As I noted last week, the Republican National Committee would be foolish to pay Donald Trump’s legal bills out of general party fundraising, not just because there are other campaigns and party business that need the money, but because not every prospective RNC donor wants to have money taken out of party coffers and given to Trump’s personal use. The people who do want to support Trump’s personal criminal and civil defense and even help pay off verdicts against him can donate to a more targeted defense fund without getting the RNC involved and, for that matter, without having to comply with campaign finance law restrictions.
Moreover, the party should grasp that donors currently expect party funds to be vulnerable to a raid to pay for Trump’s lawyers. There’s been widespread publicity around this issue. It’s well known that the RNC has given money to Trump previously for this purpose. The new handpicked slate of Trump allies running the party includes his daughter-in-law, who has a direct financial stake in the New York attorney general’s lawsuit against the Trump Organization. So if the party doesn’t plan to hand over donor money to Trump to pay his lawyers and legal verdicts, the only way to convince donors of that is to unambiguously shut the door.
The party has done the opposite. As of Tuesday, Henry Barbour’s proposed resolution to keep party funds from going to Trump legal bills was “dead,” without the votes to even be considered at today’s meeting. The denials thus far have ranged from the vague to the unconvincing. Audrey Fahlberg reports:
In an interview Friday morning, Tennessee’s RNC committeeman Oscar Brock joked that reporters talk about it far more than members do. “I serve on the budget committee and I was talking to the chairman of the Budget Committee, and she told us that it’s not in the budget to do it,” he said. “If they want to change the budget, they’ve got to come back through the normal order of business to do those things.”
S.V. Date at the Huffington Post observes that the denials are already based on falsehoods about what’s been done in the past:
Top Trump campaign aide Chris LaCivita, who is now taking day-to-day control of the RNC’s operations, did not respond to HuffPost’s queries on the matter. He has said in media interviews, including most recently with The Associated Press, that the RNC would not pay for Trump’s legal problems. “The fact of the matter is 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 said. That assertion, though, is false. In fact, in 2023 alone, Trump spent $54.2 million on legal fees through his various political committees ― all of it raised with the stated purpose of helping Trump and other Republicans win elections, with zero disclaimer that some of the money could be used for his legal fees. And between summer 2021 and autumn 2022, the RNC in fact did spend $1.6 million to pay some of Trump’s legal bills, and only stopped when he officially announced his candidacy for the 2024 nomination.
Donors who don’t want their money used for Trump legal bills have two choices: Trust Trump loyalists operating without any safeguards but their word, or send their money elsewhere. That’s not a very appealing offer when you’re asking people for money they don’t have to give you.