At a White House event a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump told an odd tale about a “very wealthy person” who called him and volunteered to help pay for military salaries during the government shutdown. Reflecting on the conversation, the president added, “I said, ‘Look, we’re not going to need it.’”
Nine days after sharing the anecdote, the story changed: The “very wealthy person” didn’t just offer to pay, in the revised version, he actually did pay. Reuters reported:
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that a wealthy private donor has provided $130 million to the U.S. government to cover potential shortfalls in military salaries caused by the ongoing government shutdown. Speaking at a White House event, Trump praised the wealthy donor as a patriot and a ‘friend of mine,’ but declined to name him.
“Today, he sent us a check for $130 million,” the president boasted on Thursday afternoon. “It’s gonna go to the military.”
At the time, I more or less assumed that the claim was entirely made up. After all, the president routinely shares the details of conversations that have only occurred in his overactive imagination.
But the administration spent Friday insisting that this was all quite real and that the Pentagon had actually accepted a $130 million check from an unnamed donor. (The New York Times reported that the person in question was Timothy Mellon, a reclusive billionaire and Republican megadonor, but this detail has not been independently verified by MSNBC.)
While some skepticism is still in order, if the story is true, it’s a problem in ways that might not be immediately obvious.
Right off the bat, there are practical considerations: The U.S. spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year to pay service members. While normal people would understandably see $130 million as an enormous amount of money, the arithmetic shows that in a situation like this, such a check would likely cover the troops’ compensation for less than a single day.
Just as notably, there are broader political principles related to our system of government and how it’s supposed to work. In the U.S., it falls to Americans to pay for our military. When those responsibilities shift to the president’s private pals, the result creates an untenable dynamic. It necessarily creates a power imbalance, in which the public matters less and wealthy interests close to the Oval Office matter more.
But perhaps most important of all is the fact that such a dynamic might very well be illegal. The New York Times reported, “The move to pay the troops with private donations is highly unusual and a potential violation of the Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from spending money in excess of congressional appropriations or from accepting voluntary services.” For all intents and purposes, the list of ways in which federal agencies can spend money is quite limited: In Donald Trump’s administration, however, there appears to be a near-constant search for alternative pools of money, either through tariffs and the resulting revenue, or through private donations for projects like the president’s ballroom vanity project. (Comcast, MSNBC’s corporate parent for the next couple of months, is one such donor.) This can’t become the new normal.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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