Not The First Time 'Dinner With Trump' Has Fleeced Supporters
Would you pay to eat dinner with this man?
August 29, 2016

News broke this morning of a twenty-five-year-old man with no ties to the Trump campaign, raising over a million bucks with the promise that you can have "Dinner with Donald."

There's a sucker born every minute, and apparently several thousands of minutes ago a whole lot of suckers were born who these days are going to vote for Donald Trump. And they are happy to type their credit card number into a website in order to possibly "win a dinner" with the Republican nominee.

What the 25 year-old, Ian Hawes, was actually doing was giving away donor tickets to a Trump dinner event. Anyone with the right donation could buy those tickets themselves.

What's most impressive and depressing is how much money some Trump supporters have to throw down the toilet of a Facebook "Dinner with Trump" contest. Politico highlights "156 donors who gave more than $200 to Hawes’ group in June." One of these donors, John McQueen of Florida, "gave $1,015 in late June. 'Who really reads the fine print?' he lamented. 'If he wants to refund me my thousand bucks, I’m happy to turn around and give it to Mr. Trump.'

Out of one toilet into another.

And there's more sad elements to this story. Ian Hawes did this same scam earlier this year with less success. And even if every single person were to request a refund (Politico gives the info on how to do it) Hawes would still own the lucrative mailing list of those who sent in money in the first place, from which he could make coin for years to come.

And hey, if you're not so much pro-Trump as anti-Hillary, Hawes is happy to take your money, too, with "another website, crookedhillary2016.org, ... promoting a contest to revoke her security clearance.

Because there's nothing like giving your credit card info to some guy on Facebook to get Hillary Clinton's security clearance revoked.

That info makes this tweet from earlier this month make sense.

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