President Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party raised $ 255.4 million in the more than eight weeks following the November 3 election, new federal records show, as he attempted to undermine the results on unsubstantiated fraud allegations to reverse.
Mr Trump’s strongest fundraising came immediately after the election, for example after major media organizations announced that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won on November 7th. Yet even when Mr Trump and his legal team lost the case afterwards – in places like the Supreme Court – his donors continued to give repeats. From November 24th through the end of the year, more than two million contributions went to Mr. Trump, the Republican National Committee and their joint accounts.
The donations were posted over the weekend on a Federal Election Commission filing by WinRed, the digital platform that Republicans use to process online donations. Mr. Trump’s campaign committee, joint committees with the RNC, and the new political action committee he formed after the elections, Save America, will be filing additional information on Sunday with more details on spending and fundraising.
Mr Trump had previously announced that he and the RNC raised $ 207.5 million in the first month after the election. The new records show that his fundraising fell sharply in December compared to November, particularly after December 14, the day the electoral college officially cast its ballot to make Mr Biden the 46th president of the nation, and the reality possibly. Some of Mr. Trump’s supporters spoke of the futility of trying to reverse the outcome.
In the two weeks leading up to the electoral college vote, Mr Trump and the RNC had raised an average of $ 2.9 million a day online. In the two weeks that followed, the average was $ 1.2 million.
In fact, Mr Trump and the RNC had raised more than $ 2 million online every day since the election through December 14. For the remainder of the year, through December 31st, when donations are made at the end of the year.
The new numbers capture almost all of Mr. Trump’s online fundraising drives when he stopped raising money on Jan. 6, addressing a crowd of supporters who then stormed the Capitol in a violent uproar and the Mr. Biden was officially ratified by Congress as the next President.
After this uprising, Mr Trump essentially stopped sending donations to his supporters (the RNC took a break of about a week). His last campaign email that day began: “TODAY is going to be a historic day in our nation’s history.”
Even so, Mr Trump left office with the tens of millions of dollars raised for his new Save America PAC, which he can use to fund a post-president political operation, including travel and staff.
But Mr Trump is still facing a surge in legal costs as an impeachment trial in the Senate is set to begin in just over a week. Late on Saturday, Mr Trump abruptly parted ways with senior attorney Butch Bowers to defend his impeachment.
In his first impeachment, the RNC covered some of the legal costs for Mr Trump for being the sitting president and the party leader. These costs included a payment of $ 196,000 to Alan Dershowitz, the attorney who was part of Mr. Trump’s defense team.
It is not clear what role the RNC will play in the impending impeachment, but the party’s coffers have benefited immensely from Mr. Trump’s aggressive fundraising as he spread conspiracy theories about electoral fraud. About 25 percent of the funds raised through Mr. Trump’s email and text messaging operations were earmarked for the RNC
