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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.
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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.
That’s precisely why it’s so notable that Trump picked Lara Trump as co-chair—in addition to senior Trump adviser Chris LaCivita likely becoming the RNC’s new chief operating officer and Trump-friendly Michael Watley earning the former president’s endorsement to lead the RNC. Trump will have more than enough say to turn on the money spigot, and can demand large personal cuts from party funds.
Certainly, the new additions to the RNC are conspicuous. The previous RNC co-chairs each brought institutional experience to the table—Drew McKissick was a grassroots specialist and the co-chair before him, Tommy Hicks, had deep ties to deep pockets.
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 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.
Despite Lara Trump’s priorities, simply electing Trump isn’t the RNC’s only job. National parties also serve as the strategic and financial hubs of a campaign support system, providing critical backing to down-ballot candidates and state party committees around the country.
A shakeup providing Trump with more opportunities to purloin from the RNC couldn’t come at a worse time for these groups. The RNC is coming fresh off a historically poor fundraising year, going through a major leadership overhaul, and scrambling to support its flotilla of state parties.
Many of those state committees have been further hamstrung by their own legal and financial woes, and are dangerously close to the red—all while they gear up for the 2024 elections. And this includes state parties 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.
But 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.
The RNC also offered a different framework for the nightmarish topline numbers from 2023. Without counting inbound transfers from affiliated committees, the RNC’s raw fundraising topped every other national party committee—Democratic or Republican—by at least $10 million. There was one exception: the Democratic congressional fundraising arm.
But those affiliated committee transfers are the exact problem the RNC has to solve. That’s because the GOP’s national fundraising apparatus is struggling to catch up with a Democratic machine that has been humming in sync with incumbent President Joe Biden for more than a year now.
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.
The setup also allows national parties to exploit a 2014 fundraising loophole that legal experts have likened to little more than legalized money laundering—opening a channel for massive amounts of megadonor cash to wash through national parties, campaigns, and state-level committees, evading individual donation limits.
That gives the committees an incredible ability to raise truckloads of cash quick—and to wash a lot of it back to the national committee.
But with Trump, political dollars always seems to flow one way: to him. Trump demands tithes at Trump properties, as well as unconditional, bare-knuckled political and media support, while returning very little himself.
Immediately upon leaving office, for instance, Trump walled off his still-fearsome personal fundraising apparatus as “leverage” over potential turncoats looking to challenge him after the Jan. 6 insurrection, while threatening legal action against any Republicans—including the RNC—who raised money off his name. Months later, the RNC came back around, 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.
The public backlash to that arrangement, however, appears to have made an impact on the RNC. On Wednesday, a day after Lara Trump’s statements, Axios reported that the RNC is vowing not to pay Trump’s legal fees this time around.
Whether the RNC stays true to that declaration remains to be seen. 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.
Save America has contributed a total $769,000 to other candidates and committees, FEC records show, while sending high-dollar donations to a selection of super PACs, mainly for Trump vanity projects in Georgia, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania during the 2022 midterms. Trump’s campaign committees have also only contributed $238,000 to other Republican candidates—all of it for the 2018 midterms.
Save America has only contributed a total of $150,000 to the RNC—all on April 4, 2022—though Trump’s old campaign did send the RNC a $3 million gift a week out from the 2018 midterms.
While the Trump campaign has given $21.3 million to state parties since 2016, those gifts are overwhelmingly connected to his own re-election. Only $4.8 million of those donations came before 2020, FEC data shows, with roughly $14.3 million getting doled out within two months of Election Day.
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.
“Trump’s money operation since leaving office has not centered around winning elections, but using donor money to pay for the attorneys representing him and his associates,” Libowitz said.
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.
Court battles have so far cost Trump’s two main political committees more than $80 million combined since he left office, FEC records show, with about $55 million of that coming last year alone, and no signs of a slowdown in the future.
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.
“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.”
The RNC has revved up that “washing machine” even without Trump as the nominee. Last month, the RNC launched a generic presidential fundraising vehicle called “the Presidential Republican Nominee Fund 2024,” which then joined the generic “2024 RNC Joint Victory” armada of dozens of state party committees. But only 39 state groups have signed on so far, with each missing state party leaving money on the table.
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.
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.
“Republican donors generally wouldn’t view the RNC paying his legal bills as a negative—they understand that it’s inherently a political expense,” the person said.
“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.
Democrats, of course, do agree. In a statement to The Daily Beast, DNC spokesperson Alex Floyd slammed the GOP’s finances, saying the RNC knew exactly what it was getting into.
“The Republican National Committee may be a financial dumpster fire, but the reality is its own leadership were the ones holding all the matches,” Floyd said. “After years of defending Donald Trump and backing whatever asinine schemes he proposed to try to overturn the 2020 election and put MAGA in control of the party, the RNC only has itself to blame for its losing electoral record and historically disastrous fundraising report. Now, with Trump set to double-down on the same reckless choices that left the party with the lowest cash on hand headed into an election year in decades, there’s no question the RNC’s problems are set to get a whole lot worse before they get better.”
The RNC pushed back hard on that statement, calling allegations of mismanagement overblown and directing attention to the turnaround effort now in full swing. The RNC touted record hauls from digital grassroots and major donors last month, with another $1 million deposited the first day of February.
“The RNC is not only raising the necessary funds, but we’re making strategic investments early in battlegrounds to win up and down the ballot this Fall,” an RNC spokesperson said in a statement. “Meanwhile, Democrats have an extremely unpopular agenda, no ground game, and a President sleepwalking his way to defeat in November.”
A Trump campaign spokesperson referred The Daily Beast to the Axios report about the RNC’s refusal to pay Trump’s bills.
Other Republicans engaged in 2024 efforts see reason for optimism, however, especially among wealthy donors.
“A lot of small dollars have been hoovered up by Trump. Many traditionally big Republican whales have been sitting on the sidelines, but that won’t last forever and they’ll start giving as we move into the general,” said the official involved in Trump’s re-election efforts.
First, however, Trump has to shake internal competition from Nikki Haley—until he’s the nominee, the national fundraising efforts will have to hang in their holding pattern. While the RNC has used the financial pressures to try to get Haley to drop out for the benefit of the party, she has shown no intention of empowering a party led by Trump.
On Tuesday, Haley cited the RNC takeover itself as evidence that the party needs to ditch Trump, or get cannibalized by a dictator.
“He’s putting his campaign manager as the director? Are we gonna let him just take over the party that’s gonna control the convention, too?” Haley told Fox News.
“At what point do we not see the problem? We don’t have kings in this country,” she said.
