Trump Orders Republican Party To Stop Fundraising Off His Name, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Small-Dollar Donations Might Flow Somewhere Other Than His Personal PAC
WASHINGTON. Former president Donald J. Trump, a man who built a fortune affixing his surname to steaks, neckties, vodka, a university, and a number of buildings he did not own, moved on Friday to defend that surname from its single most enthusiastic unauthorized user: the Republican Party. Attorneys for Trump sent cease-and-desist letters to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee, demanding that the three largest fundraising arms of his own party stop invoking his name and likeness to raise money.
The letters resolved a long-standing ambiguity at the heart of American conservatism, namely whether the Republican Party belonged to Donald Trump or whether Donald Trump merely belonged to the Republican Party. Sources within the former president's circle clarified that the answer was neither, and that the party was in fact a lapsed licensee.
"Nobody has done more for the Republican Party than him," a person close to Trump said, characterizing the cease-and-desist as a routine matter of intellectual property. "He is not asking for anything unusual. He just wants what is his, which is all of it."
The timing carried a certain administrative elegance. That same weekend, the RNC convened its spring donor retreat in Palm Beach and relocated part of its programming to Mar-a-Lago, where Trump delivered the keynote address. The arrangement allowed the party to pay the former president's private club for the privilege of hosting an event at which the former president instructed the party to stop enriching itself using his name.
Within weeks Trump formalized the redirection, telling supporters in an official statement to route their contributions away from the party committees and toward his own Save America political action committee. "No more money for RINOS," the statement read. "Send your donation to Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com." The leadership PAC, which is permitted to spend donor money on travel, legal fees, and other expenses at the former president's discretion, had already collected tens of millions of dollars from small-dollar donors responding to claims about an election he lost.
At press time, the Republican National Committee had announced it would keep using Trump's name in its fundraising appeals, having determined that it had nothing else.