UPDATED 8:50 p.m. ET: Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News have uncovered that the man who started the GoFundMe for Trump's border wall previously ran a Facebook page called Right Wing News. The page published conspiracy theories and was eventually taken down by the social network.
The guy behind #GoFundTheWall used to run FreedomDaily(.)com.
Here is, no joke, four hours of sequential content from a random day last December.
(The site shut down this year and its affiliate, Right Wing News, was banned from Facebook in October.)https://t.co/TYmiGOczuh pic.twitter.com/3s0I9OgLNs
See original story below.
What are the top 3 most American things you can think of? If you said, the military, xenophobia, and using online platforms to beg for cash when the country fails you, then we have a story for you.
An Air Force veteran and triple amputee is looking to raise the money for Donald Trump's border wall on GoFundMe. The Washington Post points out that Brian Kolfage of Miramar Beach has raised over $7 million in 3 days in an attempt to bypass Congress and fund Trump's pet project on the southern border.
Kolfage explained on his campaign page that he was overcome with a desire to help Trump make good on his campaign promise.
"Like a majority of those American citizens who voted to elect President Donald J Trump, we voted for him to Make America Great Again. President Trump’s main campaign promise was to BUILD THE WALL. And as he’s followed through on just about every promise so far, this wall project needs to be completed still," he wrote. "Democrats are going to stall this project by every means possible and play political games to ensure President Trump doesn’t get his victor. (sic) They'd rather see President Trump fail, than see America succeed."
Kolfage isn't the only person who thought that the wall could be built with donations. Republican lawmaker Diane Black put forth a bill that would allow the Treasury to accept donations for the project.
The Border Wall Trust Fund Act — which is secretly what Donald Trump called his presidential campaign before he accidentally won — would “allow the secretary of the Treasury to accept public donations to fund the construction of a barrier on the border between the United States and Mexico, and for other purposes.”
With estimates for the wall's construction costs ranging from $20 to $70 billion, the government would need to find some incredibly generous folks to get the wall going.
On Kolfage's end, he's raised over $7 million of his stated $1 billion goal. While it's an impressive number to most of us, it's a drop in the bucket when we're talking about a project the size of the wall.
