports filed late Monday night with the Federal Election Commission.
I’ve noticed throughout this election season—it actually long predates this election—just how much a campaign’s finances are taken to be a proxy for its legitimacy. During the early months of the year, Bernie Sanders was consistently raising more money, on a monthly basis, than Hillary Clinton was. This was often taken by some in the media to be a sign of his greater support among the voters, even, at times, his greater legitimacy as a candidate. Now the same argument is being leveraged against Trump.
But, people may respond, these articles aren’t really commenting on Trump’s (or, before that, Sanders’s) legitimacy; they’re talking about his political viability, his competence as a manager of a campaign.
As someone noted on Facebook, though, that kind of managerial competence is not unrelated to our sense of democratic legitimacy: we assume that a badly managed campaign somehow signals a bad candidate which signals an illegitimate candidate.
But more important, I don’t think that argument quite gets at just how much our media equates robust fundraising skills with a candidate’s political credentials and democratic legitimacy.
Consider this representative passage from a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post:
Trump hasn’t raised much money yet, and he doesn’t seem inclined to do so; according to one report, after telling Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus that he’d call 20 large donors to make a pitch, he gave up after three. Fundraising is the least pleasant part of running for office, but unlike most candidates who suck it up and do what they have to, Trump may not be willing to spend the time dialing for dollars. Instead, he’s convinced that he can duplicate what he did in the primaries and run a low-budget campaign based on having rallies and doing TV interviews. As he told NBC’s Hallie Jackson, “I don’t think I need that money, frankly. I mean, look what we’re doing right now. This is like a commercial, right, except it’s tougher than a normal commercial.” It’s not like a commercial, because in interviews Trump gets challenged, and usually says something that makes him look foolish or dangerous. But he seems convinced that his ability to get limitless media coverage, no matter how critical that coverage is, will translate to an increase in support.
I take it as a given that Trump is a con man and a grifter, who is more than likely in this just for the money (never underestimate the grifter’s appetite for the buck.) But notice what he is saying: I don’t need money to speak. I can communicate directly with the media. Not just communicate, but have an actual back and forth, where reporters get to ask me questions and I get to answer them.
And notice this journalist’s response to that claim: That kind of communication with the media is not the mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election because those back and forth discussions with the media make that candidate look foolish. The real mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election is his willingness to raise large pots of money so that he can fund television aids where he gets to spread his soundbites unchallenged. The real mark of a serious candidate in a democratic election is the fact that he has raised large pots of money.
We hear a lot of complaints from liberals and Democrats about the Supreme Court conservatives who have turned money into speech worthy of First Amendment protection.
But here is our media essentially proffering a version of the same argument, measuring a candidate’s political seriousness by how willing he is to raise money and his democratic legitimacy by how much money he raises.