For years, Donald Trump stood at podiums and told you dead people were voting. “People that have died 10 years ago are still voting,” he said in Wisconsin back in 2016. He cited a Pew report saying 1.8 million deceased individuals were listed on voter rolls. The experts at FactCheck.org and a Stanford team that combed through 4.5 million Washington State records found exactly 14 possible cases of a ballot cast in a dead person’s name over eight years. Fourteen. That is 0.0003 percent. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning twice while holding a winning Powerball ticket.
But ask yourself: who actually has a use for dead people? Not voters. Not elections. The people who need dead people are the ones trying to manufacture the appearance of public support for something the public does not want.
Enter the private equity industry and their friends at the Department of Labor.
Bloomberg and The Daily Beast just uncovered that more than 12,000 public comments supporting Trump’s plan to shove your 401(k) into private equity and crypto were manufactured. Not suspicious. Not questionable. Manufactured. The comments had no signatures, no cities, no states, no email addresses. They followed five templates. Identical punctuation, identical line breaks, identical length. They rolled in at the same pace every day from April 29 to May 5, then stopped dead, no pun intended.
Meanwhile, the 30,000 comments opposing the plan? Real people. Real names. Real addresses. Real signatures. You know, the things an actual human being puts on a comment when they actually care about something.
Shealeah Craighead (Public domain) via Wikimedia CommonsSome of the fake supporters were not alive. Danna Oderman died last December. In May, a comment appeared under her name praising the “democratizing” of private markets. Her son Heath told Bloomberg, “That’s not my mom.” He added that the language was “nothing she would ever have used while on this Earth.” Lyngrid Rawlings, a former Foreign Service officer who died in 2024, also supposedly submitted a comment. Her daughter Lauren called it “deeply disrespectful and dishonoring.” They even grabbed a living person, retired professor Karl Giberson, who said the comment under his name did not reflect his sentiments “at all.”
So let me get this straight. The same crowd that spent four years screaming about dead people voting had no problem using dead people to pump up support for handing your retirement savings to private equity sharks. Funny how that works.
And what is the prize here? Roughly $10 trillion sitting in American workers’ 401(k) accounts. Private equity firms have been lobbying hard to get their hands on it, and Trump’s executive order is the key that unlocks the door. You think these firms care about your retirement? They care about fees. They care about locking your money into illiquid funds you cannot touch for a decade while they skim off the top. That is the whole business model.
The White House and the Labor Department did not respond to requests for comment. Of course they didn’t. What would they say? “Yes, we noticed 12,000 identical ghost comments but decided to count them anyway because they support our position”? The General Services Administration, which runs the comment portal, also went quiet.
Here is what I know. When 12,000 comments show up with no addresses and no signatures and half the names belong to people in the ground, that is not a grassroots movement. That is a con job. And when the con job is designed to hand $10 trillion in retirement savings to the same private equity firms that donate to both parties and hire every former regulator in Washington, you do not need a conspiracy theory. You need to follow the money.
Trump was right about one thing. Dead people are being used. He just had the wrong room.