With Roger Sollenberger, Political Reporter

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This week’s Big Dig . . . The Truth About Trump’s RNC Shakeup—and Why the GOP Will Suffer

Donald Trump doesn’t want his snowballing legal troubles to just be his problem—he’s trying to make it an issue for the entire Republican Party.

During a monumental election year for the GOP, Trump has effectively taken over the Republican National Committee, a bid to ensure that the national fundraising juggernaut will chiefly serve him, and not other Republican efforts.

All in the family

His personal pick to co-chair the RNC—daughter-in-law Lara Trump—teased the new vision on Tuesday during an interview on Newsmax.

“Every single penny will go to the No. 1 and the only job of the RNC—that is electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States,” she said.

That arrangement would certainly sound good to Trump, who has shown no compunction about taking tens of millions of dollars from his donors and spending it on his personal legal battles. 

Of course, Trump’s team tried to mollify those concerns on Wednesday, with a senior Trump campaign official telling Axios that the RNC won’t be paying Trump’s legal bills. But that arrangement is far from set in stone, and Trump can still direct any money that he raises with the RNC straight to his legal defense.

But if the RNC is only going to operate with Trump in mind, it’ll be a massive blow to down-ballot Republicans and state parties desperate for the cash infusion they usually get from the national party in presidential election years. And even if Trump doesn’t seize RNC cash for his own purposes, the prospect of him doing so could very well have a chilling effect on donors turning over their cash.

State of the states

It couldn’t come at a worse time for these groups. The RNC is coming fresh off a historically poor fundraising year and scrambling to support its flotilla of state parties. Many of those state groups have been further hamstrung by their own legal and financial woes, including in some of the most contentious battlegrounds in the country.

The Arizona GOP had a tumultuous 2023, for instance. Its former party chair—who resigned in January amid bribery accusations—was forced to beg for RNC support last year after legal bills associated with a botched election audit nearly bankrupted the group. The party ended the year with just $310,000 in the bank. Accounting for its $55,000 in debt, that’s around half of what it had at the same point in the 2020 cycle —when the state party ultimately spent $24.4 million. Arizona Democrats, by contrast, ended 2023 sitting on $725,000.

The Michigan GOP is also reckoning with structural and financial collapse. Its year-end filing shows $246,000 on hand, with $184,000 in debt—24 percent of what it had at the same point in the 2020 election, when it spent $26 million. In contrast, Michigan Democrats have $317,000 on hand.

The North Carolina Republican Party has roughly $283,000 available, and owes about $72,000. (They kicked off 2020 with $360,000 in the bank.) Its Democratic counterpart boasted nearly $600,000 in the bank at the end of 2023.

The Pennsylvania GOP had just $137,000 on hand at year-end, after raising about $656,000. Compare that to the top of 2020, when the committee held $370,000 and had just raised $1.5 million. The Democratic party in that key battleground entered 2024 with nearly $560,000 to play with.

It’s not all bad news for every GOP state party. The Florida GOP has $4.4 million in its account and no debt—roughly 10 times the Democratic state party, and far more than the $3.7 million that the state GOP had stashed away at this point in 2020. Still, expenses last year ate up $8.4 million, with just $2.9 million coming in—more than double the party’s burn rate four years earlier.

Problems at home

The RNC itself isn’t in great shape to begin with.

Its year-end FEC filing showed the national party holding just $8 million in the bank, less than half the Democratic National Committee’s on-hand total. It was a historically bad year overall—the GOP’s worst performance since 1993 in real dollars, with total receipts in 2023 lagging the DNC by more than $30 million.

The RNC has already started to turn those numbers around, however, with a party source telling The Daily Beast that January saw nearly $12 million in donations—more than $2 million higher than any monthly returns in 2023.

Now, the GOP’s national fundraising apparatus has to catch up with a Democratic machine that has been humming in sync with incumbent President Joe Biden for more than a year now.

The Trump effect

Presidential joint fundraising ventures with national parties typically raise money for the campaign and the party, and that was true for both parties in 2020 and 2016. The setup is critical for creating wealth—raising money with the party’s most powerful figure—as well as for sharing it, distributing cash to races and regions that need it most.

But with Trump, political dollars always seem to flow one way: to him.

The most famous recent example is the RNC agreeing to cover some of Trump’s legal costs, though that sum, $1.6 million , was comparatively paltry, and not commensurate with the breathless reporting about the arrangement.

But FEC filings reveal a stunning discrepancy about those legal payments—the $1.6 million that the RNC turned over for Trump’s legal bills is more than Trump’s entire political operation has given to other Republican campaigns over the last nine years combined.

Jordan Libowitz, communications director for watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told The Daily Beast that the former president’s inexhaustible appetite for cash could carry major downstream consequences this year.

Last year, the former president’s legal expenses would have bankrupted Trump’s “Save America” leadership PAC—his de facto legal slush fund—had he not demanded a $60 million refund from a Trump-aligned super PAC. The super PAC bit the bullet, kicking back more than $42 million so far, with a $5 million hit every month until that obligation is repaid. Libowitz explained that if Trump’s philosophy is applied to the RNC, it could have profound implications for what is typically a party-wide fundraising bonanza.

Federalist society

The nightmare for the GOP, Libowitz said, is that cash runs out just before the election, forcing Republicans to take some swing states off the board, or to rely on outside groups, which are far less cash-efficient, lack local experience, and cannot sync efforts with campaigns.

“It’s a giant operation that doesn’t spring up overnight. It requires planning and staff, and decisions on how money is going to which states through the national party,” Libowitz said. “Where this can go sideways is if there’s not a ton of committees joining then that affects the limits on how much people can raise, and you get this sort of federalist setup where everyone is doing their own thing.”

Brendan Fischer, deputy executive director of watchdog Documented, said Trump would almost certainly try to siphon more cash out of the system.

“We have every reason to expect that Trump will get the RNC to include Save America as part of a joint fundraising agreement,” Fischer said, noting that Save America initially had a joint agreement involving the RNC when it was launched after the 2020 election.

“Depending on the allocation formula between the committees, Trump’s legal expense slush fund will soak up contributions that would otherwise go to the Republican Party,” he said.

That allocation is exactly what Trump wants to control, Libowitz said, so he can ensure he gets priority treatment. 

“But he’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, because this is donor money given to win an election, that he’s now claiming for his own personal purposes,” he said, noting that the potential combination of two enormous legal judgments against Trump in New York would only make Trump want more.

Cost of business

Some Republican insiders have expressed concerns about the Trump effect on fundraising. One veteran GOP strategist told The Daily Beast that the history of personal splurges itself might turn off donors, even if the RNC runs a tight ship.

“If people think their money is going to go to hair and makeup or legal bills, they’re far less likely to give anything at all—even if it’s really for voter contact,” this GOP strategist said. “So in a way, the stench of irresponsible spending is just as bad as actually spending it poorly.”

But that’s not a universal view. One official involved with Trump’s re-election efforts cast the legal bills in realistic terms, saying that, by now, his lawyers’ invoices are an accepted cost of the larger battle.

“Trump not being convicted before the election—or not going on trial before the election—is by itself worth more than any advertising campaign, and I think Democrats would agree” that the timing would be critical to the election, the source said.

This is an excerpt of an in-depth report. You can find more detail in the full article here.

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From Roger’s Notebook...

Playing with house money. Nevada Republican senatorial hopeful Sam Brown is accused of unlawfully coordinating with a super PAC during his failed 2022 primary bid, according to an FEC complaint from watchdog End Citizens United, obtained exclusively by Pay Dirt.

“Sam Brown is a walking campaign finance violation,” End Citizens United president Tiffany Muller said in a statement to The Daily Beast, alleging Brown “repeatedly violated anti-corruption laws” intended to prevent wealthy donors from exerting outsized political influence.

“It appears that he organized a scheme to channel his big donors to a super PAC that supported his campaign in an effort to circumvent federal limits on campaign contributions,” Muller said.

The complaint, which the group filed with the FEC on Wednesday evening and lives online here , asks regulators to investigate evidence that Brown was involved in funding that super PAC, “Citizens for Nevada,” which supported his candidacy. FEC records show that all of the super PAC’s donors were also maximum donors to Brown’s campaign. Additionally, the super PAC’s sole fundraising consultant also worked for the Brown campaign, which was by far its largest client; one of the two members of that consulting firm is now the financial director for Brown’s 2024 campaign, the complaint says.

Candidates and campaigns—which have hard limits on how much money individuals can contribute—may not coordinate with super PACs, which have no such limits.

“The logical explanation for how CFN’s donor base consisted entirely of Campaign donors is that either Mr. Brown or [the consulting firm] provided donor names and contact information to CFN,” the complaint states.

Both the complaint and Muller’s statement highlighted the fact that Brown is currently running again. He’s the top GOP recruit in a state that’s crucial to taking control of the Senate, gunning for the seat currently held by Democratic Sen. Jacky Rosen. Last year, a relatively little-known Nevada billionaire and Brown campaign donor made headlines after pouring millions into a new pro-Brown super PAC.

“We urge the FEC to launch an investigation to hold Brown accountable and prevent him from any further coordination this election cycle,” Muller said.

Anything’s possible. While the FEC has been criticized by watchdog groups for frequently failing to enforce critical election laws—including alleged coordination violations—the agency can take action.

On Valentine’s Day, the FEC announced a $27,000 fine against the campaign committee for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA). The campaign agreed to the fine as part of a settlement for failing to properly remedy more than $360,000 in excessive donations during the 2020 election and runoff. The FEC had discovered the violations in the course of its standard review process.

Last week, the FEC fined Democratic political nonprofit LUPE Votes $8,500 for failing to properly report tens of thousands of dollars in election spending in the 2022 midterms. The fine stemmed from a complaint, which also alleged improper coordination on polling costs between the nonprofit’s super PAC arm and the congressional candidate it was supporting—Texas Democrat Michelle Vallejo, who is taking another shot this year at the seat held by Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX). That coordination allegation, however, fell by the wayside.

Herbert Hoover. Trump has openly said he hopes the U.S. economy fails on Biden’s watch, explaining that, if Trump wins the 2024 election, he doesn’t want to be the next Herbert Hoover—the president who held office during the 1929 market crash that precipitated the Great Depression.

But, as one Trumpworld official told me for my RNC fundraising story, Trump is hoovering up small-dollar donors. And that has already yielded a potential trend.

The “Trump Save America” joint fundraising committee, which splits its donations between Trump’s campaign and his Save America leadership PAC/legal slush fund, saw its small-dollar refunds nearly quadruple between the first and second halves of 2023. Through the end of June, the committee returned $27,763 to donors; over the last six months of the year that number grew to $105,941.

Typically, this suggests that donors are already maxing out. But there are a few kinks here.

For instance, the trend is far more stark for Save America itself, whose roughly $560,000 in refunds last year were almost entirely over the last six months, with less than 10 percent coming in the first half of the year. However, the Trump campaign somehow appears to have kept a remarkably tighter rein on its excessive contributions—or, alternatively, hasn’t begun returning that money—showing only $1,400 in refunds total last year, out of about $76 million in receipts.

The joint fundraising refund surge also appears mostly due to refunds going out in much higher amounts, with the number of individual recipients actually decreasing—83 of the 105 recipients were refunded in the first half of the year. And because leadership PAC caps reset each year ($5,000 annual limit), Save America can raise the same amount from a donor year after year, while campaigns have a hard limit of $6,600 for the primary and general combined.

It’s unclear how the Trump campaign is keeping its refund rate so low. Biden has refunded more than $575,000; DeSantis has kicked back about $535,000; Haley has returned more than $260,000; and longshot Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has surrendered about $485,000 to his maxed-out donors. The Trump campaign, again, has only refunded $1,400. Total.

The FEC also has questions. In November, they sent the campaign a letter inquiring about an 88-page list of excessive donations. The campaign replied on Dec. 21, claiming that it had returned almost all of the identified donations to the joint fundraising committee, which would be “reflected on a subsequent committee report.”

Sincethen, the campaign has filed a year-end report, which should reflect those refunds. But they don’t appear in FEC data. On Friday afternoon, the FEC sent the Trump campaign yet another letter, now asking them to explain a new 236-page list of donors who had exceeded the limits.

Critical mass. The GOP’s state party troubles now include fines from the FEC. This week, the commission revealed that it struck settlement agreements with the Iowa and Massachusetts state GOP committees. Both parties agreed to pay fines—$5,800 for Iowa and $6,450 for Massachusetts—and participate in compliance education programs to resolve an array of reporting failures over the last year.

More From The Beast’s Politics Desk

Bob-N-Weave. The House GOP’s blundering impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden was dealt a potential death blow this week when the Trump-appointed special counsel investigating Hunter Biden indicted a foundational witness, who, according to the DOJ, essentially made everything up. But the issues with the GOP’s impeachment witnesses go even further, as Will Bredderman and I revealed on Monday, with another pillar of the case having business ties to one of Russia’s most notorious sanctioned oligarchs. You can read all about that here.

Pardons Aren’t Forever. With Trump’s penchant for doling out so many pardons to his uniquely troublesome friends, it was only a matter of time until those presidential pals tested the value of their Get Out of Jail Free cards. But a case in Washington, D.C., highlights the consequences of Trump’s messy pardons, suggesting that those political favors have a limited shelf life. Read Jose Pagliery’s fascinating report here.

Gaetz Keepers. House Ethics investigators have obtained communications between Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and a young woman who told federal prosecutors that she’d been paid to attend drug-fueled parties where she had sex with Gaetz. I’ve got that exclusive here.

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