A secret power protection plan? What has Donald Trump wrought this time? A Grok AI takeover of all social-media platforms? Suspension of habeas corpus? Cancelling the midterms, as one hysteric suggested this weekend?

No, it's not those options. Those are too obvious! The truly secret plan that Donald Trump has launched to retain power, according to Axios, is ... second-term fundraising. MAGA-aligned orgs are raising money hand over fist to deploy in the midterms, and Axios says it's "unheard of":

Anyone who thinks President Trump's mesmerizing hold over the GOP will slip if his poll numbers slide is missing one of his biggest innovations in American politics:

The creation of a cash-flush political operation that has raked in around a half-billion dollars — about the same amount the GOP's House and Senate campaign arms spent during the entirety of the last midterm campaign.

Why it matters: It's unheard of for a president not running for reelection to raise that kind of money. But the cash is just one piece of a bigger power play that's arguably the most powerful, well-funded political apparatus ever.

The day after Election Day, Trump — at a time most presidents-elect are scrambling to get their transitions rolling — started calling major donors to start building an enforcement machine for his agenda.

Ahem. The big secret is apparently that the two MAGA orgs -- MAGA Inc and Securing American Greatness -- are publicly raising funds for the midterms. That's it. That's the "secret" of Trump's grip on power. 

Henry VIII once said, "Three can keep a secret if two are dead; and if I thought my cap knew my counsel, I would toss it in the fire." If the two orgs have combined to raise a half-billion dollars, then it's the worst-kept secret since, oh, Organizing For America and ActBlue.

ActBlue's in the news lately, of course. But has everyone forgotten about Organizing for America? Barack Obama cannibalized the Democrat Party's ground game by first combining it with his own highly organized 2008 presidential campaign and then converting it into his own activist army. Ostensibly this was "a project of the Democratic National Committee" at first, but it became quickly clear that OFA operated on behalf of -- and under orders from -- Barack Obama himself. 

Obama recombined OFA into his 2012 campaign and then it broke out again afterward, mainly as an organizing and fundraising arm to keep Democrats in line. OFA faded in significance somewhat in the second term, although not for lack of trying. As I wrote in my 2016 book Going Red, Obama used his organization to rally for his second-term agenda and put pressure on Democrats to hew close to his party line. That effort foundered when Obamas agenda grew unpopular, and their fundraising levels crashed in late 2014 just ahead of another disastrous midterm for Democrats:

The group Organizing for Action announced its lowest quarterly haul ever on Friday — bringing in only $1.8 million in the third quarter of 2014.

That’s down sharply from fundraising numbers posted early in the year. OFA raised $5.9 million in the first quarter and $3.9 million in the second quarter.

“As OFA gears back up for an aggressive grassroots and online drive to build on the overwhelming success of the initial open enrollment period our supporters are committed to spreading the facts about the benefits of the Affordable Care Act,” spokeswoman Katie Hogan wrote in a Friday email. “During the fall and winter months OFA will continue guiding Americans who are looking to get covered, as well as continue the work supporting important issues like raising the minimum wage and pushing for comprehensive immigration reform.”

Obviously, OFA hardly was a fundraising juggernaut even when it performed relatively well. However, OFA had basically absorbed most of the Democrats' ground-game assets, which meant that candidates needed to comply with the Obama agenda to get any real organizational boost. The DNC didn't rebuild that infrastructure for years afterward, and Obama took a lot of criticism from his own allies for bogarting their ground game for his own purposes in that period.

But if OFA didn't raise MAGA money, ActBlue certainly did. In fact, they bragged about it at the time, even after watching Democrats get spanked in the midterms:

Last Tuesday was rough. Really rough. As we analyze this election and start to hone in on the things that went really well, one of the brightest spots is the continued rise of the small-dollar donor.

We didn’t just have a big cycle here at ActBlue we had a HUGE one. I’m talking nearly double 2012. Here are the top line numbers:

	2008 Cycle	2010 Cycle	2012 Cycle	2014 Cycle
Contributions	474,625	810,797	3,848,447	8,501,067
Volume ($)	$62,187,361	$85,814,697	$173,166,827	$315,187,405
Mean Donation	$142.86	$114.83	$50.19	$44.54
Committees	2,681	3,564	4,457	4,987

 

The increase in donations (98.3% growth compared to the 2012 cycle!!) is way higher than the growth in the number of number of campaigns and organizations using ActBlue (11.8% increase). Everyone’s raising a lot more grassroots money than ever before. It’s awesome.

What do you suppose $315.2 million is worth in 2025 dollars? Answer: $422.96 million. (Thanks, Joe Biden!) Combine that with the $11.6 million from OFA -- worth $15.6 million in 2025 dollars -- and we're getting pretty close to the "unheard of" half-billion dollars raised by the two MAGA-aligned orgs that Axios highlighted. 

And let there be no doubt at all that the OFA/ActBlue operations had the same mission as the MAGA-aligned orgs do this time. They existed to push the ambitions of a second-term president in his midterm elections by ensuring his party's candidates fell into line with his agenda. It was every inch a "power protection plan," with OFA handling the ground game and ActBlue controlling the money for candidates. The reason it failed was because Obama's agenda had become unpopular by that time, and its centerpiece -- ObamaCare -- had flopped on launch so badly that it took months to repair. 

So this is neither "secret" or even novel. Casting this as some sort of "secret" plan to seize power illegitimately is absurd, especially since the money is getting raised for what will be a highly competitive midterm campaign. It does show that Trump and the MAGA-aligned wing of the Republican Party has learned a lesson from the 2018 midterms by paying attention to what Democrats have done to protect their power in the past. Hopefully, they will learn the biggest lesson of all: the biggest risk to protection of power is failing to deliver on one's promises.  

Addendum: You know what may also qualify as a "secret" weapon? Independent voices and platforms that can compete against and expose the Protection Racket Media gaslighting propaganda, hysteria, and nonsense. The mainstream media and Democrats have tried everything over the last few years to shut us up, shut us down, and leave the field open only to their allies. Our VIP members have stood with us shoulder to shoulder to defeat those efforts, and you can become part of our "secret" weapon too! 

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