WHAT?! A corporatist presidential candidate hired a corporate shill to run his campaign?! Get oudda here!
You can file this one in the “Well That Figures” file. Donald Trump, who had raised a tidy sum of just over $11,000 through the end of September in Michigan, doesn’t have any sort of ground game in Michigan at this point so, given that the primary is in March, it was high time that he hired someone to try to put together some semblance of a ground game between now and March 8, 2015.
This past week, he finally got around to doing that: He hired Scott Hagerstrom, the former Michigan State Director of Americans for Prosperity. AFP is, of course, the corporate front group for the Koch brothers political efforts. Hagerstrom has a long history of union-busting, teacher-denigrating, and Democrat-bashing. In addition to his work at AFP, he was also in a leadership role in the effort to prevent the road repair ballot initiative from passing in our state last spring and has advocated for “taking unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources”.
Hagerstrom is known not for his awesome grassroots organizing but rather for running corporate-funded smear campaigns and anti-union drives that rely heavily on sleazy television ads and even sleazier direct mailings. Since the Trump campaign is not focused on raising funds, Hagerstrom will be freed to spend The Donald’s massive pile of wealth doing what he does best: lying to voters to get them to vote against their own self-interests.
It’s a match made in whatever passes for “heaven” in corporatist world.
