Dem
51
GOP
49
Donald Trump's bills are piling up and will go sky-high when his trials start. We're talking tens of millions of dollars here. Trump is a notorious skinflint who hates paying his bills. He has two preferred strategies for dealing with them. First, simply don't pay them, get sued, and then wear the other side down with endless delays until they agree to accept 30 cents on the dollar. Second, get someone else to pay the bills, for example, the rubes who support him. The first strategy won't work now. If he stops paying his lawyers, they will stop working for him and he needs them. Besides, he probably had to pay a fair amount in advance just to get them to agree to take him on. Consequently, now facing tens of millions of dollars in bills, he is focusing on getting someone else to pay his bills and the RNC is now a top target. Just to give you an idea of the scale here, Trump's legal bills last year ran to $50 million—and this was before any of the criminal trials began. It will be much worse this year.
Some RNC members initially opposed this. Henry Barbour proposed a resolution stating that the RNC wouldn't pay Trump one cent. Barbour now says: "The resolution is dead" as the RNC is warming to the idea of paying Trump's lawyers tens of millions of dollars for defending him. Other RNC members are also coming around. An RNC Committee member from Oregon, Solomon Yue, said: "The only mission of the Republican National Committee is to elect our presumptive nominee Trump as the 47th President."
Can you imagine the joy Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) felt when he heard that the RNC's only job is to elect Trump and it won't be coming after him or Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) or dozens of endangered Democratic House members because Trump's lawyers are sucking up all the RNC's money? Having the RNC pay Trump's legal bills is a gift from heaven for the Democrats. Every penny that goes to Alina Habba or Chris Kise is a penny that doesn't go to win back the Senate or hold the House. It's not a done deal yet, but it's moving in that direction.
Also relevant here is that the RNC tends to get its money from big donors. Most individual Republicans who give money to Donald of Nazareth do so because they think he is their savior, not because they are expecting concrete benefits, like a big tax cut for rich people. People who give serious money to the RNC do so because they want very specific policies implemented and want Republicans to control the government to deliver them. They all understand the concept of "return on investment" extremely well. If they believe that their money is going to go to Trump's lawyers and not to elect a Republican Congress, they are not nearly as likely to be generous, although they could switch to the NRSC and NRCC or individual candidates, of course. But a policy of funding Trump's lawyers could well have the effect of greatly reducing the pot of money the RNC has. The big advantage the RNC has over the other committees is its flexibility. It can put money where it is needed, be it a House race, a gubernatorial race, or even a state senate race somewhere. If Trump bleeds the RNC dry, the Republicans will lose the flexibility that the DNC has because all the money it gets is going to help elect Democrats somewhere. For example, the Democrats need to flip only two seats to take over the Arizona state Senate and the DNC has the flexibility to put money in races there if it thinks that is worthwhile. (V)