With the polls showing Donald Trump heading for a disastrous election loss, he and his crew are desperately grasping for something, anything, to keep their ship afloat. It has not been working out so well. Trump continues to be his own worst enemy–holding a super-spreader event at the White House, publicly dithering over more stimulus aid, commandeering Dr. Fauci for a campaign advertisement after denigrating him and ignoring his wise advice for months. The list goes on.

Now, Trump is trying to shore up his campaign by improperly dipping into public money. He recently hatched a desperate plot to snitch $7.8 billion from the Medicare Trust Fund to send a $200 drug gift card to each of 39 million Medicare recipients. It will cost an additional $19 million to send a letter through the Postal Service, which he is in the process of wrecking, to congratulate himself for his generosity.

The polls show that senior citizens are deserting Trump in large numbers, which accounts for his belated effort to curry favor with them. Seniors may recall, however, that Obamacare closed the doughnut hole for prescription drugs and that Trump is presently before the U.S. Supreme Court trying to kill that law. The doughnut hole would come roaring back.

The government blew another $1 million to put a letter in 75 million USDA food aid boxes, congratulating Trump for helping families feed themselves during the pandemic. Ironically, Trump’s wretched response to the pandemic played a major role in creating the need for massive food aid for families. Many food banks, including the Community Food Basket– Idaho Falls, have appropriately removed the letter.

On September 18, Trump announced an additional $14 billion in aid to the farm sector for pandemic relief. That follows $19 billion in April, as well as $28 billion for the two previous years to compensate for Trump’s bungled tariff policy. Much of this aid has been needed to sustain the farm economy, but the need was caused by Trump’s Covid-19 and trade policy failures. When the financial aid runs out, farmers will be left trying to figure out how to re-establish the export markets they’d built up over many years.

The Trump administration’s electioneering goes beyond using public money to try to buy the election. Trump has been harassing the Justice Department to come up with some kind of charges against numerous individuals he has villainized over the years–something any self-respecting authoritarian would do.

For months, Trump has been promising that the Justice Department would momentarily produce a report outlining criminal conduct on the part of former President Obama, Joe Biden and a cast of many others. On October 8 he unleashed a storm of tweets and verbal slams against Attorney General Barr, calling for the indictment and arrest of Obama and Biden before the election. The Justice Department has quietly indicated that no such action is going to happen. If there was any merit to Trump’s frantic claims of misconduct, you can bet Barr would be taking action against the royal enemies.

The Trump administration’s herculean effort to keep its election prospects from sinking to the depths of defeat have not worked. No amount of taxpayer funds has done the trick. The fact is that the voters have had their fill of Trump’s dangerous and inept handling of the pandemic, the toxic political atmosphere he has created in America, his pandering to extremists, his disregard for the truth and the swamp of corruption he has fostered over the last four years. The Trump ship is headed to the bottom.

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