Donald Trump's historic fundraising haul

Pundits and talk show hosts have gone back-and-forth on whether last week's verdict in the Trump Hush Money Trial helped Donald Trump, hurt Donald Trump or didn't make a difference. I immediately opined that it was like rocket fuel to the Trump campaign. Apparently, Hugh Hewitt reached the same conclusion. Hugh wrote "If you aren’t stunned by the $70 million+ in "small dollar" campaign contributions to the campaign of former President Donald Trump that were made in the first 72 hours after the verdicts in his Manhattan trial, then you don’t know much about politics, because nothing like this sort of fundraising weekend has ever happened before."

This weekend, it was reported that 30% of the WinRed contributions were first-time contributors. It was also reported that 485,000 individual donors had contributed to the first $35,000,000 contributed. That's 142,000 new Trump voters. That's enough voters to surpass the Trump margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in the "Blue Firewall States" of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan in 2016. That's the number of new voters from the first 6 hours after the verdict was read. The number of projected new voters from Thursday afternoon through Sunday night is more than 600,000.

Skeptical about the relative scale of this Krakatoa of contributions? Don’t believe me. Believe the Democrats. Here’s the first paragraph from a March 2024 Washington Post report on the "three presidents" gala at Radio City Music Hall: "In a show of force his campaign is calling the ‘most successful political fundraiser in American history,’ President Biden raised more than $25 million during a New York event Thursday featuring former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton."

It isn't that $25,000,000 isn't a good haul. It's that $25,000,000 is dwarfed by the $291,000,000 taken in from Thursday afternoon through Sunday night. Five minutes into Eric Trump's interview with Maria Bartiromo, Trump said this:

What that mountain of new money tells us is that the verdicts constituted a "last straw" for hundreds of thousands of Trump supporters, old and new. Enormous numbers of ordinary Americans were disgusted enough with the verdicts to send Trump money to press forward with his campaign.

Why? There are as many motives as there are donors, but having spoken with a dozen contributors —mostly new donors— on my radio show Monday, their responses confirmed for me my hunch that the general feeling at large in at least half the country is that the New York trial and convictions were yet another abuse of power done in order to "get Trump." Another abuse of power in a long-running drama that became, for them, the proverbial "last straw."

As Eric Trump said, people are pi$$ed off, mostly with the two-tiered justice system but also with Judge Merchan, Alvin Bragg and all the different prosecutors who've pledged to "Get Trump." Pi$$ed of voters show up to vote. These aren't if-and-maybe types of voters. These are the types that'd crawl through broken glass voters.