How much more pomo can the Trump campaign get?
By 
It’s looking like the answer might be “none.”
A lot of Trump’s “campaign” has consisted of the by now playbook version of the outsider GOP run that’s just a semi-opaque fig leaf for a straight-up old fashioned grifting operation, see, e.g., id. op. cit. Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Sarah Palin et. al. Hence:
What’s more, certain aspects of Trump’s financials are garnering special attention. For instance, about 20 percent of the $6.7 million he spent in May — or about $1.1 million — went to companies he owns or to travel reimbursements for his children, WSJ reports.
His most expensive expenditure for the month was $423,317 to book his own resort — Mar-A-Lago Club in Palm Beach. He paid one of his own golf courses $35,845, another $29,715, and his son Eric’s wine company more than $4,000. About $350,000 of the money the Trump campaign spent on private jets went to TAG Air — an airline Trump owns.
But Trump’s grifting is, not surprisingly, bigger, bolder, classier, and above all, far more suitable for providing the material for both a terrific HBO documentary and several dozen presentations at the MLA on the breakdown between “reality” and “fiction:”
The Trump campaign also paid $35,000 for advertising to a mystery firm called “Draper Sterling,” which might ring a bell for Mad Men fans and which may or may not actually exist.
I’m going with “not.”
Draper Sterling is the name of the ad agency in AMC’s Mad Men. But Legum is right; Trump’s financial filings show that he made several payments to Draper Sterling in April of this year for web advertising.
The address listed for “Draper Sterling” is nothing more than a house in the middle of suburban New Hampshire.
So what going on? Well there are two circumstantial clues. The first is that “Draper Sterling” is located a fifteen-minute drive and a town over from the hometown of former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. The second…
Want some Trump news? The campaign is doing a forensic audit on all of Corey Lewandowski’s spending.
— Matt Mackowiak (@MattMackowiak) June 21, 2016
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
— Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation —
What’s the point of skimming if we’re being skimmed? Defeats the whole purpose of what we’re doin’ out there.
— Casino —