Former President Donald Trump urged supporters in fundraising texts and emails to help Republicans hold the line in Georgia, where two GOP Senate candidates faced runoffs. But while Trump’s new leadership committee raised more than $30 million for the effort and his bid to contest the election, it spent nothing toward those goals, federal filings through the end of the year show.
“President Trump made it clear how critical it is that Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue WIN BIG in the Senate Runoff Election TOMORROW, and now he wants to know what YOU think,” read one Jan. 4 email after Trump stumped for then-Republican Sens. Perdue and Loeffler.
Another, sent by the former president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., as Trump took the stage in Dalton that evening, said his father was “fighting for Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue.”
An email soliciting donations tied to the runoff went out one day later: “The Runoff Election is TODAY & we need to WIN. Donate for 1000%-IMPACT.”
From Nov. 11 until Jan. 6, the Trump Make America Great Again Committee sent out hundreds of fundraising solicitations for the former president’s Save America organization, with dozens focused on the Georgia runoffs.
After Perdue and Loeffler lost their Jan. 5 races, forfeiting Republican control of the Senate, the messages continued briefly, before halting as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Save America had raised $31.2 million by the end of 2020, spending virtually none of it, according to a report filed Sunday evening with the Federal Election Commission. Trump can’t spend this money on a future campaign of his own, but he can use it to travel, pay advisers, and boost other candidates.
Save America had spent only $343,000 by the end of the year, with all of it going to WinRed, a GOP payment processing firm, its latest FEC filing shows.
“Why would Trump raise tens of millions in the name of saving the Senate and not spend one single dollar on it? Because like his presidency, he only cares about one thing, himself,” one Trump adviser told the Washington Examiner.
Most texts and emails focused on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, with the subject of one December email reading, “We’re taking this to the Supreme Court.”
By early January, as Congress moved to certify the results of the presidential election, Trump donors received an average of five emails a day.
“TODAY will be a historic day in our Nation’s history,” read a final Jan. 6 email. “Congress will either certify, or object to, the Election results. Every single Patriot from across the Country must step up RIGHT NOW if we’re going to successfully DEFEND the integrity of this Election. President Trump is calling on YOU to bolster our Official Defend America Fund.”
The requests ceased after rioters breached the Capitol in a bid to stop Congress from ratifying Joe Biden as the next president.
A representative for Trump did not respond to a request for comment.
Of the $31.2 million raised by the new leadership organization before January, most came from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, a joint fundraising operation with the Republican National Committee that ended the year with nearly $60 million in available cash. Records show that Save America received more than $30 million from the joint committee in early December.
The fine print on a donation page for recent contributions explains how the committees divide each donation, with 75% going to Trump’s leadership PAC and 25% going to the RNC, meaning Trump’s organization will be entitled to another cut.
Save America will score a further portion of the more than $80 million the RNC ended the year with. According to HuffPost, Trump’s RNC cut comes in at $45 million.
Trump’s campaign had about $10.7 million in the bank at the end of the year and owed $2.7 million in debt, providing the former president with another chunk of cash.
A Republican operative familiar with the Trump campaign’s fundraising efforts told the Washington Examiner that it was highly unusual for campaigns to have a surplus of money after the fact.
“It should never happen. Campaigns are a very odd business because they are built to set up shop like a startup, raise money, and then go out of business on Election Day,” this source said. “Every dollar that you have that isn’t spent is a dollar that you could have used talking to voters.”
Money that comes in after the election is typically projected to pay off campaign debts, accrued in the final effort to get out every vote.
Trump’s campaign ended with a surplus of cash.
“Whoever decided, ‘No, we’re going to cut our TV spending,’” for the campaign to then end up with millions of dollars in the bank, “just flat out means that they screwed it up,” this person said. “There’s no other way to look at it. They misread it.”
A postmortem circulated to top campaign aides, and obtained by the Washington Examiner, showed that Trump failed to capture the attention of late-deciding voters, a factor in his loss.
While 90% of voters settled on a presidential candidate before the final month of the election, Trump “needed late deciders to break in his direction in the states we flipped, but that did not materialize,” the autopsy said.
A Republican familiar with Trump’s fundraising operation told HuffPost that the former president was holding the donations for bills unrelated to the election. “He put all this money in the bank for his own legal fights. He never cared about Georgia’s races,” this person said.
Trump faces a second impeachment trial starting next week, with House Democrats arguing in an impeachment brief on Tuesday that he bears “singular responsibility” for the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 and that the Senate should convict him for “incitement of insurrection.”
