Trevor Potter, the president of the Campaign Legal Center, was a Republican FEC commissioner from 1991 to 1995. Ellen Weintraub was a Democratic FEC commissioner from 2002 to 2025.
Donald Trump wants to influence the midterm elections any way he can, from promising to give voters $5,000 checks if they elect Republicans to Congress to trying to regulate mail-in ballots. Less publicized but no less deserving of scrutiny are the president’s admissions that he is in direct control of the MAGA Inc. super PAC, a clear violation of U.S. campaign-finance laws. “I’m going to spend whatever amount of money necessary to try and help us,” he has said.
MAGA Inc. and its affiliates have spent more than $240 million since early September, including paying to air pro-Trump political ads that were initially developed and broadcast using taxpayer money. When the president took flak for that arrangement, he announced that MAGA Inc. would fund the ads. “I have decided to do the Patriotic Ads, among others, and pay for them myself, and with money I raised for MAGA, Inc.” On another occasion, he affirmed his ownership of the group: “This is my money that I control.”
The law says otherwise. Candidates and federal officeholders are forbidden from directing the spending decisions or activities of a super PAC and from raising more than $5,000 per contributor per year for such groups. Those prohibitions, first enacted in 2002, are aimed at minimizing the influence of powerful monied interests and preventing political corruption. By ensuring that such political action committees can’t serve as vehicles through which special interest groups can curry favor with a politician, the law is intended to prevent the very impression the public has gotten from MAGA Inc. For months voters have watched donors to Trump’s roughly $400 million war chest land posts in the administration and receive presidential pardons, among other favorable treatment.
Those results, coupled with Trump’s assertion of control, fly in the face of the basic legal bargain that allows organizations such as MAGA Inc. to raise and spend unlimited funds. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC held that “independent expenditures,” including unlimited corporate campaign spending, “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption” as long as they remain uncoordinated with a candidate or party. The alternative — donors evidently underwriting a given politician’s operations — would be intolerable.
Politicians of both parties, from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis (Florida) to Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo (New York), have long denied engaging in illegal coordination. Trump, uniquely and unambiguously, offers no such defense. His conduct underscores the need to rehabilitate campaign-finance law to ensure that outside groups like super PACs operate with the independence the Supreme Court required.
There has been no shortage of congressional legislation introduced in recent years to address this issue. The Political Accountability and Transparency Act would bar super PACs from spending in any race in which one of the candidates fundraised on their behalf or appeared as a featured guest at their events within the previous two years. The Stop Super PAC-Candidate Coordination Act would prohibit candidates and federal officeholders from fundraising for super PACs.
Another solution is to enhance the Federal Election Commission’s ability to enforce the law. Whenever the nonpartisan professional staff wants to launch an investigation, four commissioners have to approve it, which rarely happens. Congress could instead turn that framework on its head and require the commission to launch a recommended investigation unless four commissioners veto the staff’s plan — a feature of the Restoring Integrity to America’s Elections Act.
A Democrat introduced each of those proposals, but none of them is partisan. The core purpose of such reforms is to foster a political system that gives everyday Americans a chance to have their voices heard and their needs addressed by the officials they elect to represent them. The president hasn’t merely disrupted that culture; he has helped eviscerate the floodgates meant to separate politicians from an ocean of corrupt campaign cash. Without accountability and reform, our democracy risks drowning in it.
The post Donald Trump, MAGA Inc. and the ugly abuses of campaign-finance law appeared first on Washington Post.
