Remember the Freedom Kids? The trio of preteen girls who wore shiny American flag dresses and sang, in a sweetly robotic timbre, “President Donald Trump knows how/ To make America great/ Deal from strength or get crushed every time” back while Trump was rallying in Florida in January?
We doubt that anyone who saw this has managed to forget it, but nevertheless, here’s a reminder:
Well, the trio are back in the media spotlight, and not because they’re returning to the stage — no, it’s because the man who formed the trio (who happens to be the the youngest Freedom Kid’s dad) may be planning to sue Trump for not paying him.
The Washington Post reports that the man, Jeff Popick, is claiming that (“largely verbal”) guarantees were never actualized by assorted individuals he spoke with in the Trump campaign before and after his daughter and her freedom friends performed for Trump and became a viral sensation/nightmare.
He first spoke with Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who’d supposedly told them that they’d get to perform twice in Florida; ultimately, they only performed once, and Popick had asked for a mere $2500 for the appearance in Pensacola. The campaign allegedly struck a bargain with Popick that instead of paying them, they’d allow the girls to have a special table at which they could sell their CDs. (Like all cool young indie bands!) But according to Popick’s account, such a table never materialized.
Popick says that he tried to get back in touch with the campaign afterwards to see what the deal with the missing table was, but was unable to. He claims to have lost money putting together promotional materials for his gaggle of future pop stars. It seems that Popick and his freedom singers were asked, with a day’s notice, to come and perform at an event for veterans in Iowa — but after flying to Chicago and then driving the rest of the way, they were told there’d been a change, and they wouldn’t be performing. Allegedly, Popick paid for the flight, hotel room, and car to get himself and his junior Repbulicans there, and was not reimbursed. After that, he kept trying to reach out, with no indication that he’d ultimately get what he’d ultimately started asking for — another performance for the Freedom Kids.
This is especially pertinent following last night’s Democratic National Convention, where Al Franken, Elizabeth Warren and Cheryl Lankford — a woman whose husband died in Iraq who enrolled in Trump University — attacked the Republican candidate’s for-profit “university.” The Washington Post notes in their article that this example of Trump’s seeming exploitations also mirrors allegations of by various small business owners who worked with him in the past. USA Today wrote in June of how “Trump casts himself as a protector of workers and jobs, but [an] investigation found hundreds of people – carpenters, dishwashers, painters, even his own lawyers – who say he didn’t pay them for their work.”