Hollywood Stars, Private Jets, And Consultants Ate Harris Campaign’s Money

Oz Zeren
4 min readNov 11, 2024

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It looks like some people made so much money from the Democrat’s 2024 campaign that it defies description.

Payments to media personalities to have them appear, hauling people in and out with private jets, consultants who gave terrible advice, and media managers who got a cut of the ads they placed and the media spending they made on behalf of the campaign, seem to have eaten close to ~600 million dollars.

Solely Oprah Winfrey seems to have received $1 million from the campaign.

The campaign seems to have received $1.033 billion in donations, spent $1,37 billion, blew $582 million solely on staff, and ended up with $350 million in debt.

In debt…

In contrast, Trump’s campaign received $380 million in donations, and spent $350 million, with only $10.4 million spent on staff. An ~$30 million surplus.

So the Democrats’ campaign seems to have spent $570 million more on staff than Trump’s.

How could this much money be spent on staff, media, celebrities, and so on? Who ate all this money?

From the looks of it, consultants, and the celebrities who appeared in the Democrat’s rallies seem to have made bank. The majority of spending is ‘media production’, suggesting that those celebrity appearances, shows, and endorsements were bought:

But the result has been Trump taking a whopping 312 electoral votes, and the Democrats remaining at a count of 226.

This is an incredible display of an out-of-touch aristocracy feeding themselves with the donations of ordinary people who made the mistake of donating their hard-earned money to them.

In a self-criticism of their campaign, a DNC member tells Rolling Stone magazine that the Democratic campaign consultants prevented using even the term ‘working class’ in the campaign because it sounded ‘Marxist’. Even as Trump ran his campaign on a working-class rhetoric.

We said: “If you go to these communities in Pennsylvania, you can call them ‘working class,’ that’s fine.” But they [the consultants] don’t like to use “working class” — because it smacks of Marxism. . I’d say, call them Polish Americans, or call them Hungarian Americans, or call them Irish Americans — call them what they call themselves.

So they went back to doing half-arsed identity politics. Anything but ‘the working class’.

To top this off, they brought in out-of-touch, multimillionaire celebrities to tell the voters what to do, as if the voters were dumb. A total display of an aristocracy that is disconnected from reality.

This whole thing of celebrity politics — where instead of doing stuff with people who mattered and had constituencies, we were doing stuff with musicians, with entertainers, and with Hollywood stars. It plays into that whole elite, celebrity mindset. That that’s who we are, and that’s who we appeal to. The folks who think it’s a good idea are out of touch with where average voters are.

But even the self-criticizing DNC member above still exhibits the tenets of an out-of-touch aristocracy: His proposal later in the Rolling Stone article for a solution to the Democratic Party’s disconnect still takes the form of ‘reaching out to voters’ on their ‘identity’ and ‘making them feel heard’, and ‘speaking to them’.

Performative identity politics instead of actual working class policies.

This aristocracy still can’t risk even a little bit of their obscene wealth to improve the conditions of the people whose vote they need. The stocks, real estate, and other investments must not be disturbed by taxes, social programs, housing efforts, and whatnot! Woe to the ordinary person on the street. S/he should be content with just ‘getting reached out to’, ‘being heard’, and ‘spoken to’. Not expect any economic policy that could actually improve his or her life.

This mentality is a narcissist aristocratic mentality. For narcissists, the most important thing in the world is themselves. In the narcissist’s mind, the narcissist stopping being immersed in his own world, and noticing your existence is a great blessing to you. Him talking with you, is an even bigger blessing. That is why narcissists think that doing just that is enough to get votes and that is also why they can’t understand why they lost the election despite doing that and blame everyone and everything else.

The calcified aristocracy of the Democratic Party is exhibiting all these traits. They aren’t able to break out of their bubble even after the crushing victory of Trump that steamrolled them.

And as there seems to be no kind of movement or dynamic in the Democratic Party that can destroy the narcissist aristocratic stranglehold, its future looks bleak. The working class and the ordinary people should seek the solution in alternatives.

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Oz Zeren
Oz Zeren

Written by Oz Zeren

Writing for a better future. I work in Tech. I like Philosophy, History, Computers, Gaming, the Internet. I’m excited about the Creator Economy, Web 3.0, DAOs.