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On Saturday, before a roomful of top Republican donors, former President Donald Trump called Senator Mitch McConnell a "stone cold loser" — and worse. |
Today, Trump was rewarded with the first "Champion for Freedom" award, handed out by none other than the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign finance arm of the Republican caucus that McConnell leads. |
The events of the past few days have laid bare a tension that is tearing the Republican Party apart by its pocket seams: Big donors are beyond tired of Trump's antics, but his small-dollar fund-raising is through the roof. If Trump is in a tug of war with the Republican establishment, he appears to have the upper hand — not just in the polls, but also in dollars. |
Days before he gave his speech on Saturday to Republican National Committee donors, it became public that in the first quarter of 2021, Trump's Save America PAC had amassed a war chest of $85 million. That's a million dollars more than the R.N.C. itself had on hand at the end of the quarter. |
As our reporters Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin pointed out in a story over the weekend, Trump has expressly encouraged his supporters to donate to Save America PAC, his group, rather than to "RINOS." (That term has long been slang for "Republicans in Name Only," but nowadays Trump tends to use it to mean any Republican politician who doesn't show blanket support for his claims.) |
One establishment Republican insider with fears about Trump's continued influence on the party told me today that the fund-raising totals were far more worrisome to moderate Republicans than his outlandish statements on Saturday — which felt like old hat. |
"What surprised people and took them aback was the $85 million he raised," the person said in a phone interview. "That is a bigger problem, frankly, than what he says. Because within my world, nobody cares about what he says anymore." |
And the fund-raising successes aren't Trump's alone. Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene — arguably Trump's two staunchest acolytes in Congress, who both voted in January to overturn the general election results — raised more than $3 million each in the first quarter of this year. Those are enormous hauls, and they put Hawley and Greene well ahead of their more moderate peers, for whom just a few hundred thousand in a quarter is a good showing. |
It bears noting that the first quarter of the year, running from January through March, included the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the fallout from Trump's refusal to fully denounce the perpetrators. |
The violence at the Capitol, Trump's continued devotion to an untruthful narrative, and the flood of anti-voting legislation being passed by Republican-led state governments in response to his failed 2020 campaign have all fed outrage among many high-dollar donors and corporations with long histories of supporting Republicans. |
Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster and strategist, said that this trend was only the latest example of how Trump has shifted the power in Republican politics away from major corporations and establishment figures, and toward the grass roots — a demographic he firmly controls. |
"In a world where the traditional Republican corporate donors are drying up, there are millions of people who will donate $5, $10, $20 and easily make up that difference," Cahaly said. "If you're going to move toward a crowd-funded party, you can't alienate the people who make up the crowd." |
As his speech on Saturday made clear, Trump remains devoted to one cause above all else: himself. And for now, so do Republican voters. |
Even as two-thirds of Americans said in a CNN poll last month that they disapproved of how Trump had responded to the Jan. 6 attack, 63 percent of Republicans said he had responded to it well. And 71 percent of Republicans said Trump had had a positive effect on the G.O.P., not a negative one. |
On Saturday, Trump didn't give his speech at the Palm Beach Four Seasons, where the weekend's official gathering of Republican National Committee donors took place. In a characteristic act of symbolic big-footing, he delivered his address at nearby Mar-a-Lago, his private club, forcing donors to caravan over to hear him. |
Trump went entirely off script, but he was totally on brand. He dished out falsehoods about the election in November, and bashed some Republicans who had denounced the Jan. 6 riot — including McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence — while heaping praise on his closest allies. |
Donors who attended the event mostly panned it, saying it was exactly the opposite of what's needed right now, when the party is starved for unity. But with just over 18 months to go until the 2022 midterm elections, money matters. |
Trump's command over small-dollar donors in the Republican base is enormous — as is his popularity. Which means that the very National Republican Senatorial Committee that gave Trump an award today is holding its breath ahead of 2022. Trump has said he will campaign against certain Republicans who have been critical of his attempts to overturn the election results, including Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Both are up for re-election next year in solidly red states. |
Last week, the Senate Leadership Fund — a super PAC that funds Senate Republican campaigns — announced that it would back Murkowski in her bid for re-election. Announcing the endorsement, Steven Law, the group's director, made a pointed comment, the significance of which was hard to miss. "Many politicians put themselves first," he said, "but Lisa Murkowski always puts Alaska first." |
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