OPINION: Trump’s latest grift: the MAGA takeover of the GOP to fund his legal bills

This article was originally posted on Edwin’s Substack newsletter on March 23.

There is nothing unusual about presidential candidates engaging in joint fundraising with their political party. In our democracy, neither a president nor the legislature can go it alone. They need allies both in Washington and in the states to accomplish the people’s agenda. That’s one of the reasons we have political parties.

So it’s not unusual that Trump and the Republicans have created the Trump 47 Committee as a joint fundraising vehicle for the candidate and the party. But as with everything Trump touches, this turns out to be a scam.

As the Associated Press first reported, contributions to the Trump 47 Committee will go first to the Trump Campaign. When that’s maxed out, dollars will then flow to an entity called the Save America PAC. And when that’s maxed out, what’s left will go to the Republican National Committee and state parties. But the Trump campaign and the Save America PAC are vehicles to raise money to defend Donald Trump against the 89 indictments he is facing for stealing classified documents, undermining the election and leading a criminal conspiracy.

Pity the poor Republican donor who thinks that Mr. Trump is using his famous brand to help build party infrastructure and to support candidates up and down the ballot. Because the unless the donors got so much money his gift will max out on both the Trump campaign and his legal fund and still have money left over for the party, he’s just paying lawyers.

And what are those lawyers doing for their fees? Not defending Mr. Trump against very serious criminal charges in court. No, they are using all their skill and all their guile to delay the reckoning in court. They are being paid to do what they can to make sure that the rich and powerful do not face equal justice in America.

And that’s the deal the Republican Party — the Republican National Committee — signed up for.

It is shocking and surprising unless you’ve paid attention. If you have, you know that the GOP is now part of the Trump family business. He recently installed his most loyal henchman and his daughter-in-law to lead the organization.

The crumbling of Republican infrastructure is a slow-motion disaster for conservatives in America, and, from where I sit in the decidedly more left side of the field, a disaster for America too.

Today’s GOP is dedicated to keeping Donald Trump out of jail. To do that, it has to siphon political funds to pay legal bills, and it has to replace conservative thought with a radical and divisive populist vision that abandons long-shared American goals and ideals. It instead demonizes the majority of Americans and those ideals in order to motivate its base and, at the same time, inoculate it against facts that would be inconvenient to Mr. Trump. (That’s the only kind of vaccine they are actually for.) It is, as scholars of fascism have told us, a well-worn and dangerous path.

It was not that long ago that Republicans and Democrats both sought an America that maximized freedom for everyone; an America that led a peaceful and rules-based world order, an America where anyone could prosper. We agreed on these goals, even as we loudly disagreed about the means to achieve them. Conservatives wanted to trickle down. Liberals wanted to lift the bottom and build from the middle. That’s the kind of debate a democracy should have.

Today’s GOP is not interested in any of that. It has its own goals, antithetical to interests of the rest of America. They demand fealty and demonize those who will not bend the knee. It is a profound break from our history. They have turned their political structure into a defense fund for Mr. Trump, because he is the only candidate willing to help them with their real agenda:

• They aim to create a religious state. If you doubt it, you haven’t paid attention to Justice Sam Alito, who is determined to enforce anti-LGBTQ bigotry as an American religious belief.
• They aim to make ours a country where some are beyond the reach of the law. If you doubt it, you haven’t heard the argument Donald Trump made to the Supreme Court about his own immunity. His lawyer told the court it would be okay for the president to order the assassination of political opponents.
• They are not content with letting some be above the law. They aim to make whole groups of others permanently beneath its protection. They are even willing to use the force of arms to halt America’s long arc towards justice. If you doubt it, you haven’t paid attention to Charlottesville, to Mother Emanuel, to Kyle Rittenhouse. There were not “very good people on both sides.”
• They aim to dominate and will undermine voting and election integrity to win. If you think that’s going too far, then you were not listening when Justice John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act and barred the door to cases challenging radical gerrymanders. If you think I’ve gone too far, you haven’t heard the Jan. 6 insurrectionists lionized as political prisoners. And you haven’t heard Mr. Trump promising to pardon them all on day one.
• They do not want America to lead the fight for democracy and for international rules. That’s why they point to Hungary’s anti-democracy leader Viktor Orban as their model. It’s why they resist helping Ukraine. They prefer to go back to the age of Empires, where the strong take what they can and the weak suffer what they must.

These are not, and never have been, the goals and the ideals of our country. But this is what today’s GOP is fighting for. And in Donald Trump they have their champion. If they get their way, they will not have to engage in conversations about climate, or abortion, or guns. Those conversations, like the ones between principled right and left leaders of the past, will be gone.

Edwin Eisendrath hosts “The Big Picture” on WCPT 820 AM every Saturday at 1 p.m. CST. You can follow him on X @eisendrath.