Picture this. You’re a fan of President Donald Trump. But you’re on the fence about donating to his campaign. The pandemic has taken a toll on your finances. And giving $50 to a billionaire’s election bid seems like a foolish thing to do when paying for groceries on a fixed income is a challenge.
And then, you get an email from the campaign itself. You’ve won the title of Trump Patriot of the week (!!!!). Not only that, Donald Trump is going to see your name—your actual name!—provided you give in the next hour. But here comes the coup de grâce: Your donation will immediately be multiplied nine-fold. That $50 is suddenly $450.
You quickly find your credit card, fill in the blanks, and click submit. You’re immediately bombarded by another dozen or so requests for your time and money.
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This is the scenario countless small-dollar donors have been presented with this year. As President Trump’s re-election campaign has scrambled to maintain its financial advantage over Joe Biden, it has increasingly relied on a tried and true fundraising gimmick: the donation match.
It’s a tactic that the campaign is using ad nauseam. But a fundraising email sent Wednesday featured a new twist: It included copies of checks, signed by “Your President,” ostensibly nonupling the donations. They weren’t real checks, of course, but they were clearly designed to give the impression that Trump himself would be putting up the funds.
And, maybe so (though probably not). Bloomberg News reported this week that Trump is considering pouring some of his own money into his re-election campaign, which posted disappointing fundraising numbers in August and is reportedly burning cash at an alarming rate. But spokespeople for the campaign and the Republican National Committee did not respond to questions about whether Wednesday’s fundraising email, sent by a joint fundraising committee for the Trump campaign and the RNC, portended a presidential cash infusion.
The email did show how significantly the Trump campaign has escalated its small-dollar fundraising appeals, which in the past few months have occasionally drifted into hysteria and outright fantasy, promising donors lunch with the president and direct input on his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last month. And while that escalation makes more sense in light of the campaign’s apparent cash crunch, experts say that Team Trump’s increasingly desperate appeals for funds have the potential to burn out its donor base, costing the campaign a critical source of funding as it enters the final stretch of the 2020 race.
“Everything they do has some level or layer of deception to it,” a top Democrat in the online fundraising field told PAY DIRT, “and when you run a program like that, it has to be matched with insatiable growth because you are losing people left and right through unsubscribes and people dropping off.”
The hair-on-fire tone of Trump campaign and national Republican fundraising appeals this year has become something of an inside joke among the highly politically attuned. Team Trump’s frequent offers to privately meet with, or solicit strategic input from, or provide exclusive briefings to its small-dollar supporters have been mainstays of the campaign’s digital fundraising strategy all year.
Few such appeals garner more eyerolls in Washington than the frequent promises to match donations up to some multiple. There’s little to suggest that any such matching actually happens. The Trump Make America Great Again Committee, which sent the “800 percent match” email Wednesday, is a joint fundraising committee, and therefore can accept six-figure contributions from its top donors. That means it’s possible for the group to solicit large donations for the purpose of matching grassroots financial support, and indeed, a few of the emails offering matching donations have claimed that a “dedicated group of donors” would be providing the matching funds. But the scale of Trump’s grassroots fundraising operation would likely require an untenable number of compliant large-scale donors to match every contribution made by way of these fundraising appeals.
To say the Trump re-election campaign has embraced the tactic would be an understatement. The campaign and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee—the RNC joint fundraising arm that sent the email Wednesday—have sent more than 500 emails since 2018 promising supporters that their donations will be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, or even more lavishly matched, according to data gathered by a Twitter user and Daily Beast columnist going by the handle @TrumpEmail, who tracks the campaign’s digital fundraising. @TrumpEmail said the matching solicitations started happening around March 2018. But the campaign has gradually upped the ante over time. Wednesday’s email was the 14th to offer an 800 percent match.
Team Trump’s hysterical missives have even drawn the attention of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, which is actually doing its own fundraising off the appeals. “Have you ever seen the kinds of crazy, misleading fundraising appeals that Donald Trump sends to his supporters?” declared a Biden campaign email sent Wednesday. Its subject line was “8X-MATCH? (let us explain)” and it featured a screenshot of a Trump campaign fundraising text message.
“Instead of lying and promising you that someone else is going to 8X-match your donation, we’re asking you to 8X-match your donation yourself!” the Biden email declared. It asked for supporters to sign up for eight recurring donations.
The phantom donation match is not a new tactic, nor is it confined, historically, to the Republican side of the aisle. The matching donation offer is a relic of the direct-mail era in political fundraising. On the digital side, it was largely pioneered by Democratic fundraisers, chiefly those with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which earned its own scorn and derision for its over-the-top fundraising appeals in the 2012 and 2014 election cycles.
Democrats’ use of the tactic drew criticism from within the party for the same sort of “churn and burn” approach that could backfire on the Trump campaign this year. And activists and operatives leveled allegations of deception and exploitation against the national party that Republicans have had to face this year.
“Hey @NRCC – WTF is wrong with you? Stop this. Do it now,” tweeted Kurt Schlichter, a prominent conservative pundit, in response to a National Republican Congressional Committee text message in July that promised donors a “500% Trump House Patriot match.” The NRCC responded that the text raised nearly $200,000.
The question is how long donors will continue to respond to those appeals—and how many will unsubscribe instead.
Out of curiosity, and purely in the interests of journalistic inquiry, PAY DIRT decided to donate $1 to the Trump Make America Great Again Committee by way of its Wednesday email to see if it would provide any clues about our mysterious 800 percent benefactor.
Alas, we didn’t get any details about who is providing the matching funds, or even a confirmation that they would be provided. What we did get, instead, was an onslaught of additional fundraising appeals. Before reaching the final confirmation page for our donation, the TMAGAC hit us with no fewer than 10 more requests for money, with pleas to double and triple our contribution or to schedule other contributions down the line, as well as prompts to download the campaign’s official app and sign up to volunteer.
Two of the subsequent appeals included yet more matching offers, promising 500 percent and 700 percent matches if we agreed to double our contribution on the spot. We declined.
—with reporting by Sam Stein
