MeidasTouch

For MeidasTouch, the pro-Biden blitz was part of a rapidly expanding political action committee that turned viral tweets and posts into campaign contributions. Founded by three brothers, the group says it has generated more than a billion views on social media, mocking and humiliating Trump and his enablers. Crowd favorites included “Creepy Trump,” “Bye Ivanka,” and “Bye Don Jr: Love Me, Daddy!” Its podcast has become a popular destination on the anti-Trump circuit, with recent guests including Democratic Reps. Eric Swalwell and Ted Lieu, and Mary Trump, the former president’s estranged niece. All this exposure translated into more than $5 million in contributions from Resistance donors desperate to oust Trump and his Republican collaborators. The three brothers who founded MeidasTouch sell themselves as the progressive breakout success of the 2020 election cycle, weaving a narrative of a start-from-scratch operation that — thanks to a gift for creating viral anti-Trump videos and a unique understanding of the digital tides — rapidly blossomed into a behemoth of Democratic politics. “We’ve become the most recognizable and impactful brand name in progressive politics in the 30 days since we launched,” Ben Meiselas, the eldest brother, told Adweek in June. They aren’t, per their own telling, just the top brand, they’re also pioneers of a radical transparency model that the notoriously opaque world of Super PACs could stand to learn from. “I knew that PACs in general, political action committees, have a reputation about them,” Meiselas said on a recent MeidasTouch podcast. “And I wanted this to be so different from every other PAC, starting with the fact that me, who works for this every day, doesn’t get paid. But, two, to have the most ridiculous amount of transparency possible.” But the full story of MeidasTouch is more complicated. The group spent more than $1 million on an advertising strategy that it calls revolutionary but campaign veterans and independent experts say is nonsensical and a more effective tool for fundraising than for helping Democrats win elections. And despite its promised transparency, MeidasTouch’s financial structure makes a dollar-for-dollar accounting of its spending impossible — and, according to a former Federal Election Commission attorney, raises some of the same legal issues that got the Trump campaign into trouble in 2020. The arrangement was neither illegal nor uncommon, but was MeidasTouch — which bills itself as uniquely transparent and honest — misleading its donors when it said: “We are giving” money to the Biden campaign and “we are proud to have already chipped in”? The ones who were giving were Meidas’ donors, not the Super PAC itself. “It’s extremely misleading,” says Adav Noti, chief of staff at the Campaign Legal Center and a former associate general counsel at the Federal Election Commission. “It’s not just PACs who do it. The Trump campaign did it ad nauseam. They did it so much it started not working anymore, which is hard to do. It’s obviously misleading.” MeidasTouch, like many other Super PACs, is fueled by anti-Trump donors who, outraged and terrified by Trump’s malevolence and incompetence, were ready to open their wallets like never before in 2020. But those donors were pouring money into a broken campaign-finance system. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and other court rulings have allowed Super PACs to raise unlimited sums of money but given them few rules or guidelines on how to spend it. The rules that do exist are rarely enforced, as the Federal Election Commission went dormant for most of 2020 because it was unable to form a quorum. This system has created a free-for-all environment in which donors are continually asked for money, often on social media, but have meager legal protection to ensure that those dollars are being spent wisely, ethically, or even in the way they intended. “With PACs, it’s the Wild West,” says Paul S. Ryan, a vice president at C