NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE P olitics is a team sport. When party leaders act for the good of the team, everyone benefits. I have written previously about the contrasting approaches of Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump to party-building. Recent moves by the two draw this into sharp relief: DeSantis has been hard at work sharing the wealth, putting his time and prestige in the service of helping other Republicans, while Trump continues to drain resources from the rest of the party in service of his own personal ambitions.
As Paul Steinhauser at Fox News reported on Friday, “DeSantis has helped haul in over $4.3 million in fundraising since the beginning of March for state and local GOP organizations from coast to coast. . . . Starting with a March 3 Harris County GOP Lincoln-Reagan Day dinner in Houston, Texas, DeSantis has headlined 10 Republican Party events in eight states. . . . Over 10,000 people have been in attendance at the gatherings where the governor gave keynote speeches.”
The Harris County event was the Harris County GOP’s highest-attended fundraiser, with the county chairwoman Cindy Siegel saying that “we raised over $1 million the first time ever for our Lincoln-Reagan dinner and we had over 1,400 people in attendance.”
Nearly everywhere he went, DeSantis was a record draw for the local GOP. In Manchester, N.H., “DeSantis headlined the state GOP’s annual fundraising gala. New Hampshire GOP chair Chris Ager told Fox News that the dinner broke fundraising records for the state party.” Ticket sales had to be halted because the event exceeded capacity, providing “a financial boon for the historically cash-strapped state party organization.”
In Birmingham, Ala., “DeSantis’s appearance . . . helped the party raise nearly $700,000 and break attendance records with more than 1,700 at the dinner,” its highest attendance since 2011. The event had to be moved to a larger venue.
In Rothschild, Wis., for the Marathon County GOP’s Lincoln Day Dinner, “the DeSantis ticket was so hot, organizers had to move the event to a convention center, which sold out at 570 people — 200 people more than have ever attended the dinner, said Kevin Hermening, chair of the Marathon County GOP . . . The event is on pace to also break a fundraising record, with an anticipated $30,000 in proceeds all set to go to the county party.”
Friday and Saturday, DeSantis was in Illinois and Iowa, and it was the same story: “High attendance is expected at a pair of events in Iowa . . . for DeSantis. Already, a Saturday GOP state party fundraiser in Cedar Rapids has sold out — only the second time in five years that such a regional event has done so, Iowa GOP party chair Jeff Kaufmann said. A Saturday fundraising picnic in Sioux Center, hosted by Rep. Randy Feenstra, has the highest number of RSVPs it’s had since it started three years ago, according to a spokesperson. In Illinois, a Friday Lincoln Day Dinner benefiting the counties of Tazewell and Peoria sold out, with 1,150 guests confirmed and a record number of tickets purchased.”
Trump, by contrast, canceled what was planned to be a competing event in Des Moines on Saturday, blaming the weather.
DeSantis’s agenda also included fundraisers in Dallas, Texas; Anaheim, Calif.; Midland, Mich.; Akron, Ohio; West Chester, Ohio; and — on his home turf — Tampa, Fla.
When you see DeSantis hauling in dozens of endorsements in Iowa and other places, it’s partly about Republicans believing in his candidacy and wanting to move on from Trump. But it’s also a reflection that DeSantis is actually helping them do their jobs rather than ruling solely through fear of retribution.
The contrast with Trump, who has simply treated the party and its donors as a personal piggy bank, is stark. To start with, Trump has used a pervasive strategy of deceiving donors into believing that they were giving money to other candidates or to causes like election integrity and get-out-the-vote efforts. In several cases, they weren’t. Trump raised “more than a quarter-billion dollars,” much of it from small-dollar donors in November and December of 2020; it was supposed to be for election integrity. His Save America PAC even raised money for an “Official Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. Trump promised to start a Republican “ballot harvesting” operation, yet has been spending the money on ads attacking DeSantis.
Trump also refused to spend money on the supposedly crucial election audit in Arizona, but spent lavishly from small-dollar donor money on his own legal fees — $16 million from his PAC in 2021 and 2022, with the bulk of that relating to his own ongoing legal troubles rather than election contests. Two million dollars alone went to defending the E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault trial, and $3 million for the Mar-a-Lago documents case. Worse, Trump has been bleeding the party itself to bail out his legal problems. In October and November 2022 alone, the Republican National Committee spent $720,000 in donor money to pay Trump’s personal legal bills. The RNC has reportedly pledged to spend twice that on Trump’s personal lawyers.
Unlike DeSantis’s generosity in giving his time to raise party money, Trump’s use of RNC funds is a one-way street: As Isaac Stanley-Becker and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported, “Aides at other committees, including the RNC, say their pitches secure more small-dollar money when they invoke Trump, which often angers him. His political team has asked the committees to send his team every ad that features him for approval.”
Rather than help out Republican Senate candidates in Georgia, per Shane Goldmacher and Rachel Shorey of the New York Times, “what fraction of the money Mr. Trump did spend after the election was plowed mostly into a public-relations campaign and to keep his perpetual fund-raising machine whirring, with nearly $50 million going toward online advertising, text-message outreach and a small television ad campaign.” Trump’s belated and underfunded efforts in 2022 to help Republican Senate candidates were notably ineffective and cost-inefficient because he waited until late September to create the MAGA Inc. super PAC.
For a sense of scale, Marc Thiessen compared Trump’s spending with what Mitch McConnell’s groups were doing:
McConnell-aligned super PACs . . . have invested a whopping $238 million so far in seven key Senate races. How much has Donald Trump spent? He has raised an eye-watering $161 million this election cycle. But his super PAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., has spent a grand total of … $14.8 million on Senate races. To put that in perspective, MAGA Inc.’s total spending across the country is less than McConnell-aligned PACs have spent in any individual race in which they are engaged.
Trump was more concerned with involving himself in primaries against Republicans who crossed him. He spent $3 million trying and failing to unseat Brian Kemp in Georgia.
Ultimately, Trump’s real top spending priority is attacking DeSantis. Save America Leadership PAC — the vehicle Trump has used for grassroots fundraising — has given MAGA Inc. at least $60 million, of which over $11 million has already been spent against DeSantis. MAGA Inc. has spent more against DeSantis than it did against any Democratic Senate candidate last year.
Ultimately, the Trump-DeSantis choice isn’t just about the two men, their agendas, or their odds of beating Joe Biden. It’s also about whether the Republican Party’s leaders exist to serve the party, or whether the party exists to serve one man.