Is Maryland's Open Senate Seat For Sale? New Dem David Trone Is Offering $50 Million For A Term

Crooked Businessman Wants To Be A Senator

David Trone is a super-wealthy Maryland alcohol peddler and donor to both political parties. He ran against Jamie Raskin in 2016, spending $13,414,225 of his own money to lose the primary (with 27.2% of the vote). Drooling over his money, Pelosi and the Democratic establishment got behind him 2 years later when conservative corporate Democrat John Delaney retired and Trone ran for the open seat. This time he spent $17,913,172 of his own loot to buy himself a congressional seat. He joined the New Dems, of course, and ran up a mediocre and unremarkable voting record. He accomplished absolutely nothing in his 5 years in the House and decided it was time to buy himself a Senate seat instead.

He developed a taste for power when he saw how the government could prevent him from driving his competitors out of business with monopolistic practices. He also learned about lobbying at the time, as he got corrupt legislators— primarily Republicans like Greg Abbott and Pat McCrory— to weaken laws by bribing them. Even while in Congress as a putative Democrat, his firm shoveled massive bribes to Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, etc.

Last week, Time Magazine reported that Trone “appeared to have put his days as a GOP donor behind him. The liquor store tycoon had just won a U.S. House seat representing Maryland’s 6th District, despite some critics questioning his progressive bona fides. Over the previous two decades, Trone had contributed more than $150,000 to Republicans nationwide. It was the cost of doing business, he said. Since then, his personal donations have been almost exclusively to Democrats… But in the years since Trone joined Congress, his company has sent tens of thousands of dollars to anti-abortion Republicans across the country. In the last two election cycles, Trone’s firm, Retail Services and Systems, donated to GOP officeholders who moved to criminalize abortion in states where access to the procedure was at risk, according to a Time review of campaign finance records. That includes at least $80,200 the corporation contributed to a dozen Republicans in Georgia who passed a 2019 trigger bill that banned abortions after six weeks, as well as Gov. Brian Kemp, who signed it into law. The measure went into effect shortly after the 2022 Dobbs ruling that ended a constitutional right to abortion.”

Trone is spending millions of dollars on ads in his Senate race pretending to care about Choice. “We need federal protections,” he said. “As Senator, I'll fight to do just that.”

Retail Services and Systems, the parent company that owns Total Wine & More, also donated a total of $12,000 in October and November 2022 to two groups working to elect Republicans to the Wisconsin state legislature, where GOP lawmakers were blocking efforts to repeal an 1849 law that barred virtually all abortions.

Those outlays are indicative of Trone’s and his company’s history of making campaign contributions to candidates throughout the nation, Republican and Democratic alike, to advance legislation or regulatory changes favorable to Total Wine, the nation’s largest privately owned retailer of beer, wine, and liquor, with 254 stores in 28 states.

… Since entering Congress in 2019, Trone, 67, has maintained co-ownership of Retail Services and Systems and Total Wine with his brother Robert, with whom he founded the companies in the 1980s. When he stepped down as Total Wine’s CEO in 2015 and president in 2016, he said he would no longer manage day-to-day operations. But Trone has remained involved in the firm. Last year, he and his brother spent $1 million each in Colorado pushing for a ballot initiative to loosen the state’s liquor laws. In December 2021, an Arizona police report revealed that he was visiting a Tempe store location and engaging with delivery workers. And his picture remains plastered on the company website, which says that he and his brother “lead an expert team focused on excellent selections at the lowest prices possible.”

Ever since Trone got involved in Democratic politics, however, he has stopped writing personal checks to GOP candidates and officials, the Time review found. During his first House bid in 2016 in a heavily blue district, he drew attention for the $150,000 he had previously given to Republican officeholders, including Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and then-Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina. “I sign my checks to buy access,” he told the Washington Post. “We disagree categorically with their political positions on everything social and economic.”

…Trone is currently locked in a competitive Democratic primary to replace outgoing Sen. Ben Cardin. After two months of soul-searching, Raskin decided last month not to seek the seat, making Trone’s main opponents Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks and Montgomery County Council Member Will Jawando.

Alsobrooks has stood out as his most formidable rival, drawing high-profile endorsements and mounting an impressive first-quarter fundraising haul. But she won’t be able to spend anywhere near as much as Trone. The super-rich wine magnate has already spent millions on television advertising and has told associates he’s prepared to dish out as much as $50 million for his bid, according to sources familiar with the matter.

That said, Alsobrooks seems poised to attract national interest as a single mom and Black woman running when there are no Black women in the Senate. Nor are there any women currently in Maryland’s Congressional delegation. Maryland political analysts suspect her story will resonate with the state’s Democratic voters, especially the nearly 60% who are women, according to state voter data.

Abortion-right advocates say that Trone’s company funding anti-abortion Republicans procedure will be a factor for those women, especially since a substantial portion of those donations were made around the same time he was castigating those same officials for undermining access to the procedure. “For years, radical state legislatures have waged an all-out assault on women’s reproductive rights,” he said in September 2021, after voting with House Democrats to codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.

“Abortion rights weren't overturned in a day,” Stephanie Schriock, former president of the abortion rights group Emily’s List, tells Time. “It's been a decades-long strategy that we have all known was coming. And yet he and his company have been and continue to be supportive of Republicans who are very much part of this strategy, and making it worse, ensuring that abortion is knocked out at the state level.”

Trone has run for Senate as an unabashed self-funder who is beholden to no one. “When someone takes money from PACs, someone takes money from lobbyists, and corporations, those folks aren't just writing those checks out of the goodness of their heart,” he told a Baltimore-area radio show last week. “I just spend my own money, because I give a damn about trying to change the system."

It’s a posture that’s led some detractors to say Trone is a participant in the system he claims to protest. “I find it so hypocritical for him to spend all this time bragging that he doesn’t take money from special interests when he’s a special interest who gives money to anti-choice candidates,” says Susan Turnbull, a former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party who has endorsed Alsobrooks. “He can claim it is his company, and not him, all he wants, but let’s be real— that company is the ongoing source of his wealth and funds his campaign for Senate. That’s why you question his beliefs, because what comes first: his business or what he claims to stand up for?”

…On July 27, his campaign blasted an automated text message out to Maryland Democrats. “24 states have already banned abortion care or are planning to,” it reads. “David Trone is going to fight tooth and nail to make sure fundamental freedoms like reproductive rights are protected federally.” The message then included a link to an online form to sign up for his email distribution list. “Will you add your name in support of abortion rights by midnight tonight?”

As Primary School noted last week, Trone is hoping to suffocate his opponents under a mountain of cash but “he’s learning the hard way that running for Senate is a wee bit tougher than running to represent Frederick, Maryland in the House. His profligate self-funding and apparent inability to make friends have rubbed just about everyone in Maryland politics the wrong way, allowing Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks to become the runaway favorite and unanimous establishment choice by default. The fact that he’s never needed to develop basic political instincts is coming back to bite him in new and exciting ways seemingly every week.

Trone has been indicted, charged and arrested numerous times in several states for unfair business practices. Trump-like, he always manages to slip out of his legal problems with those mountains of cash. He has told friends that the is willing to spend as much as $50 million to win the Senate race. Can you call yourself pro-Choice when you are bankrolling anti-Choice politicians? Maryland deserves better than David Trone.