The Republican party’s WinRed fundraising platform collapsed briefly on Thursday under the weight of grassroots donors rushing to support Donald Trump following his criminal conviction in New York.
The unanimous verdict, handed down after just two days of jury deliberations, further drove a wedge through American society as GOP supporters demonized the trial involving fraud over hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels as a “kangaroo court”.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk went so far as to characterize as “trivial” the 34 separate felony counts for falsifying business records.
“We are working on getting the website back online as quickly as possible,” the Trump campaign posted to social media on Thursday, blaming the half-hour outage on a supposed flood of donations.
While websites can buckle under a sudden surge in traffic if their host provider doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to handle data transfers, skeptics warned they wanted to see proof of this supposed flood of donations when the Trump campaign releases records for the month of May.
🚨 WEBSITE IS BACK ONLINE!
— Team Trump (Text TRUMP to 88022) (@TeamTrump) May 30, 2024
DONATE: https://t.co/f0sOtKF3aj
Trump’s legal woes might have kept him in courtrooms rather than on the trail canvassing for votes, but they have proven to be a boon to his campaign finances.
The ex-president used the defiant scowl of his mugshot in August to haul in his biggest one-day take at that point, according to a Politico report, and donations have spiked in the immediate wake of his various indictments and arraignments, data filed by WinRed to the Federal Election Commission has shown.
Set up in 2019 as a counterweight to the Democrats’ successful ActBlue, WinRed is a Republican party fundraising platform designed to capture small dollar amounts from grassroots.
It operates as a for-profit joint venture between the Republican National Committee’s Data Trust voter file system and Revv, a payments processor founded by former RNC operative Gerrit Lansing.
Biden's fundraising in April trailed Trump heavily
While independents might shy away, the Trump fraud verdict doesn’t look like it will deter many Republican supporters.
Musk associates David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya will host Trump at a San Francisco fundraiser in a week.
Meanwhile, billionaires like Bill Ackman and Steven Schwarzman—who stand to lose from Biden’s planned landmark tax on unrealized capital gains—recently threw their support behind the New York real estate tycoon.
There’s only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office: At the ballot box.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 30, 2024
Donate to our campaign today: https://t.co/aJXS9oti0a
The GOP isn’t the only one trying to make hay from Trump’s felony conviction on fraud charges.
The Democrats also hoped to boost their fortunes after the Biden campaign succeeded in raising only $51 million in April, well short of the $76 million donated by Trump supporters.
Much of that, however, was due to a single event in Florida hosted by billionaire speculator Jon Paulson.
“There is only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office—at the ballot box. Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for President,” Biden campaign spokesman Michael Tyler said in a statement on Thursday.
Ironically, Trump may very well not be the presumed GOP candidate had it not been for the Stormy Daniels case in the first place.
After several Trump-endorsed candidates flopped in the 2022 midterm elections, it appeared as if his iron grip on the party had loosened.
In the weeks following, the GOP looked poised to move on with Ron DeSantis as its standard bearer after the youthful conservative romped to victory in the Florida gubernatorial race.
Last April’s decision by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg to indict Trump on hush money charges ended that, with support for DeSantis subsequently ebbing steadily away in favor of the former President.
