I get a personal email from Donald Trump at least once a day. I also hear all the time from other members of his family.
These messages are invariably urgent—so urgent that I wonder if the President is worried, deep down inside, that he may not be reelected.
I’m not sure how I got on all of these email lists, but I have never complained. I appreciate that the President and others are genuinely concerned about my level of support for his campaign.
“Friend,” began one recent message from President Trump himself. “I really need you to pick up the pace.”
“I emailed you 3 times. I texted you 2 times,” the President’s son told me. “My dad needs your support in order to demolish the Radical Left. We must fund every critical race between now and Election Day in order to win BIG in November.”
Trump explained, as he often does, that his campaign needed my help to meet a critical fundraising goal. In this case, its need for a cash infusion was so great that it had “activated” a 600 percent match for however much I gave—but only until 11:59 that night. The President informed me that “63 Patriots from your state have already stepped up. I’m just waiting on you.”
I thought about this message that night around 11:30, but then realized that he probably meant Eastern Time, not Central. So it was a lost opportunity.
But it’s true, I’ve been given plenty of other chances. In fact, the President and his family ask me for money so often that they apologize for it, and this is not a group that apologizes much.
“I am sorry for bombarding you,” Donald Jr. wrote to me not long ago. “But, this is critical.” His exasperation in what followed was palpable.
“I emailed you 3 times. I texted you 2 times,” the President’s son told me. “My dad needs your support in order to demolish the Radical Left. We must fund every critical race between now and Election Day in order to win BIG in November.”
Donald Jr. added that, for the sake of people like me, there was still time to give, if I did it quickly.
For one reason or another, I didn’t.
But Donald Jr. did not give up.
Not long afterward, he wrote again to say he had signed a copy of his book, Liberal Privilege, just for me. He said the offer to buy it for just $75 was good for only an hour. But more time than that had passed before I saw it in my inbox.
Donald Jr. also wrote to let me know that “My father only chose 100 Patriots to join his prestigious Trump 100 Club, and YOU were one of them.” And his dad regularly invites me “for the chance” to have dinner with him. All I have to do is “contribute any amount” by 11:59.
Recently, I was asked to rate “the job President Trump’s campaign is doing,” as part of the Trump campaign’s “Official 100 Days Out Strategy Survey.” The options were: “Incredible,” “Great,” “Good,” and “Other.” I was even given my own registration number, made out with my name and zip code, so that I could send a contribution.
“Without you,” the President assured me, “our movement would be NOTHING. I would be NOTHING.”
Vice President Mike Pence also wrote to me, just the other day, to underscore the urgency of the moment. “The only thing standing between the American People and the agenda of the far-Left,” he warned, “is four more years of President Trump.”
I also hear regularly from the President’s other son, Eric. One of his recent emails arrived with the subject line, “I convinced my father to give you another chance.”
It’s the kids, always the kids, who take my failure to respond to any of these hundreds of messages the hardest.
“The dishonesty from the media and their attempt to demean, harass, and slander anything related to my father and his administration is truly mind-boggling,” Eric explained in this email. “They’ll never stop coming after him, which is why we were really disappointed to see that you neglected to help us reach our End-of-Quarter Goal.”
Eric also shared this thought with me: “It’s going to take EVERY patriot stepping up if we want to CRUSH Sleepy Joe’s dreams of turning America into a BIG GOVERNMENT SOCIALIST Nation.”
I also get frequent emails from Lara Trump, Eric’s wife. She seems highly concerned. “The polls have never been more inaccurate,” she wrote me recently, “which proves we’re not just up against the Democrats anymore - we are taking on the ENTIRE Fake News media too.”
The solution to this problem, of course, was for me to give money to the Trump-Pence campaign—with a multiplier match that was good only until midnight.
It’s clear to me from those messages that I am letting these people down. They ask and ask, and I never give them a thing but grief. What kind of a supporter am I? The President himself recently emailed me about this. Even the subject line of his email was sad: “Are you there?”
The email went on to say:
Now I know why the President has not had time to deal with this coronavirus pandemic. He’s spending a part of every day looking at lists, trying to find my name. He and his family are also spending a lot of time on these letters.
The President, after expressing his deep disappointment, gave me yet another chance to make things right “by the end of the night.”
I missed that deadline, too.