Trump's Military Commanders Order Troops to Buy Tickets to Melania Documentary That Pays Her $28 Million

Jeff Bezos spending $75 million on a documentary about Donald Trump’s wife, from which she will personally pocket an estimated $28 million, is an obvious bribe paid to the president. What is worse is that some in the executive branch are reportedly abusing their power to drive up the film’s ticket sales by providing a captive audience of military families.

The Daily Beast has the story:

The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.

According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets. …

“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those [MRFF] members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.

The unit commander in question is alleged to have worn red MAGA hats in the past and “made it very clear” how he feels about those who do not support the administration’s agenda.

He is also alleged to have made seeing Melania count as one of the three “unit activity events” service members are required to attend each month. Such events are designed to promote bonds within combat units and their families.

The letter said, “…he ‘advised’ our unit members and their families to join him and his wife and children for a showing of that new documentary called Melania at an off-base movie theater. … When he said ‘advised,’ we know what that meant.”

In addition to the personal corruption of driving viewers to a documentary for the personal financial benefit of the president’s wife, there is something in this story even more corrosive to a democracy: making the military subservient to a partisan agenda and subjecting its members to partisan loyalty tests—a total no-no in this country but a norm that the administration has already broken repeatedly.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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