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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, analog era. Since 2017, businesses associated with the group have billed roughly $75 million to the Trump campaign, the RNC and a range of other Republican clients.
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 empire-building and profiteering by the campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his allies. Parscale’s flagship firm, Parscale Strategy, has billed nearly $35 million to the Trump campaign, the RNC and related entities since 2017; the vast bulk of it, he said, 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 fundraising on the new platform, a for-profit company that Trump branded WinRed, brought dissent.
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For all that, WinRed, created last summer, has given the party an overdue counterweight to ActBlue, the Democrats’ small-donor fundraising 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.
WinRed’s chairman, Henry 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.
The Parscale-led group — including Katie Walsh Shields and her husband, Mike Shields, both former RNC 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.
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. The millions moving through opaque private businesses have left even the president perpetually concerned that 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 Kushner. While his White House portfolio has 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.
A Data Arms Race
In the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s failed 2012 presidential run, the Republican Party released a 100-page reportinside which Reince Priebus, then the RNC 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.”
Trump’s team embraced the call for technological change.
Previously, parties had spent heavily on television advertising, but now the RNC 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, fundraising limits would not apply.
Opposition to the transition 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.
The Senate committee’s staff was concerned about a consulting contract given to Shields by Data Trust, given Walsh-Shields’ influence, though she had briefly left the RNC in 2017 during the period when it was awarded. Data Trust also chronically needed to purchase new state voter files and pay its staff and vendors like Shields. The party has pumped nearly $15 million into the company since 2016, filings show.
Building a Cash Machine
Just before the Republicans lost the House in 2018, 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 Sen. Ted Cruz. Megadonors warned Kushner that, come 2020, they would not make up for the party’s small-donor deficit.
Republicans had fundraising 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 Kushner and 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.
Revv had been co-founded by Lansing. In 2017, Politico reported that, after taking over as the RNC’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 RNC representatives imposing restrictions that blocked Lansing from selling WinRed in the future and tightening control of firms he could hire.
The new company was a joint venture between Revv and Data Trust, with 60% of profits going to Revv. Parscale, Walsh-Shields and Shields do not own stakes, according to financial records reviewed by The New York Times.
With or without a stake in WinRed, key aides have positioned themselves at the center of a formidable political machine. Walsh-Shields’ consulting firm receives a $25,000-a-month RNC retainer and 1% to 5% of money it raises for the party’s 2020 convention. Shields’ firm, Convergence Media, represents clients including the RNC.
But Parscale has most often been the focus of Trump’s complaints that those around him are making too much money from his name and brand. Since his appointment as campaign manager, Parscale has bought a $2.4 million canalside home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; two condos, owned with his family, together worth $2 million; and a Ferrari.
After a rival aide left an underlined copy of a Daily Mail story detailing his spending on the president’s desk, Trump summoned Parscale for a pointed lecture, according to a senior White House official.
Others in his circle have made purchases of their own. Lansing bought a $1.7 million home in Washington last year, while Walsh-Shields and Shields bought a $2 million beach house in the Florida panhandle.
‘We Have the Upper Hand’
Startups have proliferated around the Trump campaign.
A company called Excelsior Strategies, run by employees at Shields’ firm, Convergence, was contracted to rent Trump’s crown jewel: his list of some 20 million donors; Shields said that only the campaign profited from the arrangement. And Opn Sesame, a voter-texting startup run by Gary Coby, a Parscale protege, is being paid $200,000 to $300,000 a month through the RNC, according to campaign filings.
To allay 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; Parscale and other advisers said they did not profit from it. Parscale has declined to provide a detailed accounting of his network of interlocking businesses and has told associates he follows Trump’s directive, relayed through Ronna McDaniel, the party chairwoman, 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, Vice President Mike Pence’s office scheduled his first visit to the headquarters. But when the day came, Parscale canceled, even though the visit was already on the vice president’s official schedule. The visit has not been rescheduled.
For the moment, such concerns are muted as the Trump campaign, the RNC and other affiliated committees raised $155 million in the final three months of 2019, a 23% increase over the previous quarter that was buoyed by the impeachment proceedings.
Most Republican officeholders have succumbed to the WinRed pressure campaign. One late convert was Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who learned the power of being linked to Trump’s money machine when WinRed unexpectedly sent out a joint fundraising appeal that brought in a “six-figure sum in a single day,” said Tim Cameron, a Tillis adviser and former digital director at the Republican senatorial committee.
Without 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .