There are principled reasons not to let Trump suck the party dry, but the practical reasons should be of more urgent moment to the people who gather in Houston a ...
When the Republican National Committee meets Friday, March 8, in Houston, the headline order of business will be selecting a new chairperson to replace Ronna McDaniel. But a more contentious fight looms: a resolution proposed by Mississippi committee member Henry Barbour that would prevent the party from paying Donald Trump’s legal bills. McDaniel had paid some of Trump’s bills before he announced his candidacy in 2022 but said that she would not do so while he was a primary candidate — so the question is an open one as the party tries to dig out of a huge financial hole in advance of a general election.
On the RNC chairperson front, Trump is likely to get his way. He probably should. So long as Trump is the de facto leader of the party, its presidential candidate and its public face, the party leader should be someone accountable to Trump, on the same page with Trump, and for whom Trump is accountable.
But it’s one thing to say that the leader of the party should get to lead the party. It’s entirely another thing to treat the leader as the party. People join, support, and donate their time and money to political parties because the party serves some purpose besides simply enriching and protecting its leaders. That purpose is invariably a mixture of high ideals, particular policies, and more prosaic and self-interested benefits and protections given to the party’s supporters. Parties exist as the alternative to feudal-style government by loyalty to an individual patron who buys only such support as he needs to serve his own interests. That was Edmund Burke’s argument for why Parliament should be organized around parties that stand for things rather than around people bought off by the king. While there will always be people willing to sign up for the latter sort of arrangement, it is hard to build a popular majority of them, and harder still for such a party to attract the dollars of significant donors.
Barbour, the nephew of former RNC chair and Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, is not exactly neutral on Trump. He told Audrey Fahlberg in December that the party needed to nominate someone other than Trump, and along with the legal-bills resolution, he has also proposed that the party remain formally neutral and uncoordinated with the Trump campaign unless and until Trump mathematically clinches the nomination. (Of course, that resolution could be moot if Nikki Haley exits the race between Super Tuesday, March 5, and March 8). His argument, laid out to CNN’s Dana Bash:
The RNC has one job . . . and that’s to win elections. And we should spend our finite resources on political operations and actually winning elections, and paying any candidate’s legal fees — or frankly, any other outside fees or expenses — is not the RNC’s job. . . . When the RNC sends out solicitation, it says, ‘Hey, do you want to take the White House back and get the country back on track?’ Donors send in their $28 or whatever it is. . . . It would be totally misleading to take that money and then go and spend it with some big fat law firm, you know, legal fees for stuff that has nothing to do with winning the election.
But the legal-bills resolution deserves serious consideration independent of the primary. The resolution, first reported by David Drucker at the Dispatch, reads as follows:
WHEREAS, the Republican National Committee should focus its spending on political efforts associated with winning elections and make clear from this point forward that the RNC’s financial resources are to be used to assist candidates across the country winning elections in 2024. WHEREAS, spending any RNC financial resources for any candidate’s personal, business, or political legal expenses, not related to the 2024 election cycle, does not serve the RNC’s primary mission of helping to elect our candidates in 2024; therefore, be it RESOLVED, that the Republican National Committee will not pay the legal bills of any of our candidates for any federal or state office, but will focus our spending on efforts directly related to the 2024 election cycle. [Emphasis added.]
Now, as a lawyer reading this, I’d recommend clarifying the language. On the one hand, “legal bills” could be read too narrowly: Trump’s personal money problems arise not only from paying lawyer bills but also from the civil verdicts against him, including the need to post appeal bonds in order to appeal three state and federal civil verdicts against him in New York. If the resolution is to protect the RNC’s fragile finances from being drained to support the personal interests of Trump, it should make that clear. On the other hand, the resolution is probably too broad: It’s entirely proper for the RNC to foot the bills for directly campaign-related lawsuits such as recounts, ballot-access suits, and fights over election laws. I frankly would not have a big problem with the party spending donor money to fight efforts to disqualify Trump from the ballot; that’s a directly campaign-related lawsuit, unlike criminal prosecutions of Trump or civil suits about his private business and an alleged sexual assault years before he entered politics.
Nikki Haley has demanded a vote on the resolution, arguing that “we deserve to know how the RNC is going to spend their money and if it’s going to go towards legal fees.” That fits with her campaign theme that Trump is a liability to the party: On CNN recently, she branded the RNC as a “legal slush fund” for Trump that was no longer concerned about “winning races up and down the ticket.” “My biggest issues is, I don’t want the RNC to become, you know, his legal-defense fund,” Haley told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “I don’t want the RNC to become his piggy bank for his personal court cases.” She suggested that Trump is trying to “get control” of the RNC so that he can “continue to not have to pay his own legal fees.”
She’s been joined by other Trump critics such as Asa Hutchinson. The Trump camp, by contrast, has been equivocal. Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law and part of the team he proposes to install at the RNC, expressed openness to the RNC paying Trump’s legal bills, although she confessed to not really knowing what the current rules allow: “That’s why people are furious right now. And they see the attacks against him. They feel like it’s an attack not just on Donald Trump but on this country. So yeah, I think that is a big interest to people, absolutely.” By contrast, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita, tabbed by Trump to take over an operating role at the RNC, told Vaughn Hillyard of NBC News “No,” and, asked to clarify, said, “F***ing no.”
LaCivita is a professional, and his response suggests that he knows it would be poison to the party’s already-tepid fundraising for donors to believe that their money is going to Trump’s legal defense instead of winning elections. There is a donor base that wants to give money directly for that cause, and Trump can target those donors himself. But there are also plenty of people who do want to help the party win elections but won’t donate if they think the money is going to a billionaire so he doesn’t have to pay his own personal lawyers out of his own pocket. I’m sure the RNC has received plenty of feedback to this tune over the past three years, and it could do market research (if it hasn’t already) to quantify how much money it will lose out on if people think that’s where the donations are going.
Ask the Catholic Church about this. For two decades, the Church has struggled with the perception of parishioners and large donors that money given to the Church wasn’t going to celebrations of Mass, or the schools, or charity, but was being paid to verdicts and settlements from sexual abuse. Diocesan fundraising has often emphasized that the sex-abuse cases would be paid for separately; not everybody buys it. I’m a New York Mets fan, and the final decade of team ownership by the Wilpon family was similarly plagued by fan suspicion that buying tickets to the games and subscriptions to cable networks was helping the Wilpon family pay off Madoff-related debts rather than improve the product on the field. That same cynicism is all too apparent in the RNC’s collapsed fundraising: A party that had between $58 million and $65 million on hand at the end of November in 2019, 2020, and 2021 ended the same month in 2023 with less than $10 million in the bank. If the Republican party was a stock, people would be shorting it.
There are principled reasons not to let Trump suck the party dry, but the practical reasons should be of more urgent moment to the people who gather in Houston a week from today. Otherwise, at this rate, they might be holding next year’s meeting in a shopping cart under an overpass.
CORRECTION: This article initially misidentified Henry Barbour’s familial relationship with Haley Barbour. He is his nephew, not his son.