Donald Trump Is Using His First State of the Union for a Lame Fundraising Ploy

Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.

Want to see your name flash across the stream of a broadcast of tonight’s State of the Union address? Well, now you can, for the low low price of a $35 donation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

“This is a movement. It’s not about just one of us. It’s about ALL of us. Which is why your name deserves to be displayed during Tuesday night’s speech,” a fundraising solicitation posted on Monday and first reported by the Washington Post reads.

Donating at least $35—or as much as $2,700, the maximum individual donation per election—means seeing your name displayed during a stream of the speech on Trump’s campaign website. While it’s par for the course for politicians of all stripes to fundraise off the State of the Union, it’s unusual for a president to launch such a lame cash-grabbing ploy even before the speech. But if you’re the kind of person inclined to watch the speech on Trump’s website in the first place, seeing “MAGAChud1488″ flash across your eyes will probably feel like the peak of human achievement.

So far, it’s been widely reported that Trump will strike a bipartisan tone in his State of the Union address, with pundits predicting this could very well be the night that he finally becomes president by reading the Teleprompter good.

WHAT ELSE?

• The Daily Beast reported that Julian Assange, the hygiene-challenged Wikileaks founder, reached out to a fake Sean Hannity Twitter account to offer some “news” relating to the top Senate Democrat on the intelligence committee investigating Russian interference in the election.
• This NBC story about Trump’s strained relationship with FBI acting director Andrew McCabe was published late Monday afternoon, but I’m still laughing about this anecdote: after firing James Comey, the president was apparently mad to see him leaving on a government jet, and this call transpired (emphasis added):

McCabe told the president he hadn’t been asked to authorize Comey’s flight, but if anyone had asked, he would have approved it, three people familiar with the call recounted to NBC News.

The president was silent for a moment and then turned on McCabe, suggesting he ask his wife how it feels to be a loser — an apparent reference to a failed campaign for state office in Virginia that McCabe’s wife made in 2015.

McCabe replied, “OK, sir.” Trump then hung up the phone.

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