Donald Trump is tapping the well dry.
The former president’s incessant barrage of donor appeals has garnered him a massive influx of cash ($122 million entering 2022), but GOP officials worry that it undercuts their ability to craft a durable fundraising operation that benefits the entire party, according to Axios.
The outlet reports that Trump’s “ceaseless emails and text messages” imperil GOP “efforts to build a sustainable, grassroots base of financial support for anyone not named Trump.”
Axios cites data from The Defending Democracy Together Institute which indicates that Trump has sent an average of 14 fundraising emails a day since the beginning of the year. (He sent 10 a day between October and the end of December. Christmas offered a reprieve; just two were sent that day.)
Because of the high volume, donation requests from other Republican candidates can easily get lost in an inbox or donors might give to Trump repeatedly instead of to more needy campaigns. “The chances of [conservative donors] opening [a candidate’s email], let alone reading, clicking and donating, is pretty small to begin with,” said one GOP strategist to Axios.
In addition, Trump’s fundraising success has inspired many Republican candidates to adopt his hyperbolic tone and inflammatory rhetoric. GOP strategist are worried that this approach will ultimately backfire, as donors get burned out by increasingly unhinged emails.
But Republican candidates aren’t just parroting Trump’s bombast, they’re also explicitly using his name to appeal to donors. That puts the Republican National Committee in an untenable position. Will they compromise their pledge of neutrality in the 2024 presidential primary if Trump threatens to crack down on GOP candidates invoking his name to raise desperately needed money? (All indicators suggest Trump will run in 2024 and that he expects the full loyalty of the RNC.)
In short, Axios write, “All of this is building a Republican fundraising machine and ecosystem that’s heavily reliant on one person: Donald Trump.”
That’s a particular problem because Trump is notoriously ungenerous and self-dealing. According to a recent report in The New York Times, Trump’s PACs spent $600,000 in 2021 at Trump-owned properties for expenses like rent, meals, meeting expenses and hotel stays. During that same time period, he donated just $350,000 to the scores of political candidate he endorsed.
A Trump spokesman defended his fundraising practices to Axios, writing “No one in the history of the Republican Party has done more to grow the donor pool at every level than President Donald J. Trump, something that pays untold dividends to Republican candidates and causes across the nation.”