From the "No Fucking Shit" files: People stop donating to Democrats

There seems to be no effective counterinsurgency to the Trump train being run over the government. Democrats are hopelessly in disarray, fighting last year's battles, while the billionaires eat caviar

donald trump and elon musk playing the game of risk with nuclear weapons

The one breathtaking thing from the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election is that today, middle of February, 2025, my phone and the throwaway email I used for my donations in the last election have both been inundated with impassioned pleas for me to open my wallet to help them counter the fuckery of Trump and his co-president Musk and what they are doing to the nation.

I have a hearty fuck you to that:

            *-------------------------------*  
            |               _               |  
            |              { }              |  
            |              | |              |  
            |              | |              |  
            |           .-.| |.-.           |  
            |         .-|  | |  |.-.        |  
            |         | |       |  ;        |  
            |         \           ;         |  
            |          \         ;          |  
            |           |       :           |  
            |           |       |           |  
            |           |       |           |  
            |                               |  
            *-------------------------------*  
                        Figure 1.

I have not typed “STOP” in full caps so often in my life as I have the last couple of months.

Alas, the brainiacs at the NY Times has this less than stellar article: “Venting at Democrats and Fearing Trump, Liberal Donors Pull Back Cash” (gifted link)

Gee, you have three by-lines on this article and you talked to plenty of billionaire donors to put this crack piece of investigative journalism on your paper.

I guess you really are the paper of record. 🤔

Anyhow, they spend a lot of time talking taking dictation from Reid Hoffman, the clownish tech visionary that unleashed the cancer that is LinkedIn on the world.

Aides to Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn co-founder and one of the biggest Democratic donors, have signaled that he is now much more reluctant to fund progressive political projects. A spokeswoman for Mr. Hoffman said that “he thinks that the Democratic Party strategy needs to reform, and when it does, he’s happy to hear new ideas and new pitches.”

Mr. Hoffman has also voiced publicly what many donors have said privately: He expects retaliation from Mr. Trump.

“There’s a greater than 50 percent chance that there will be repercussions from a misdirection and corruption of the institutions of state to respond to my having tried to help Harris get elected,” he said on the podcast “The Diary of a CEO.”

One of the individuals who has entered the rarified space where he has true F-U money, is wetting himself because Trump and Elon Musk will be mean to them? That they might direct the IRS to investigate them? That their life may be inconvenienced by some slight?

Get the fuck out of here. You so-called captains of industry, who got to your lofty perches due to “integrity, grit, and determination”, that you are where you are because you earned it.

So, now you are going to knuckle under to a schoolyard bully, because your feeling might get hurt?

Grow the fuck up.

Ok, I did jump ahead a bunch to get that blurb out, so let me go up the chain.

Apparently, the canary in the coal mine is the drastic decline of small dollar, grass-roots donors. The folks who chip in $5 - $25 a whack, and once Act Blue or some other organization gets their mitts on your contact details, begins a deluge of spammy pleas for cash.

While the Democratic efforts aren’t as abusive as the WinRed and other tactics, they are in your face, and the barrage is real.

But the small dollar donors (people like me with some disposable income) have rightly begun to question the efficacy of these donations.

The small-dollar online spigot that powered opposition to the first Trump administration has slowed to a trickle as shaken liberal voters withhold their donations.

Charitable foundations that have long supported causes like voting rights, L.G.B.T.Q. equality and immigrants’ rights are pulling back, devoting time to prepare for expected investigations from the Republican-led Congress.

And yes, many of these organizations are going to get hauled into court, and have the forensic accountants at the IRS crawl up their assholes to look for any irregularities in their books¹. Daunting, but predictable.

Then there are the rats bailing out of a sinking ship, like Jeff Skoll, a Silicon Valley billionaire who has jumped to supporting Trump. Way to show moral courage fuck-o:

Jeff Skoll, a Silicon Valley billionaire and a longtime friend of Elon Musk’s, said there was “an awful lot of pressure” to side with Mr. Trump.

This month, Mr. Skoll, who has donated tens of millions to Democratic candidates and causes in recent years but said he did not vote in the 2024 presidential election, posted a photo on social media of himself standing with Mr. Trump backstage at the inauguration. On Friday, he had breakfast in Palm Beach, Fla., with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, where they discussed the prospect of Mr. Schumer’s using Mr. Skoll to back-channel ideas to the president, Mr. Skoll said.

The Dems seem to struggle to keep billionaires in their pockets. It seems that these titans of industry, the apex predators of Capitalism really have no foundational tenets of decency and will flip allegiances as the wind shifts.

And Chuck Shumer meeting with this boneless chicken to back channel with the Trump administration? Seriously, go fuck yourself.

What to do?

Honestly, I do not know. I see plenty of posts urging the elected Democrats to take to the battlefield, but the reality is apart from sound bites and clips that may or may not go viral, there isn’t a whole lot that they can accomplish.

I praise folks like Jasmine Crockett, and Elizabeth Warren who joust with the clown car Republicans, but that is light and heat, not any real fire.

I also have had several people in threads on the Substack Notes tell me that the Courts will halt this. Uh, no.

Lastly, I am beginning to see an acknowledgement from the Never Trump former Republicans that their target, the “moderate” or “centrist” Republicans will stand up is a fantasy. What tipped them into this realization? It was Senators Murkowski and Collins pulling the lever to confirm both Tulsi Gabbard at DNI, and RFKjr at HHS (as of this writing, Ka$h Patel seems to be on a glide path to full senate confirmation even with the revelation that he provably lied in his hearing. I guess the Senate no longer has any spine).

Unlike many, I am not so sure that the chaos that co-presidents Musk and Trump are overlaying on the population will lead to heavy electoral wing clipping in the 2026 midterms.

This may be as good as it gets. Hang on for dear life.

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1. A note here: Any reasonably sized organization that has a pipeline of money, and expenditures with human employees will have some waste or slop. If the Trump administration looks hard enough, with enough auditors and lawyers, they will find some shit that looks bad but really is more like spoilage at the supermarket.

And if the Dems did such investigation of the Republican groups, I would bet my bottom dollar that there is a lot more nest feathering being done by their operatives.