If you were a lunatic and you wanted to make a billion dollars completely evaporate in just three months, could you figure out a way to do it? Buying real estate or stocks wouldn’t work because those count as cash assets. Short of setting the entire pile of cash on fire, it would be an extremely challenging if not impossible thing to do. Yet somehow, the Kamala Harris campaign for president figured out a way to do it. They blew through a billion bucks in three months and ended with nothing to show for it. They also ended up $20 million in debt!

How the heck did that happen?

A lot of Gen Xers might remember a Richard Pryor movie called “Brewster’s Millions” from the 1980s. The main character’s eccentric uncle dies and leaves his nephew a silly challenge. To inherit the entirety of the uncle’s $300 million fortune, Pryor’s character has to spend $30 million in 30 days and end up flat broke at the end of the month. He’s not allowed to explain his motive to his friends as to why he’s wasting a fortune.

Thirty million dollars was a jaw-dropping amount of money back in 1985. People who saw the movie had debates about how they might make $30 million evaporate and have nothing to show for it. In a funny parallel, Pryor’s character comes up with the perfect way to obliterate a bunch of cash. He runs a frivolous political campaign in hopes of losing.

It seems like we just watched the 2024 remake but, in this version, the main character didn’t win anything at the end of the contest. She lost everything in a historic landslide to Donald Trump.

So, how did the Harris campaign manage to end up $20 million in debt after the “nominee” quickly raised over a billion dollars between July and August? The answer is lots of grift and celebrity payoffs. Billions of dollars are spent on every presidential campaign and all that sweet, sweet cash has to end up in somebody’s pockets.

The Harris campaign’s publicly available FEC filings have been posted and they reveal quite a few surprises that people weren’t expecting. The top five expenditures went to five Democrat political consulting firms and “media buys,” which is spending money to air campaign commercials and so forth. That alone accounted for $600 million.

Democrat presidential candidates don’t fly commercial with the rubes. They fly private. The Harris campaign spent $26 million on private jet flights in just three short months. We’re also guessing that the campaign staff didn’t miss any meals during their three-month spending spree and they weren’t eating at McDonald’s.

The funniest thing revealed in the FEC filings, however, is the payouts to celebrities for their endorsements. You didn’t think Bruce Springsteen and all those twerking rapper ladies performed concerts at Kamala’s rallies for free, did you? None of them actually believed that “democracy was on the ballot,” so they all got paid. Even Beyonce probably got paid for her four-minute introduction speech at the Harris rally in Texas in October.

One of the biggest celebrity disbursements was a $1 million payout to Harpo Productions. That’s Oprah Winfrey. The “town hall” with Kamala Harris that was presented as a news event was bought and paid for. Oprah sold her endorsement to Kamala Harris and threw her longtime friend Donald Trump under the bus for a measly $1 million. All this money was donated to the Harris campaign in good faith and they spent it like a bunch of drunken sailors. Congratulations on finishing in second place, guys!