Trump’s Legal Fee Scam Is Just the Start, and Republicans Know It
Trump’s Legal Fee Scam Is Just the Start, and Republicans Know It
They were promised party money wouldn’t pay Trump’s lawyer bills. Until it did.
REPUBLICANS KNEW MAKING HISTORY by nominating a four-time-indicted individual for the presidency would be, well, a little complicated. They knew they would have to explain away an insurrection and the theft of national secrets. They knew they would have to vouch for him against “racist” prosecutors in New York and Georgia, and a “weaponized” Department of Justice for bringing “fake” charges against him.
Fortunately they were assured that Donald Trump could, and would, pay for millions upon millions of dollars in legal bills, and—after anemic fundraising and an uninterrupted string of defeats—the GOP was getting its act together and preparing to win everywhere in this critical election year.
And then last week, Trump’s legal fee scam came to light when the Associated Press noticed the fine print on an invitation to a megadonor event next month:
Donations to the Trump 47 Committee will first be used to give the maximum amount allowed under federal law to Trump’s campaign. Anything left over from the donation next goes toward a maximum contribution to Save America, and then anything left from there goes to the RNC and then to state political parties.
Save America is a “leadership” PAC that pays Trump’s lawyers as well as Melania Trump’s stylist hundreds of thousands of dollars for “strategy consulting.”
So at massive-dollar events, most of the money will still go to the RNC, but at smaller fundraising events, much of it will go to Trump. The arrangement allows Trump “to tap funds from larger donors for his legal matters without the money ever passing through the RNC,” the New York Times wrote.
Naturally donors, candidates, and elected Republicans working hard to stem the tide of losses the party has suffered in the age of Trump—in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and already in 2024 (in NY-3)—objected in outrage. Right?
Of course not.
Every one of them rolled over in silence. Like they always do.
In a normal political party a guy who is bragging that he has “ALMOST FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS IN CASH, A SUBSTANTIAL AMOUNT OF WHICH I INTENDED TO USE IN MY CAMPAIGN FOR PRESIDENT,” wouldn’t be diverting money from the party coffers to pay for his criminal habit.
But Trump, in addition to facing 88 criminal charges1 across four indictments, has been dealing with multiple civil cases—most notoriously the fraud case in New York for which he is supposed to pony up $454 million, with a bond due today, and the E. Jean Carroll defamation case for which he posted a $92 million bond this month. His defense has reportedly racked up $76 million in legal fees in just the last two years. While only one of the four criminal cases may reach trial, Trump has no visibility into how much more money he will be spending on lawyers over the rest of this year while he is also campaigning for the presidency.
ON TOP OF THE LAWYER BILLS and half-billion-plus in court judgments, Trump’s campaign and the RNC are far behind President Joe Biden’s campaign and the DNC in fundraising. Not only is Biden’s haul a record for this point in an election year, but he and the Democrats ended February with more than four times the cash-on-hand that Trump and the RNC did.
Members of the RNC saw this all coming—after all, the committee had paid $1.6 million for Trump’s lawyers in 2021 and 2022, then stopped once he declared his candidacy at the end of 2022 to stay “neutral.” Henry Barbour, a committee member from Mississippi, had moved to block the committee from paying for Trump’s legal fees, but his non-binding resolution never even made it to a vote.
In the weeks before she took the reins at the RNC, Lara Trump said she thought Trump supporters would love to pay his bills. But campaign co-chair Chris LaCivita shut her down, telling the AP “not a penny of the RNC’s money or, for that matter, the campaign’s money has gone or will go to pay legal fees.” LaCivita had also called concerns over using party funds to pay for them “manufactured.”
Lara’s RNC co-chair, Michael Whatley, agreed with LaCivita on Fox News, saying this was “a done deal.”
Which Republicans believed Whatley, or the Trump campaign, when they insisted that lawyer bills would only be paid by his personal wealth, his PACs, and a GoFundMe account supporters created?
Those Republicans who assumed maybe Trump was doing so well in the polls that he would choose this year to become a team player.
In the last election cycle, in 2022, Republicans lost every Senate battleground race except Wisconsin, as PACs aligned with Mitch McConnell spent $238 million backing wacky Trump-endorsed GOP candidates who lost costly races in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. Meanwhile, Trump pitched in $14.8 million.
Donors to the RNC should be confident that Trump could—and likely will—change these rules at any time. The committee will, at his urging, feel free to increase the percentage of new contributions for legal fees or for the Trump campaign, downballot races be damned. Who would step up to object?
It’s too late.
It’s not just Trump’s party now—because he secured a third nomination and he forced McConnell to give up his job as Senate leader—but it’s his party no matter what happens this November. The RNC will be socking away money now for the next steal, in case Biden wins. That’s far more important to Lara and Trump than downballot races.
Should Trump win, does anyone expect the RNC, in a second Trump term, to raise money for a future Republican primary, let alone nominee? They may pretend to, for a while, but donors know that money will find its way to a Don Jr. candidacy, or to his father’s pockets. No questions asked.
As Jonathan V. Last wrote in December 2019 in a prescient Bulwark article titled “Trump Is Forever”—long before the coup plot and January 6th—the idea that Trump will move on when his time is up is ludicrous.
“There will be no ‘life after Trump’ because Trump is going to be the head boss of Republican politics for the rest of his days,” JVL wrote. “Trump is not a caretaker of the Republican party. He is the owner.”
All Trump cares about is attention and money. Imagining donor dollars will go to anything but his needs—from here on out—is lunacy.
If Republicans are paying his legal bills now just imagine what they will rationalize, because of what he will demand, even a year from now.
Fortunately for Republicans, they deserve all of this. And so much more.
Although there were originally 91 counts across Trump’s four indictments, 3 of the counts against him in the case pending in Fulton County, Georgia, were dropped this month.