A
team led by University of Massachusetts professor emeritus Thomas
Ferguson reveals that “a giant wave of dark money” flowed into Donald
Trump’s campaign coffers in the last months of the 2016 election,
enabling him to go heads up with Hillary Clinton’s $1.4 billion
juggernaut in the final stages of the contest. The identity of Trump’s
late-campaign godfathers is “shrouded,” according to a paper authored by
Ferguson and his collaborators, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, but all
signs point to “a sudden influx of money from private equity and hedge
funds.” The cash infusion brought Trump’s total spending up to $861
million. Although that’s still substantially less than Hillary’s total
outlays, Trump’s dark money arrived just in time to capitalize on
Clinton’s failure to mount an effective blitz in Michigan, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania.
Thus, it wasn’t the Russians that brought us Trump, but the usual suspects: private equity and hedge funds bandits.
