Meet Trump contribution Bundler #2024027, AKA Kansas Republican Chairman Mike Brown | Opinion
I just had the weirdest conversation with Donald Trump campaign contribution Bundler #2024027.
He’s otherwise known as Mike Brown, chairman of the Kansas Republican Party.
I called him up to talk about something I saw in the GOP’s Friday File email newsletter that frankly, seemed a little shady to me.
Brown wants you to donate to the Trump campaign — but he wants you to pass your donations through him.
As it says in the Friday File, which is widely distributed to party members (of which I am one, for the record): “Note: Be sure to write BUNDLER #2024027 on the memo line of your check.”
So I called Brown to ask about that. He confirmed that he is Bundler #2024027. I asked him what he’s getting out of this and he told me nothing but the satisfaction of helping Donald Trump become president again, which would make him oh so happy.
I can’t say I believe that.
Special treatment for bundlers
Bundlers are a special class of donors within our political system. They’re usually someone rich and/or influential who can round up a lot of donations for national campaigns. Both parties do it.
There are benefits to being one. Bundlers get VIP treatment at campaign events and conventions, often including face time with the top-of-the-ticket candidates themselves.
They get on the short list for jobs in the presidential administration, or, sometimes, cushy ambassadorships to friendly but otherwise inconsequential countries.
About the closest analogy I can think of would be, it’s like you buying an airline ticket and Mike Brown getting the frequent-flyer miles.
Moments after I spoke with Brown, he called me back demanding to know in what capacity I had called him.
When I told him I was a journalist, he flew into a rage, accusing me of unethical behavior. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He just yelled at me for a while, said he’d never talk to me again (boo hoo) and hung up.
I called back and left him a voice mail message, saying that I had identified myself as being from The Eagle when I called the party office and left him the message that he was returning. As far as I’m concerned, if he didn’t know who he was calling back, that’s between him and his staff. Not my problem.
He also said he had recorded our conversation (be my guest, I’ve got nothing to hide) and that he went to journalism school and knows the rules.
I’d imagine Brown will probably write up this episode for his Friday file (it is his way), so if he does, now you know what really happened.
Unconstitutional proposal
If Brown was ever trained as a journalist, I’d love to see that college transcript. From his behavior, I can say with reasonable certainty that he made the right call going into construction contracting instead.
In the same issue of the Friday File, the man we now know as Bundler #2024027 called for the use of government power to punish the press for not being MAGA enough to suit him.
Don’t you just love it when political hacks say the quiet part out loud?
In attacking Joel Mathis, one of our other opinion columnists, Brown let slip a dirty little secret that Trumpublicans like him have been dutifully denying for the last couple of years — that the motivation behind efforts to strip Kansas newspapers of paid legal notices is that The Party doesn’t like what the press writes about them.
Mathis, a regular opinion columnist for The Eagle and The Kansas City Star, got Brown’s attention when he objected to his muzzle-the-press attitude expressed in the Friday File two weeks ago.
Brown was on one of his rants against the “Deep State” — this time targeting the FBI, the Secret Service, the Education Department and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Included in it was this quote:
“The challengers (to the deep state) are deemed troublemakers and the mainstream media - the DNC’s (Democratic National Committee’s) communications department, happily begins the smear campaign never pausing to ask the next set of important questions. This sycophant and derelict behavior begs a Congressional review of the MSM’s (mainstream media’s) vast protections under the U.S. Constitution.”
I can only imagine what Brown considers “the next set of important questions.” Mine would start with “Who died and left you boss, Mike?”
What Mathis objected to, and quite rightly so, was Brown’s call for “congressional review” of the First Amendment. The amendment — which protects freedom of speech and freedom of the press — literally begins with the phrase, “Congress shall make no law” abridging those things.
Somehow, I expect the guy who’s in charge of the dominant political party of Kansas to have at least a basic understanding of high-school civics.
I don’t anymore.
State vs. the press?
In responding to the Mathis column in last Friday’s Friday File, Brown doubled down on his call for government to suppress the press.
He wrote (and it’s in big red letters and italics, so it must be true): “I wholeheartedly support the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment. It’s a fundamental right that we must cherish and defend.”
Unfortunately, the rest of his message indicates the exact opposite:
“When reporting factual news, I simply stated that the press should always enjoy the First Amendment. And when they are printing stated opinion, they should also enjoy the benefits of 1A. However, when they print opinion as news in a thinly veiled attempt to bend the curve of public opinion then and there they have crossed a line beyond the protections of the First Amendment.”
Maybe he’s talking about Fox News?
Nah.
“It is McClatchy news that bastardized my point and contorted the apparent facts and my opinions,” he wrote. “They aren’t a legitimate news service but the ‘Communications Arm of the Left.’”
Let’s set aside that the column that’s threatening to give Brown a stroke was clearly labeled “opinion.” Three times, in fact — in the headline, the byline and the tagline at the end.
Instead, let’s move on to his plan to punish the non-MAGA newspapers:
“The fact is, most newspapers exist only because they make enough money from being an ‘official publication’ in their community and not because of subscribers or advertisers outside of government,” he wrote. “If the Republican legislature would band together and change Kansas law to allow internet publications to serve in this capacity the newspapers would need to cater to their readers wants and needs versus their liberal editorial boards and the all-too-tempting government money to survive.”
So much for the oft-told lie that doing away with legal notices is about anything other than punishing newspapers for writing stories that upset the powers that be.
The reality is, like any other government vendor, newspapers get paid to provide a service. As I’ve written before, legal notices serve two functions: They help get the word out about government actions, but more importantly, they create a permanent and unchangeable record of those actions.
Small papers rely on them heavily to generate operating cash. Big papers, not so much.
You’d think somebody who’s as paranoid of the government as Brown would be all for the checks and balances that printed notices provide, because anything that exists only on computers can be changed using computers.
But Brown’s all in on using the power of government to punish those who disagree with him politically. At most, he’d wind up killing a bunch of tiny small-town papers that generally don’t run anything more controversial than “Pet of the Week.”
Brown is many things. Champion of the Constitution is not one of them.
So here’s hoping that if Trump’s elected, Brown has amassed enough campaign contribution bundling credits to get him out of here and into an ambassadorship somewhere far from Kansas.
Antarctica would be nice.
