An amusing attempt at fund raising from the Trump campaign – send a brick to Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. Yes, of course, the usual have got all worried about it, telling people to send a brick might mean them lobbing one through the window, yadda, yadda. The significance is obvious enough, they won’t build a wall, send them a brick to show that walls work.
The actual point of the campaign obviously enough being to raise money for one of the Trump committees. It costs $20 to so send a brick, that $20 going to the committee.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””] President Donald Trump has faced backlash after his 2020 campaign team launched a new fundraising drive to send bricks to the offices of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) The Republican National Committee, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale and Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. each hyped the initiative and its BuildTheBorderWall.com website on Twitter Friday. [/perfectpullquote]But there’s a way of making this much more fun. Actually post Nancy and Chuck a brick each. No, not through the window, the US Mail. The trick though is to make them pay the postage.
Now, this comes from one of the old MASH novels so it might not still be entirely 100% true. But I think that it is – we’ve seen the same problem arising with Freepost addresses in the UK.
So, someone sends out a mailing with a reply paid coupon or envelope. Sure, politically, they’re hoping that people will be sending money back. But they’ve still got to pay that postage cost if no money is sent back. Just an empty envelope being sent back costs your enemy money that is. In the MASH novel sending the reply coupon back attached to a brick costs them more.
So, find any mailing from any Democratic committee for whatever, take the reply envelope or coupon and attach it to a brick. Put in US Mail. Chuck and Nancy get a brick and they’ve got to pay for getting a brick.
To be equal opportunist about this this would – assuming that it does – also work for Republican fundraisers. Or for the guys trying to sell you life insurance.
Wesn’t there some government booklet sent out to all households in the 1990s that had a freepost tear-off slip for comments. You could carefully slide the booklet out of its envelope, turn the back page over so the freepost address was visible, slip it back in and post the entire thing back.
The ‘post a brick to your enemies’ thing certainly happened at least once to the party I worked with in the noughties. I remember opening the day’s freepost returns and finding about 100 of them were clearly photocopies of the same survey return. The individual identifiers (a unique number in the bottom corner) had all been cut off. Of course we had to pay the postage on them.