Tom Steyer Buys Trump Campaign URL, Uses Site to Call President a ‘Fraud and Failure’
The site, keepamericagreat.com, directs to a sales page for a $1 Steyer bumper sticker which reads, “Trump is a fraud and a failure,” in bold text.
Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer bought himself an early holiday gift on Monday. The hedge-fund billionaire purchased the domain name associated with President Donald Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, “Keep America Great.”
The site, keepamericagreat.com, directs to a sales page for a $1 Steyer bumper sticker which reads, “Trump is a fraud and a failure,” in bold text.
“Trump’s campaign prides itself on hoarding websites of political opponents, but they forgot to pick up the URL for their signature re-election slogan, ‘Keep America Great,’” wrote the Steyer campaign in an emailed statement.
The president has long purchased the URLs of political opponents as a campaign tactic. In 2015, the Trump campaign bought JebBush.com and directed visitors instead to DonaldTrump.com. In October, Trump purchased todosconbiden.com, the name of former Vice President Joe Biden’s Latino outreach agenda. “Oops, Joe forgot about Latinos,” the site reads. “Joe is all talk.”
Steyer’s purchase comes at a time when the Democratic presidential field is receiving a new influx of cash.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg officially entered the race in late November with a promise to spend at least $100 million on anti-Trump ads, and Steyer has pledged another $50 million. Progressive advocacy groups like American Bridge and ACRONYM have also launched multi-million dollar campaigns in an attempt to match the president’s spending.
ACRONYM has said they will spend $75 million over the next year in online campaigns which emphasize the president’s “broken promises” and his administration’s alleged “corruption.” American Bridge is spending $50 million on radio, television and digital ads in 80 counties that voted for former President Barack Obama in 2012 but switched to Trump in 2016.
Priorities USA, meanwhile, has spent nearly $7 million on digital ads that target voters in Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The ads specifically reference the president’s economic record.
But Trump has a large cash advantage over his competitors in the 2020 election cycle. He has been collecting funds for his reelection campaign since the day he first stepped into the Oval Office in 2017 and has about $83 million on hand. He’s raised $165 million in total, according to recent filings. His closest financial competitor, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has raised just under $74 million, for comparison.
As a unit, Democrats have out-raised the president in the third quarter of 2019, bringing in over $190 million. Trump’s campaign raised about $43 million.
Prior to launching his own presidential campaign, Steyer spent $120 million of his own money on a campaign to impeach Trump, causing the president to refer to him as “Wacky Tom Steyer,” on Twitter. “He comes off as a crazed & stumbling lunatic who should be running out of money pretty soon. As bad as their field is, if he is running for President, the Dems will eat him alive!” wrote Trump in 2018.
In a November interview with Fortune, Steyer said that his business acumen and Washington-outsider status made him a perfect foil to President Trump.
“I’m not tied to the political system. I have a freedom. No one is telling me what to do,” he said. “[Trump] ran on something that really resonated with people, that the system is corrupt. His message was that the system doesn’t work for you, the system doesn’t care for you or even respect you and people responded to that. But it turns out he’s a huge swamp rat. I’m not.”
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