TWO TITANS OF OUR ERA DREAM BIG TOGETHER LIVE. Elon Musk's Interview with Donald Trump. Elon Endorsement and Trum...

12 August 2024

TWO TITANS OF OUR ERA DREAM BIG TOGETHER LIVE. Elon Musk's Interview with Donald Trump. Elon Endorsement and Trum...

IN CONTEXT

Pro-Trump super PAC plans $100M ad blitz

The ads come as Republicans seek to undercut Kamala Harris ahead of the DNC.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump joins his Vice Presidential Nominee, Senator JD Vance, not pictured, on stage at a campaign stop.

The super PAC’s ads will focus on defining Kamala Harris as a “soft-on-crime radical who is too dangerous for the White House.” | Jamie Kelter Davis for POLITICO

A pro-Trump super PAC is planning a $100 million TV ad blitz in the lead-up to Labor Day, a massive sum as Trump moves to regain his footing in the campaign.

MAGA Inc, the principal Trump-aligned super PAC, announced the reservations in a memo to “Interested Parties” on Monday. The commercials will air in seven Rust Belt and Sun Belt states that are likely to determine the outcome of the election.

". . .The former president posted a two-and-a-half minute ad he’s previously shared on other social media platforms and at campaign events, a video compilation painting himself as a political target in the face of multiple criminal indictments.

He went on to post at least four more times within the next two hours, promoting his 8 p.m. EDT interview with Musk and hitting Vice President Kamala Harris as a “SAN FRANCISCO RADICAL.”

His last activity on the platform had been sharing his Fulton County Jail mugshot in 2023, and before that, an announcement two days after the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection that he would not attend President Joe Biden’s inauguration.

His campaign also began running ads on X under his @realDonaldTrump account ahead of his Musk interview.

Data on how much his campaign was spending on the platform was not available in X’s political advertising log, which updates every few days.

Trump’s campaign has previously spent on X ads under a @TeamTrump account, but not on the former president’s notorious personal account.

The X posts also come after the company behind Trump’s own platform Truth Social, Trump Media & Technology Group, recorded a more than $16 million loss and a nearly 30 percent decline in revenue from the same quarter last year, according to its latest financial results earlier this month.

Trump is the company’s largest stakeholder with shares valued at roughly $3 billion.

A month after Musk — who had denounced Trump’s ban from the platform following the insurrection — acquired what was then called Twitter in 2022, he reinstated Trump’s account, although the former president has mostly remained on Truth Social.

Once a self-proclaimed Democrat, Musk has risen recently as a figure in right-wing spaces. While the Tesla CEO has said he would not be donating to any presidential candidate, he endorsed Trump in the days following the assassination attempt on the Republican presidential candidate at a Pennsylvania rally last month.

Jessica Piper contributed to this report.