A rookie House Republican who loves him some Donald Trump might have just made it harder for the president’s reelection campaign to continue spending bread at Trump’s properties.
According to the Daily Beast, Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) was trying to come for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) when he introduced legislation that would prevent campaign spending, but he accidentally may have fucked up things for his president’s campaign crew, who loves to spend money at Trump-owned businesses.
From the Daily Beast:
[Steube] introduced a bill this month explicitly designed to target campaign spending by a House colleague, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN). Steube even appears to have taken steps to insulate the president from his bill’s prohibitions. But the language of his legislation would very likely bar Trump campaign payments to Trump businesses as well, and his office could not muster an explanation otherwise.
Steube introduced his legislation on May 1 and titled it “Obstructing Monetary Allocations to Relatives Act”—I’ll give you a second to see if you can catch what he did there….Got it? Yeah, he named the bill the OMAR Act because he’s trying to build his rank in the Trump gang and one way to do that is to go after people that Trump hates.
The Daily Beast notes that Omar, “steered some $600,000 since 2018 to a company owned by political consultant Timothy Mynett, whose ex-wife said in divorce filings in early 2019 that he had admitted to carrying on an affair with Omar.”
The bill would prohibit campaign payments “to a vendor which is owned or controlled by an immediate family member of the candidate,” which it defines as “a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, father-in-law, or mother-in-law.”
Now here is where things get a bit Trumpy: The act would also prohibit payments to a company that is “controlled” by a candidate’s family member if that family member “is a member of the board of directors or similar governing body of the vendor,” the Daily Beast reports.
Mynett and Omar married in March (sure, the whole thing is a bit messy), but that didn’t stop Republicans from getting their Depends in a bunch trying to sort out where and how Omar spent campaign money.
“Rep. Omar has a history of FEC violations and is clearly using her position in Congress to increase her personal wealth,” Steube spokesperson Carson Steelman wrote the Daily Beast in an email, “much like President Obama and the Clintons.”
Just had to throw a shot at Obama in there. Always Obama. Something tells me that all Republicans have a Post-It note taped to their cellphones to remind them to throw Obama’s name in the mix no matter what it is.
Nonetheless, Steube’s bill runs into real world problems when it comes to the president’s actual business and political entanglements. Upon taking office in 2017, Trump publicly insisted he had turned over all operations to his two adult sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., who remain the top two executives at the privately held company. That means the Trump Organization is, under the terms of Steube’s bill, “controlled” by immediate family members of the candidate, and therefore that the Trump campaign would be prohibited from spending money at Trump properties.
Now let’s see how long it takes for Steube to distance Trump from the bill he created that clearly explains that Trump totally would be included in this. And this is a good lesson on how being petty AF doesn’t pay off.