Quickly after Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi endorsed Donald Trump, it was discovered that Trump had been quite a generous supporter to her election efforts.
Florida Governor Rick Scott has now endorsed Trump, and it turns out the price tag for his support was considerably higher than Bondi’s.
The day after GOP frontrunner Donald Trump won the Florida primary, the state’s governor, Rick Scott, endorsed him. In a Facebook post, Scott asked Republicans to “accept the will of the voters” and unite behind Trump. This came as no surprise, considering that Scott wrote an op-ed praising Trump in January for USA Today.
Trump has been very generous to Scott in the past. Between April 2012 and the end of 2013, he gave $125,000 to Scott’s PAC, Let’s Get To Work.
There are also similarities in how Trump and Scott do business. For example, they both have reputations for defrauding hardworking Americans. Donald Trump’s most well-known scam, Trump University, is in the news, and it’s by no means the only example of Trump fraudulence. The billionaire even ran a pyramid scheme selling vitamins, which defrauded mostly small investors.
Meanwhile Rick Scott oversaw the largest Medicare scam by a hospital company in American history. In 1997, Scott was forced to resign as CEO of Columbia/HCA, a business he founded in 1987, after federal agents went public with an investigation of Medicare fraud by his company’s hospitals. Among the allegations against Columbia/HCA was that it billed Medicare for services that were unnecessary and not even provided. Columbia/HCA later pled guilty and was forced to pay over $1.7 billion in fines to the U.S. government.
Who pays for Medicare? Hard-working Americans through their payroll taxes.
For years Trump, like most wealthy American business people, has been spreading contributions around to politicians on both sides of the aisle. This is usually done to purchase some goodwill and maybe legislative influence. It’s a safe bet that Trump has been working the phones to every prominent Republican he’s given more than a dime to in the past to inform them that the quid pro quo phase of their relationship is now in full flower.
What’s striking is the position many of them are being put in right now. If the general election polling holds, it is highly unlikely that Trump can beat Hillary in November. The seething anger will manifest itself as low voter turnout for the GOP, while the Democrats will more than likely revert to form and show up for the team. That means that many sitting Republican officials who think they are now covering their you-know-whats will actually be active participants in what will probably be a gutting of the GOP.
If Trump loses with so many party heavyweights behind him (for whatever reasons), that loss may just be the first tug on the string that will eventually unravel the GOP’s hold on state houses and governor’s mansions.
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