Shortly after the House of Representatives initiated a formal impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump, his son Eric started crowing that his dad's campaign had raised $15 million in the wake of the announcement. The campaign said that more than $5 million poured in over the course of the first 24 hours.

Those are big numbers, for sure. But I would caution Republicans against feeling too secure over the catharsis of a good fundraising day. In 2013, I left a job at the White House to run the digital team at the Democratic National Committee. I started on Sept. 30 -- the final day of the fundraising quarter, which happened to coincide with a charge from Ted Cruz to shut down the federal government to delay the implementation of parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Between moments of filling out paperwork and picking a health care plan, I signed off on email copy and fundraising appeals. Before midnight, we set a single-day record for the committee -- our supporters chipped in more than $850,000. We felt great about where we landed. But a few days later, we were back to reality. And for the rest of the election cycle, our success was largely predicated on incremental adjustments and optimizations on the margins. Because by and large, that's how successful grassroots mobilization gets done.

Strong organizing operations aren't sustained by buzzy moments or unpredictable outbursts of spontaneous giving. They're all about building trust between an organization and its supporters over time. And on that front, the GOP has a major problem.

In May, the Trump campaign had to take the extraordinary step of issuing a public warning against "Dishonest Fundraising Groups -- after his former deputy campaign manager solicited more than $12 million from conservative small-dollar donors using Trump's likeness. “Their actions,” Trump's team stated, “show they are interested in filling their own pockets with money from innocent Americans’ paychecks, and sadly, retirements.”

And for some, it's not just about turning a quick buck off the president. In 2014, for instance, Politico identified 33 Tea-Party-branded PACs that raised $43 million during the cycle. Those groups spent just $3 million supporting conservative candidates.

In 2018, the FBI arrested William and Robert Tierney — two brothers who had used their political operation to solicit $50 million over the last decade from donors concerned about autism, opposition to abortion, law enforcement, and a broad set of conservative causes. Just last month, a political operative named Kelley Rogers pleaded guilty to wire fraud for using a series of fraudulent PACs to raise money from conservative small-dollar donors, then keeping the funds for himself and his associates.

The problem is so visible and persistent that earlier this summer, the National Review ran a piece with the headline "The Right’s Grifter Problem." And even established conservative entities are wrestling with charges against leadership using donor dollars for personal gain.

Amid financial problems that the NRA calls an "existential crisis," the organization's president, Wayne LaPierre, billed $267,000 in personal expenses and $275,000 for purchases at a luxury men’s wear boutique in Beverly Hills. Between 2016 and 2017, the group paid millions of dollars to various board members for services ranging from "consulting" to writing for NRA publications.

What about the Trump campaign proper, the proud beneficiary of that impeachment-driven donation spike? For months, Campaign Manager Brad Parscale has been dogged by questions about his own business activities -- and the extent to which he's personally profiting off of the campaign.

In his first 14 months on the job, various firms under his control billed "three different Trump campaign committees, the RNC, the presidential inaugural committee, a pro-Trump super PAC and a ‘dark money’ organization" for a total of more than $13 million, according to ProPublica. On Sept. 9, CNN quoted major donors and advisers to the Trump campaign expressing their concern. “The president said he was going to drain the swamp. But, turns out, Parscale is the swamp,” one longtime Trump adviser told CNN.

At a moment in our political history when activists seem to live from one push alert to the next, maybe the accumulated weight of these all these scandals and charges of self-dealing never breaks through. Maybe the tribal ties that define political identity in 2019 offer enough insulation that conservatives never pay a price for all that these bad actors have done to betray their supporters.

But in our business, trust doesn't tend to work that way. In politics, credibility can disappear in an instant.