Help! Donald Trump keeps begging me for money!

It is instructive to see how these daily computer-generated messages are organised. From official figures, about 30% of the funds raised for Trump’s various election campaigns come from “small dollar donations”, i.e. amounts less than $200, made by ordinary Americans whose lives and finances are very different from Elon Musk’s.

Maybe some of them are seized by a pressing desire to give their money to Trump independently. But this kind of highly organised e-mail campaign, in which messages claim that Trump is being besieged by enemies and his freedom can be secured only by your dollars, seems like a more likely candidate.

Someone has put a lot of thought and effort into this, and they have found by trial and error that this is the most efficient approach.

The first thing to make it seem personal. I assume there is some real MAGA-supporting Chris Lord in Maryland, and I am getting his messages by mistake.

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Lord is a common enough surname. It’s connected with the mediaeval tradition of ‘King for a Day’, when a local peasant lad would be crowned as King or Prince or Lord or whatever the local tradition was.

The Lord of the Manor (the real one) would come and serve the peasants at table. But nine months later a certain number of unmarried girls would have babies. These babies would then be named Lord or King or Prince etc.

Has my opposite number in Maryland responded to these e-mails? It seems that he has not, since they all have a certain pleading quality. He still seems to be at the starting gate.

The idea that is repeated endlessly is one of a terrible crisis. The lunatic left communists have collected millions of dollars. They must be defeated in the battle (of the bank balances).

But it is again more personal than that. The messages may be from Vance or Johnson or another sycophant, but it is all done explicitly in the name of Donald J Trump. He’s working so tirelessly to defend your rights (the right to bear arms featuring prominently) that it is left to the second tier to point out that donating money is the only way to prevent disaster.

If it’s purportedly from Trump himself, the message is more direct. “I have just come out of a meeting and things are looking bad. I immediately asked for a list of Top Patriots in Maryland, and that is why I am taking the time to write to you personally.”

Each email has a banner reading “TRUMP VANCE Make America Great Again! 2026”. Then a message from Trump: “I need your help to make sure my messages are getting through to TOP PATRIOTS in Maryland.”

Then a barrage of multiple-choice questions. “DO YOU SUPPORT PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP?” near the top, and a few slightly sharper items like “WILL YOU HELP DEFEAT THE CRAZY COMMUNIST LEFT?”

The answers don’t matter. If you make a mistake, nothing happens. These questions lead you with quite an investment of time to the heart of the questionnaire: ow much money are you going to pledge?

There are three rows of buttons with suggested donations, from $5 up to $45,000, and you could ruin your family in a few seconds with this exciting game. One button is highlighted: $47, Trump’s current presidency being the 47^th. But they haven’t finished with you yet.

While this is laid out in easy-to-read large print, it is followed by what seems to be small-print legal notices. These have check boxes and the suggestion is that you will quickly click through these to make your payment final.

The first says you agree to a small additional processing fee. The second, presumably on the calculation that reading the first one will have exhausted you, promises to confirm your payment every month without limit from now on. Then they need your credit card details.

The magic of the system is now revealed. The election interference speech followed exactly the same pattern.

You would have to be extremely stupid to believe that President Trump has just got out of a crucial meeting and has identified you personally as the saviour of his movement, just as you’d need to be pretty brain-dead to think the Chinese government was stealing your vote.

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This is not some extra kind of bonus message. This is the whole system. 

I remember talking to some Republican campaign people many years ago, who told me this cynical approach was invented for George W Bush and not by MAGA at all. Most people are going to see through it, but then most people are not going to respond to a fundraising message like this whatever happens.

So it is better to fish for the small percentage of hardcore true believers. This, perhaps, is the meaning of Trump’s “I love the poorly educated”. 

As the European correspondent for a Los Angeles-based news site, Truthdig.com, I have spent some time on the MAGA internet, and it is possible that’s how they got my e-mail address. But I don’t think so. There are no regular sums heading from my bank account to Mar-A-Lago, anyway. 

A doppelgänger in Maryland looks most likely. But the majority of people being targeted by these campaigns have quite literally asked for it: signed up on some kind of forum or list as a sign of fealty.

Where else are the “small dollar contributions” coming from? We are talking about sums in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Trump himself evidently cares less and less about whether his claims make sense. He is not raising money by making appeals to logic.

He is treating his base with the contempt that he evidently thinks they deserve.