Republicans Beg Trump To Cough Up Funds For Struggling Senate Campaigns
Sen. Mitch McConnell, left, and former president Donald Trump
Former President Donald Trump is only concerned about one person: former President Donald Trump. So even though he’s bilking his MAGA groupies for millions, he’s failing to support his endorsed Republican Senate nominees—with just weeks until the midterm elections.
According to Politico, Mitch McConnell has been quietly pushing the twice-impeached ex-president to start digging into the coffers of his leadership PAC and super PACs—a necessary move if the GOP wants any chance of winning back the Senate.
Trump is sitting on nearly $99 million in his PAC, and although he vocally endorses a few Senate candidates nationwide—J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona—apparently, he has given them little more than scraps toward the financial support they desperately need.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, a Republican from North Dakota, tells Politico that Trump “should invest to win, and not just to finish second or tied. I think he ought to do it. I really do. I think he ought to get generous. [...] One thing Donald Trump doesn’t like to do is lose.”
In a July op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove mused about what Trump was doing with his treasure trove of campaign donations, writing that the former president “hasn’t shown much interest” in giving to Republican candidates. “If Mr. Trump doesn’t start actually deploying these funds to help candidates he’s backed for Congress, governor, and other statewide offices, donors might not keep giving to the former president’s causes. Trump-endorsed candidates might start to wonder how strong an ally the former president really is, beyond lending his name in a primary,” Rove wrote before millions in donations poured into Trump’s war chest following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in mid-August.
A GOP strategist working on House and Senate races tells Politico that Trump’s “a penny pincher. He’s not going to spend money on people when he can spend money on himself. In lieu of spending money, he can do events for you. [...] Everyone thought that, by Labor Day, he would be loosening up the purse strings a bit, and money would be flowing in.”
According to reporting from Politico, Trump’s Save America has given the legal maximum of $5,000 to a few vulnerable Senate candidates and a total of $150,000 in those same $5,000 increments to other RNC accounts, including those of incumbents running for safe seats. Republican political strategist Scott Jennings told The Washington Post, “We need all the help we can get.”
According to the Post, when interviewed about the ongoing money woes of the Senate GOP candidates, Mitt Romney said, “I would sure hope that President Trump would use some of that money he's got to get Republicans elected to the Senate. [...] It'll be good for the country and good for the people he's endorsed.”
In an interview with Politico, an unnamed Trump advisor said simply that the former president has no “moral obligation to spend millions on candidates,” but the advisor thinks “it would be a politically smart move for [Trump] to spend big,” adding that the former president still “doesn’t owe it to these people.”
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos
