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You are here: Home / Politics / 2016 Elections / Trump stops big bucks fundraisers that meant big cash for Republican Party

Trump stops big bucks fundraisers that meant big cash for Republican Party

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You can now say the “other” debate now seems over.

Yes, each party had its primary debates.

And then there were the Presidential debates.

But the underlying debate has been whether Donald Trump really felt any loyalty to the Republican Party, which is teeming with members who noted during the primary that once upon a time he had been a Democrat lauding Hillary and Bill Clinton. See THIS VIDEO. Now Trump & Co are doing something at the very least suggests he couldn’t care less for the GOP as a party: he’s halting his fundraising operation that was raising big bucks for the Republican Party, the Washington Post reports.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has stopped holding events for his high-dollar fundraising operation for the rest of the campaign, an unusual move that deals another serious blow to the GOP’s effort to finance its get-out-the-vote operation before Election Day.

Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s national finance chairman, said in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday that Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee between the party and the campaign, held its last formal fundraiser on Oct. 19. The luncheon was in Las Vegas on the day of the final presidential debate.

“We’ve kind of wound down,” Mnuchin said, referring to formal fundraisers. “But the online fundraising continues to be strong.”

While Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is headlining her last fundraiser Tuesday night in Miami, her campaign has scheduled 41 other events between now and Nov. 3 featuring high-profile surrogates such as her daughter, Chelsea, running mate Tim Kaine and the entertainer Cher, according to a schedule sent to donors this weekend

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Trump wants to focus on his voting rallies:

Mnuchin said the Trump campaign decided to keep the candidate’s final weeks focused on taking his message to the voters in person rather than on raising money. The GOP candidate held a small Trump Victory event in Florida this week, and there may be a handful of more high-dollar fundraisers in coming days featuring Trump surrogates, including his son Donald Jr., according to people familiar with the internal discussions. But Mnuchin said “there is virtually nothing planned.”

“We have minimized his fundraising schedule over the last month to emphasize his focus on political [events],” Mnuchin said. “Unlike Hillary, who has been fundraising and not out and about, he has constantly been out and about.”

Mnuchin noted that the Trump campaign continues to help bring in donations for the party from individual donors who are writing big checks, as well as through online contributions. “We continue to do fundraising with the party,” he said.

Is this no big deal?

But the RNC gets only 20 percent of the money that Trump raises online in conjunction with the party, while the vast majority of the big checks contributed to Trump Victory are routed to the party.

RNC officials said that party leaders, including Chairman Reince Priebus, are continuing to bring in resources for the party. “The RNC continues to fundraise for the entire GOP ticket,” said spokeswoman Lindsay Walters.

So the reality isn’t helpful to the GOP. The public face on this is put on a happy face — so much so that this should be the GOP/Trump campaign’s theme song about their relationship:

It isn’t seen quite that cheery on Twitter:








The conservative blog Red State:

Over the course of the election season, we’ve seen numerous reports of Trump’s enrichment of Trump through the campaign process.

He has charged the campaign rental rates that are four to five times higher than what they would normally be to rent space in his own building, as well as charged for using his own airplane and other resources, where he could be saving the GOP money and funneling the savings down ballot.

That, of course, is what someone that wasn’t a parody candidate would have done. This is Donald Trump.

The Washington Post is reporting that Trump has tired of putting on even the most basic pretenses of being a team player.

Hot Air’s Allahpundit:

Why spend the final few weeks schmoozing with fatcats, the campaign insists, when Trump and his top surrogates could spend the time holding rallies and events instead? The answer: Because the RNC, which, by the way, is running Trump’s ground game and desperately trying to keep downballot Republicans afloat, needs the money from those fatcats to keep things humming along. Trump’s own campaign might be able to get by on money raised through small donations online, but the RNC gets only a small cut of those funds. Reince Priebus and company are going to have to go begging donors for money now without help from the nominee.

SEE ALSO: Data mining: Dems leading in new-voter registrations in PA, FL

If you were worried that Trump would spend the home stretch of the election thinking about himself rather than the party at large, yep, you were right to worry…

….The best spin you can put on that is that he really does believe he has a chance to pull the upset next month but thinks it’ll take an all-hands-on-deck effort from his entire team to get there, so much so that they simply can’t spare time to help the party anymore. The worst spin you can put on it is that he believes, barring a miracle, that the race is over and therefore he’s not devoting any more energy to helping a party that he always viewed as little more than a vehicle for his personal ambitions, not a congregation of ideological comrades-in-arms. Either way, the RNC running low on funds in the final week could be a gamechanger in close races..

Of course, Trump has been given many signals through news reports that’s it’s increasingly every Republican for him/herself now that his campaign appears to be going down the tubes. The Trump campaign’s action isn’t being phrased as retaliation, and the expected CYA statements are already coming out now from the Trump campaign saying many other events will be held. The Post story already has an update — but not one suggesting that it’s story was at all incomplete or in error.

photo credit: Gage Skidmore Donald Trump via photopin (license)