I was curious about what is the official figure (more on that below) of money that have been given to Trump for his campaign. It turns out that in 2020 the biggest donors, above 1 million or so summed 208 million. Let's say, for the shake of simplicity, that all the rest of donors combined are another 92 million or so and all sums 300 Million.
https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/donald-trump/contributors?id=N00023864This leads me to think: (a) there must be much more dirty money being moved under the radar and (b) It would be relatively simple for a foreign
Ruzzian, Chinese, government to put forward that kind of money (peanuts really - it is the cost of a modern Radar / antiair system) to influence the elections.
What are your thoughts of this? Would it be easy for a foreign government to get a candidate that, lets say, would be keen on given then ample preferential treatment and let them go wild on a neighbour country for example?
I believe they foreign governments seeking to intervene and mess with American elections are more likely to use other unregulated channels and not try to directly donate to their prefered candidate, in my opinion. Because in theory, it would be way easier to Authorities in the United States to realize there has been fool play with the origin of the money the candidate received.
As it stands for now, the government of Russia prefers to mess with the public perception the average citizen has on candidates by their classical troll farms and also carrying out hacks onto those candidate who are considered to be hostile against them, in order to publish damaging information during the presidential campaign.
After all, those attacks are not as blatant as some Russian entity trying to donate to a Republican candidate in the USA by a third party in the country, in the end, the registers of those donations are supposed to function in such a way, so the donations are not completely anonymous.
If Trump for some strange reasons started to accept donations in Bitcoin and Monero, there would be indeed interesting transactions from foreign entities, though that won't happen obviouly. Not even sure whether it is legal or not.