THE CAPTURE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY
Bound to No Party, Trump Upends
150 Years of Two-Party Rule
PETER BAKER, The New York Times National Edition, September 10, 2017, A1. A19
The high-water mark for independent presidential candidates since Theodore Roosevelt came in 1992, when Ross
Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote. Credit: Edward Keating/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — When Donald J. Trump set his sights on the presidency in the 2000
election, he pursued the nomination of the Reform Party, a home for disenchanted
independents. “The Republican Party has just moved too far to the extreme right,” he
explained. “The Democrats are too far to the left.”
In the end, he dropped the campaign and the Reform Party, the leftover construct
from Ross Perot’s two independent presidential candidacies during the 1990s. It was
one of at least five times that Mr. Trump would switch party affiliations over the years.
“I’m the Lone Ranger,” he once said in another context.
Now in the White House, President Trump demonstrated this past week that he still
imagines himself a solitary cowboy as he abandoned Republican congressional leaders
to forge a short-term fiscal deal with Democrats. Although elected as a Republican last
year, Mr. Trump has shown in the nearly eight months in office that he is, in many ways,
the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the current two-party
system around the time of the Civil War.
In recent weeks, he has quarreled more with fellow Republicans than with the
opposition, blasting congressional leaders on Twitter, ousting former party officials in
his White House, embracing primary challenges to incumbent lawmakers who defied
him and blaming Republican figures for not advancing his policy agenda. On Friday,
he addressed discontent about his approach with a Twitter post that started,
“Republicans, sorry,” as if he were not one of them, and said party leaders had a “death
wish.”
While some conservatives complained about the apostasy of cutting deals with
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosiof California,
others applauded his assault on establishment Republican leaders like Speaker Paul D.
Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. By the week’s end,
pundits speculated about whether Mr. Trump might seek re-election in 2020 as an
independent.
“The truth is that he is a political independent, and he obviously won the nomination
and the presidency by disrupting a lot of norms that Republicans had assumed about
their own party and their own voters,” said Ben Domenech, publisher of The Federalist,
a conservative website. “This week was the first time he struck out and did something
completely at odds with what the Republican leadership and establishment would want
him to do in this position.”
None of which means that Mr. Trump has suddenly transformed himself into a centerhugging
moderate. More situational than ideological — critics would say opportunist —
Mr. Trump adjusts to the moment, and his temporary alignment with Democrats could
easily unravel tomorrow. The deal he cut, after all, merely postponed a fight over
spending and debt for three months. It did not resolve any substantive disagreements.
But it showed that Mr. Trump does not feel beholden to his party. “I never viewed
Trump as a strict adherent to Republicanism,” said Ned Ryun, a Trump supporter and
founder of American Majority, which trains political activists. “He gave Paul Ryan and
Mitch McConnell almost nine months to get something accomplished, and all they
accomplished was to really remove all doubts about their legislative incompetence.”
Until now, the American two-party system has resisted assaults from the outside for
more than a century and a half. No new party has captured the presidency since
Abraham Lincoln’s Republicans in 1860.
Even formidable figures like Theodore Roosevelt failed to break up the duopoly.
Unhappy with his Republican successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt formed his
own Progressive Party, also known as the Bull Moose Party, to mount a comeback in
1912, winning 27 percent of the popular vote and 88 electoral votes, but losing to the
Democrat, Woodrow Wilson.
Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968 staged independent candidacies
founded on overtly racial appeals. John B. Anderson, a moderate Republican
congressman, ran as an independent in 1980. The high-water mark since Roosevelt
came in 1992, when Mr. Perot won 19 percent of the popular vote as an independent; he
ran again in 1996 and drew less than half of that.
George Wallace, the former Alabama governor, ran for president as an independent in 1968 on an overtly racial
appeal. Credit: Associated Press
By running within the Republican Party, Mr. Trump last year managed what they never
did, while making clear that he was not really a party man. The feeling was mutual. The
Republican establishment resisted even after he had won enough primaries to secure the
nomination, and he repeatedly threatened to run as an independent if he felt mistreated.
As someone who spent George W. Bush’s presidency as a registered Democrat, Mr.
Trump had the potential to cross lines, but once inaugurated, he chose a hard-right path
of banning visitors from certain Muslim-majority countries, pulling out of a climate
change accord and seeking to overturn Mr. Obama’s health care program. He seemed
uninterested in working with Democrats, and they seemed uninterested in working with
him.
“There could have been some ways early on in his presidency to use his unique standing
of a somewhat-independent who did not have the normal party strictures, and to date he
has not been able to capitalize on that,” said Thomas F. McLarty III, who was Bill
Clinton’s first White House chief of staff.
Yet even as he ignored Democrats, Mr. Trump was not governing as a traditional
Republican, particularly on issues like free trade or national security alliances.
Republican leaders distanced themselves when he made racially inflammatory
comments after a white nationalist rally erupted into violence in Charlottesville, Va.
Other presidents have tacked against their own parties at times. Franklin D. Roosevelt
sought to oust conservative Democrats who bucked him during party primaries in
1938. Ronald Reagan worked with Democrats, who controlled the House, to pass his
agenda. Mr. Clinton introduced the term “triangulation” to the political vocabulary as he
negotiated budget and welfare deals with Speaker Newt Gingrich.
But none seemed as distant from his own party as Mr. Trump. Breitbart News, the
archconservative website run by his former adviser Stephen K. Bannon, delights in
attacking establishment Republicans like Mr. Ryan. At a conference in Washington this
past week featuring prominent political veterans from both parties, Republicans often
expressed harsher assessments of Mr. Trump than Democrats did.
“There’s still a big question about whether he has a political strategy that matches his
willingness to bash his own party,” said William J. Antholis, director of the University of
Virginia’s Miller Center, which sponsored the conference. “There’s clearly a genius about
Donald Trump. The question is whether it translates into political wins. If he continues
to do this, would he get the Republican nomination? Would he run as an independent?”
The more immediate question is whether he will continue to seek agreements with
Democrats. “President Trump campaigned as a conservative with an independent
streak,” said Greg Mueller, a conservative consultant. “This disposition helped him build
a winning coalition, but I think it’s too early to make a determination that he will now
adhere to a strongly independent path and steer from his more conservative base.”
The Democrats’ liberal base finds Mr. Trump so anathema that party leaders will be
pressured not to make concessions in the interest of finding consensus.
“The profound problem for him is this would have been a smart way to do things eight
months ago, but post-Charlottesville, it’s really hard,” said Neera Tanden, president of
the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “He can do deals
where Democrats win, but it’s really hard to get progressives to stretch for Trump.”
As for Republicans, Mr. Domenech said they should not think of Mr. Trump as their
party leader. “They need to approach him the way they would have approached a Ross
Perot presidency,” he said. “They’re dealing with a guy who technically has an R next to
his name, but only technically. We have to convince him that our way is better, not just
assume he’ll think so.”
A version of this news analysis appears in print on September 10, 2017, on Page A1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Trump’s Flair Upends Legacy Of 2-Party Rule.
Fear and Loyalty: How Donald
Trump Took Over the Republican
Party
The president demands complete fealty, and as the impeachment hearings showed, he
has largely attained it. To cross him is to risk losing a future in the Republican Party.
Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times Online edition.
Published December 21, 2019, and updated December 22, 2019
BIRMINGHAM, Mich. — By the summer of 2017, Dave Trott, a two-term Republican
congressman, was worried enough about President Trump’s erratic behavior and his
flailing attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act that he criticized the president in a
closed-door meeting with fellow G.O.P. lawmakers.
The response was instantaneous — but had nothing to do with the substance of Mr.
Trott’s concerns. “Dave, you need to know somebody has already told the White House
what you said,” he recalled a colleague telling him. “Be ready for a barrage of tweets.”
Mr. Trott got the message: To defy Mr. Trump is to invite the president’s wrath,
ostracism within the party and a premature end to a career in Republican politics. Mr.
Trott decided not to seek re-election in his suburban Detroit district, concluding that
running as a Trump skeptic was untenable, and joining a wave of Republican departures
from Congress that has left those who remain more devoted to the president than ever.
“If I was still there and speaking out against the president, what would happen to me?”
Mr. Trott said before answering his own question: Mr. Trump would have lashed out
and pressured House G.O.P. leaders to punish him.
Just under four years after he began his takeover of a party to which he had little
connection, Mr. Trump enters 2020 burdened with the ignominy of being the first
sitting president to seek re-election after being impeached.
But he does so wearing a political coat of armor built on total loyalty from G.O.P.
activists and their representatives in Congress. If he does not enjoy the broad
admiration Republicans afforded Ronald Reagan, he is more feared by his party’s
lawmakers than any occupant of the Oval Office since at least Lyndon Johnson.
His iron grip was never firmer than over the last two months, during the House inquiry
that concluded Wednesday with Mr. Trump’s impeachment on charges of abuse of
power and obstructing Congress. No House Republican supported either article, or even
authorized the investigation in September, and in hearing after hearing into the
president’s dealings with Ukraine, they defended him as a victim of partisan fervor. One
Republican even said that Jesus had received fairer treatment before his crucifixion
than Mr. Trump did during his impeachment.
Perhaps more revealing, some G.O.P. lawmakers who initially said Mr. Trump’s phone
call with the president of Ukraine was inappropriate later dropped their criticism.
People close to Mr. Trump attributed the shift both to his public defense of the call as
“perfect’’ and to private discussions he and his allies had with concerned lawmakers.
This fealty hardly guarantees Mr. Trump re-election: He has never garnered a 50
percent approval rating as president and over half of voters tell pollsters they will
oppose him no matter who the Democrats nominate.
But the shoulder-to-shoulder unity stands in contrast to Democrats at the moment, with
their contentious moderate-versus-liberal primary that was on full display in Thursday
night’s debate. And it is all the more striking given Mr. Trump’s deviations from
longstanding party orthodoxy on issues like foreign policy and tariffs.
“He has a complete connection with the average Republican voter and that’s given him
political power here,” said Representative Patrick McHenry, Republican of North
Carolina, adding: “Trump has touched the nerve of my conservative base like no person
in my lifetime.”
Interviews with current and former Republican lawmakers as well as party strategists,
many of whom requested anonymity so as not to publicly cross the president, suggest
that many elected officials are effectively faced with two choices. They can vote with
their feet by retiring — and a remarkable 40 percent of Republican members of
Congress have done so or have been defeated at the ballot box since Mr. Trump took
office.
Representative Dave Trott of Michigan decided not to seek re-election in 2018 after determining it was
untenable to run as an anti-Trump Republican. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call, via Associated Press
Or they can mute their criticism of him. All the incentives that shape political behavior
— with voters, donors and the news media — compel Republicans to bow to Mr. Trump
if they want to survive.
Sitting in a garland-bedecked hotel restaurant in his former district, Mr. Trott said that
he did not want to seek re-election “as a Trumper” — and that he knew he had little
future in the party as an opponent of the president.
There is no market, he said, for independence. Divergence from Trumpism will never be
good enough for Democrats; Mr. Trump will target you among Republicans, Mr. Trott
added, and the vanishing voters from the political middle will never have a chance to
reward you because you would not make it through a primary. That will be ensured in
part by the megaphone the president wields with the conservative news media.
“Trump is emotionally, intellectually and psychologically unfit for office, and I’m sure a
lot of Republicans feel the same way,” Mr. Trott said. “But if they say that, the social
media barrage will be overwhelming.” He added that he would be open to the
presidential candidacy of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York.
On the other hand, Mr. Trump dangles rewards to those who show loyalty — a favorable
tweet, or a presidential visit to their state — and his heavy hand has assured victory for a
number of Republican candidates in their primaries. That includes Gov. Ron DeSantis of
Florida, who did as many Fox News appearances as possible to draw the president’s
attention.
“The greatest fear any member of Congress has these days is losing a primary,” said
former Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who lost his general
election last year in a heavily Hispanic Miami-area district. “That’s the foremost
motivator.”
The larger challenge with Mr. Trump is that all politics is personal with him, and he
carefully tracks who on television is praising him or denouncing his latest rhetorical
excess. “He is the White House political director,” Scott Reed, a longtime Republican
consultant, said.
More conventional presidents may be more understanding of lawmakers who are pulled
in a different direction by the political demands of their districts — but Mr. Trump has
shown little tolerance for such dissent. Mr. Curbelo, for instance, occasionally spoke out
against Mr. Trump, particularly over immigration policy, and the president took notice.
Riding with Mr. Trump in his limousine on Key West last year, Mr. Curbelo recalled in
an interview that the president had noted that people were lining the streets to show
their support for him, and asked Mr. Curbelo if they were in his district.
He said they were, prompting the president to turn to others in the car and say: “Maybe
Carlos will stop saying such nasty things about me,” Mr. Curbelo recalled.
He said they all laughed but the “passive aggressive” comment, as he put it, was not lost
on him.
Representative Carlos Curbelo occasionally spoke out against Mr. Trump over immigration policy. He lost
re-election in 2018. Credit...Pedro Portal/Miami Herald, via Associated Press
Increasingly, though, Mr. Trump does not even have to make implied threats within his
party — Republicans can ascertain the benefit of sticking with him.
Representative Elise Stefanik hails from an upstate New York district that the president
carried by 14 points yet she had not previously hesitated to go her own way.
“I have one of the most independent records in the House,” Ms. Stefanik said. “And I
have critiqued the president, have voted differently than the president.”
Yet after she vehemently criticized the impeachment hearings and found herself under
attack by George Conway, the anti-Trump husband of the White House adviser
Kellyanne Conway, she welcomed the embrace of the president, his family and news
media allies such as the Fox News host Sean Hannity — and the campaign donations
that poured in.
Ms. Stefanik said she opposed impeachment because Democrats failed to make a
convincing case. But she said that she would not have even voted to censure the
president, and that she was chiefly driven by wanting to “stand up for my district.”
And, Ms. Stefanik noted, since her “no” vote she had received “the most positive calls
since I was sworn into office.”
The incentive to show fealty to Mr. Trump has become evident to the Club for Growth, a
fiscal conservative group that was made famous for its willingness to fund primaries
against Republican leaders and was hostile to Mr. Trump in 2016.
The group’s president, David McIntosh, said conservative voters had lost interest in
punishing ideological heresies and were motivated by one overarching factor unrelated
to policy.
“Poll after poll showed us that Republican primary voters wanted their nominees to
support President Trump,” he said, “so in order to make sure they were viable and
would get re-elected, they ended up being supporters of his.”
Mr. McIntosh and Republican lawmakers said Mr. Trump’s largely conservative record
had made it easier to remain loyal, noting his tax cuts, deregulation and judicial
appointments.
Lawmakers not seeking re-election are often the most candid about the slavish devotion
Mr. Trump engenders with voters — and the pressure it puts on them.
“Public officials need to be held accountable, and I don’t think any governmental system
works well with blind loyalty without reason,” said Representative Francis Rooney of
Florida, who announced his intention to retire earlier this year after criticizing Mr.
Trump for his conduct with Ukraine and suffering an immediate backlash.
Mr. Rooney ultimately voted against impeachment, but told colleagues he felt uneasy
about it. Recalling an appearance on a Florida television station afterward, Mr. Rooney
said: “They interviewed me after the vote and then they interviewed one of these Cape
Coral Republican ladies and she said, ‘Well, it’s about time they came around to realize
it’s a big media hoax.’ How do you argue with that? How do you reason with that?”
Many of the Republicans who may have considered impeaching Mr. Trump are gone.
They were part of a 40-seat loss the party had in the House last year, which deprived the
caucus of many of its most independent figures and left it more supportive of the
president than ever.
So why was there no introspection within the party after the midterms about the
damage Mr. Trump did to Republican candidates, particularly in the suburbs?
“If you go to any Republican event, you’re going to find more people at that event than
ever before,” Mr. Trott said, “and every single one of them to a person will be all in for
President Trump. They’ll all have ‘Make America Great Again’ hats on and they’ll be
saying what a tremendous president he is.”
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, was a vocal defender of Mr. Trump during
impeachment hearings. Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times
Mr. Trott recounted one of his most vivid memories of his time serving with Mr. Trump.
It was the day in 2017 when House Republicans voted to repeal the A.C.A. and
celebrated afterward at the White House.
Mr. Trott was one of the first lawmakers to enter the Oval Office after the Rose Garden
celebration and he stood behind the president’s desk when Mr. Trump pulled out a sheet
of paper.
“He already had a list of 20 people who had voted against him two hours earlier,” he
recalled.
Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting from Washington, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
How the Trump Campaign Took Control
of the G.O.P.
Seizing Voter Data and Fundraising Arms to Amass Power and Turn a
Profit
Danny Hakim and Glenn Thrush, The New York Times National Edition, March 9,
2020, pp. A1, A14.
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s campaign manager and a circle of allies have
seized control of the Republican Party’s voter data and fund-raising apparatus, using a
network of private businesses whose operations and ownership are cloaked in secrecy,
largely exempt from federal disclosure.
Working under the aegis of Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, with the
cooperation of Trump appointees at the Republican National Committee, the operatives
have consolidated power — and made money — in a way not possible in an earlier, more
transparent analog era. Since 2017, businesses associated with the group have billed
roughly $75 million to the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and a
range of other Republican clients.
The takeover of the Republican Party’s under-the-hood political machinery parallels the
president’s domination of a party that once shunned him, reflected in his speedy
impeachment trial and summary acquittal. Elected Republicans have learned the
political peril of insufficient fealty. Now, by commanding the party’s repository of voter
data and creating a powerful pipeline for small donations, the Trump campaign and key
party officials have made it increasingly difficult for Republicans to mount modern,
digital campaigns without the president’s support.
The process has not been exactly frictionless, shot through with accusations of empirebuilding
and profiteering by the campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his allies. Mr.
Parscale’s flagship firm, Parscale Strategy, has billed nearly $35 million to the Trump
campaign, the R.N.C. and related entities since 2017 — the vast bulk of it, he says,
passed along to advertising and digital firms.
What’s more, the move to consolidate voter data came at the expense of a competing
data vehicle developed by the conservative activist Koch brothers, provoking resentment
from Koch allies, especially in the Senate. And a fierce pressure campaign to centralize
fund-raising on the new platform, a for-profit company that Mr.
Trump branded WinRed, brought dissent from candidates initially reluctant to sign on,
as well as competitors who believed they were being pushed aside without a fair hearing.
For all that, WinRed, created last summer, has given the party an overdue
counterweight to ActBlue, the Democrats’ small-donor fund-raising juggernaut. With
WinRed, donors could contribute with a few clicks, and candidates could reap windfalls
through joint appeals with the president. In its first six months, capitalizing on the
Republican base’s outrage over impeachment, WinRed raised $100 million, a fast start,
though still well behind the roughly $1 billion raised last year by ActBlue.
While Jared Kushner’s responsibilities in the White House have varied since his father-in-law took office, his most
consistent role has been informal campaign chairman. Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times
“It is completely, thoroughly ironic that Trump, who ran against anything to do with the
R.N.C. and the establishment, is the guy who is breathing new life into the party,” said
WinRed’s chairman, Henry Barbour. Perhaps no one better represents the new outsidein
reality than Mr. Barbour — nephew of the former Republican Party chairman Haley
Barbour — who once said it would be “very hard” to vote for Mr. Trump.
The younger Mr. Barbour is also chairman of the other central pillar of the Republican
machine, Data Trust, a storehouse of personal, commercial and demographic voter data
collected from state parties and voter files or bought from data brokers (or from
WinRed, itself a vital source of donor information). Data Trust, a private company
controlled by a board of Republican grandees, provided much of the raw material
behind the Republicans’ digital-messaging advantage in 2016 — a deficit that the
Democrats, after leading on tech during the Obama years, are now struggling to close
amid the divisive funk of this primary season.
The Parscale-led group — including Katie Walsh Shields and her husband, Mike Shields,
both former R.N.C. chiefs of staff; and the party’s former digital director, Gerrit Lansing
— has also presided over the creation of a number of other political tools, from the
president’s affiliated super PACs to a forthcoming party-controlled news app intended
to produce cheerleading content.
Mr. Parscale declined to comment in detail for this article. But he and his associates
have said that private companies give them greater operational flexibility, given the
constraints of campaign-finance laws. (ActBlue, by contrast, is a nonprofit. Both
entities, though, are required to disclose individual donors.) Still, the millions moving
through opaque private businesses have left even the president perpetually concerned
that Mr. Parscale and his team are making too much money, according to campaign and
White House staff members.
The Trump family looms over the whole operation, starting with Mr. Kushner. While his
White House portfolio has variously encompassed everything from immigration to the
Middle East, his most consistent assignment has been informal campaign chairman,
overseeing the most vital arm of the new family business: politics.
According to two people with knowledge of the matter, Parscale Strategy has also been
used to make payments out of public view to Lara Trump, the wife of the president’s son
Eric, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., who have
been surrogates on the stump and also taken on broader advisory roles. Their presence
makes for an odd dynamic between a campaign manager and a candidate’s family.
During a campaign appearance last summer in Orlando, Ms. Guilfoyle confronted Mr.
Parscale: Why were her checks always late? Two people who witnessed the encounter
said a contrite Mr. Parscale promised that the problem would be sorted out promptly by
his wife, Candice Parscale, who handles the books on many of his ventures.
ActBlue, the Democrats’ small-donor fund-raising platform, is a nonprofit. WinRed, which the Republicans
developed in response, is a private company. Credit...Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images
A Data Arms Race
In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential run, the Republican Party
released a 100-page report that many considered an autopsy. Reince Priebus, then the
R.N.C. chairman, offered this blunt assessment: “Our message was weak. Our ground
game was insufficient. We weren’t inclusive. We were behind in both data and digital.”
While Mr. Trump’s team shredded its core recommendation — a tolerant immigration
policy and outreach to women and minorities — it embraced the call for technological
change.
Previously, parties had spent heavily on television advertising, but now the R.N.C.
moved to rebuild around Data Trust, which it had recently helped establish. The idea
was compelling: If state and national party committees and campaigns fed information
into one place, it could create a deeper understanding of voters. If that place were
outside the party, fund-raising limits would not apply. Contractors were fired, and much
of the R.N.C.’s data staff was moved into Data Trust, which effectively became an offcampus
arm of the party.
“Naturally we faced opposition from a lot of the entrenched interests who had business
models that benefited from the old way of doing things,” said Mr. Shields, the R.N.C.
chief of staff in 2013 and 2014.
That included the Koch brothers and their data vehicle, i360, which built personality
profiles of millions of voters and was used by a number of campaigns. They weren’t the
only skeptics who worried that the committee was steering business to its pet company.
Aides to the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, believed that Data Trust was
inferior to its competitor, and Mr. McConnell gave senators the option of using either.
The battle came to a head in mid-2016, when Mr. Priebus and Ms. Walsh-Shields, who
had become R.N.C. chief of staff the previous year, visited the National Republican
Senatorial Committee. She accused the committee of working against the interests of the
party and its presumptive presidential nominee, Mr. Trump. From there, the meeting
devolved into shouting, several Republicans with direct knowledge of the clash said.
While Ms. Walsh-Shields said in a statement that she did not recall the specific meeting,
she added: “I have found that quite often when a woman in a position of power
disagrees with a man, it is later referred to as a bad meeting.”
She said the Senate committee’s staff was “bizarrely very beholden to using i360 and the
Koch brothers’ system,” while Mr. Priebus’s general position was that the party would
help pay campaigns’ staff expenses only if those aides were “going to be using — and
gathering — data that would help elect the president.”
In the end, some Senate Republicans continued to use the Koch data.
Money was another point of contention. Some Senate committee staff members chafed
at a consulting contract given to Mr. Shields by Data Trust, given Ms. Walsh-Shields’s
influence, though she had briefly left the R.N.C. in 2017 during the period when it was
awarded. (Mr. Barbour said Mr. Shields “provided tremendous value.”) Data Trust also
chronically needed to purchase new state voter files and pay its staff and vendors like
Mr. Shields. The party has pumped nearly $15 million into the company since 2016,
filings show.
Building relations with Senate Republicans became secondary after Mr. Trump secured
the nomination. Ms. Walsh-Shields struck an unlikely alliance with Mr. Parscale, then
the Trump campaign digital director, when the two began sharing a Trump Tower office.
Katie Walsh Shields, a Parscale associate whose consulting firm is on retainer with the R.N.C. and gets a cut of
every dollar raised for the party’s 2020 convention. Credit...Cliff Owen/Associated Press
Mr. Parscale, now 44, was a small-time San Antonio web entrepreneur with a gift for
salesmanship. Ms. Walsh-Shields, 35, had worked her way up through the political
ranks on the strength of her fund-raising abilities and knowledge of the party’s internal
workings. With Mr. Kushner’s blessing and Data Trust’s information — and some help
from the now-defunct, controversial data firm Cambridge Analytica — Mr. Parscale
focused on targeting Facebook ads at voters.
Karl Rove, campaign manager and confidant to President George W. Bush, was an early
backer of Data Trust and has been informally advising Mr. Parscale. He wrote in
a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that technology had played a critical role in
battleground states, adding, “Data Trust was a big reason why Donald Trump won the
2016 election.”
Building a Cash Machine
Just before the Republicans lost the House in 2018, Mr. Kushner convened a cadre of
operatives at the Trump family’s Washington hotel to confront a rising threat to the
president.
Republicans had watched with alarm as ActBlue helped Beto O’Rourke, a previously
obscure Texas congressman, pull in more than $50 million for his improbably serious
challenge to Senator Ted Cruz. Megadonors warned Mr. Kushner that, come 2020, they
would not make up for the party’s small-donor deficit.
Republicans had fund-raising tools, but by coalescing around a single vendor like
ActBlue, candidates could raise money jointly and more easily share data on
contributors. There were several contenders. But to Mr. Kushner and Mr. Parscale, who
by then was the 2020 campaign manager, only one vendor was acceptable, according to
several people with knowledge of the deliberations: a company called Revv which had
already been processing payments for the campaign.
Mr. Parscale, second from left, with Mr. Kushner. Both embraced Revv, a fund-raising tool co-founded by the
Republican Party’s former digital director. WinRed was later built atop Revv. Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
Revv had been co-founded by Mr. Lansing, who was well regarded as a tech-savvy
operator and for raising alarms about ActBlue for years. But in 2017, Politico reported
that, after taking over as the R.N.C.’s digital director the year before, he had encouraged
Republican campaigns to use Revv, earning a $909,000 payout from the company.
Some party veterans viewed this as self-dealing.
By the summer of 2019, WinRed was created atop Revv’s platform, but only after
negotiations that ended with the Senate campaign committee, and R.N.C.
representatives, imposing restrictions that blocked Mr. Lansing from selling WinRed in
the future and tightening control of firms he could hire.
Mr. Lansing, in a statement, called WinRed “the work of seven months of lawyering to
ensure every major stakeholder would be happy with all data, financial and ownership
arrangements.”
The new company was a joint venture between Revv and Data Trust, with 60 percent of
profits going to Revv. (WinRed charges campaigns 3.8 percent, plus 30 cents per credit
card transaction.) Officials involved would not detail Mr. Lansing’s remuneration. Mr.
Parscale, Ms. Walsh-Shields and Mr. Shields do not own stakes, according to financial
records reviewed by The New York Times.
WinRed became ascendant, and this time the Trump team and Senate Republicans
joined in a pressure campaign to convert holdouts. Mr. McConnell told colleagues at a
lunch in mid-2019 that his personal goal was to “shut down all the competitors,”
according to one senator who was surprised at the majority leader’s directness. The
party even sent a cease-and-desist letter to one of the losing contenders, Anedot,
instructing it to remove G.O.P. logos from solicitations.
With or without a stake in WinRed, key aides have positioned themselves at the center
of a formidable political machine. Ms. Walsh-Shields’s consulting firm receives a
$25,000-a-month R.N.C. retainer and 1 to 5 percent of money it raises for the party’s
2020 convention. Mr. Shields’s firm, Convergence Media, represents clients ranging
from the National Republican Congressional Committee to Representative Devin Nunes
of California, one of the president’s staunchest defenders against impeachment.
But it is Mr. Parscale who has most often been the focus of Mr. Trump’s complaints that
those around him are making too much money from his name and brand. Mr. Parscale
has not always discouraged suspicions. A few weeks before the 2016 election, the
campaign staff gathered at the Whiskey Trader, a watering hole near Trump Tower, to
play beer pong and brace for near-certain defeat. In walked Mr. Parscale, returning from
dinner with a new campaign hire.
“I’m making so much money!” Mr. Parscale declared, inserting an expletive, according
to two people who were present.
Mr. Parscale, in a statement, called their account “untrue and ridiculous,” but since his
appointment as campaign manager, he has bought a $2.4 million canalside home in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.; two condos, owned with his family, together worth $2 million; and a
Ferrari. A campaign official attributed the spending to Mr. Parscale’s relocation and
divestment from businesses in Texas.
But after a rival aide left an underlined copy of a Daily Mail story detailing his spending
on the president’s desk, Mr. Trump summoned Mr. Parscale for a pointed lecture,
according to a senior White House official.
Others in his circle have made purchases of their own. Mr. Lansing bought a $1.7 million
home in Washington last year, while Ms. Walsh-Shields and Mr. Shields bought a $2
million beach house in the Florida panhandle. Asked about the house, Ms. WalshShields
referred a reporter to her mother, who said the down payment and mortgage
payments had come mostly from her. Mr. Shields had also recently sold the house he
owned before their marriage.
That Ms. Walsh-Shields has endured is noteworthy. While Vice President Mike Pence
said, in a statement, that “we are grateful for her hard work, loyalty and
professionalism,” Mr. Trump has privately referred to her as a ‘leaker,’ blaming her for
unflattering media coverage during her brief tenure as White House deputy chief of staff
in 2017. He has pressed Ronna McDaniel, the party chairwoman, about Ms. WalshShields’s
role in recent days. And during a meeting last summer, after prodding by his
longtime security consultant, Keith Schiller, the president asked if Ms. McDaniel trusted
her, according to people with knowledge of the exchanges. “I do,” Ms. McDaniel replied.
“She works for me.”
‘We Have the Upper Hand’
Start-ups have proliferated around the Trump campaign.
The president with Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chairwoman, who has defended Ms. Walsh-Shields. Credit...Zach
Gibson for The New York Times
A company called Excelsior Strategies, run by employees at Mr. Shields’s firm,
Convergence, was contracted to rent Mr. Trump’s crown jewel, his list of some 20
million donors; Mr. Shields said that only the campaign profited from the arrangement.
And Opn Sesame, a start-up run by Gary Coby, a Parscale protégé, is being paid
$200,000 to $300,000 a month through the R.N.C., according to campaign filings.
When the Trump campaign’s digital operation recently moved to its own floor at the
campaign’s Northern Virginia headquarters, much of it was being run by Mr. Coby, who
recently merged his operations with the R.N.C.’s data team. Opn Sesame’s specialty is
texting voters, a burgeoning and lightly regulated field that is expected to be a factor in
the 2020 campaign.
To allay Mr. Trump’s concerns, tens of millions of dollars worth of campaign advertising
that once ran through Parscale Strategy has been redirected to a new company,
American Made Media, which is run by a Parscale lieutenant. There are no public
records detailing the company’s financial structure; Mr. Parscale and other advisers said
they did not profit from it. Mr. Parscale has declined to provide detailed accounting of
his network of interlocking businesses, and has told associates he follows Mr. Trump’s
directive, relayed through Ms. McDaniel, that he make no more than $700,000 or
$800,000 for his campaign work.
Even to insiders, the campaign’s activities can seem opaque.
Last fall, Mr. Pence’s office scheduled his first visit to the headquarters, to get a
firsthand look. But when the day came, Mr. Parscale canceled, even though the visit was
already on the vice president’s official schedule. Mr. Parscale, who spends much of his
time working from his Florida home — though he recently said he would relocate to
Washington — told Mr. Pence’s office that the campaign’s landlord had vetoed the idea,
fearing a vice-presidential visit would disrupt other tenants. Mr. Pence was puzzled not
to learn sooner, and the visit has not been rescheduled, two officials with knowledge of
the episode said.
For the moment, such concerns are muted as the Trump campaign, the R.N.C. and other
affiliated committees raised $155 million in the final three months of 2019, a 23 percent
increase over the previous quarter that was buoyed by the impeachment proceedings.
The digital operation overseen by Mr. Coby and Mr. Parscale has been developing a
series of new products, including a news app for volunteers to dole out Trump-friendly
content, republish Trump-world tweets and raffle MAGA hats. An arm of the campaign
has also hired a company called Phunware, which specializes in tracking cellphone
locations; a senior campaign official said the company was hired to develop an app, not
track people.
The Democrats are trying to regroup, but their efforts have been scattershot. A year ago,
the party installed its former chairman, Howard Dean, to create a Data Trust for the left,
but the momentum around the venture has lagged.
“We’re very far behind right now,” said Mikey Dickerson, a former Obama
administration official who is chief technology officer at Alloy, a nonprofit tech venture
on the left. “They got motivated by the stories from the 2008 and 2012 campaigns
saying that the Democrats had an insurmountable advantage,” he said, adding that it
“caused our side to be complacent.”
Most Republican officeholders have succumbed to the WinRed pressure campaign. One
late convert was Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who learned the power of being
linked to Mr. Trump’s money machine when WinRed unexpectedly sent out a joint fundraising
appeal that brought in a “six-figure sum in a single day, which is huge in a downballot
race,” said Tim Cameron, a Tillis adviser and former digital director at the
Republican senatorial committee.
Without Mr. Trump’s victory, “there’d be nothing at the scale of WinRed,” he said. “All
of a sudden, it’s one election, and we have the upper hand.”
Correction: March 9, 2020
An earlier version of this article mistakenly listed the Republican National Committee as among the
clients of Convergence Media. The firm works for the National Republican Congressional
Committee, not the Republican National Committee.
Kitty Bennett contributed research. Kenneth Vogel contributed reporting.