President Donald Trump. | Cengiz Yar/Getty Images 2020 elections GOP cashes in on impeachment A fundraising drive from Trump and the RNC netted a million dollars Tuesday.

Republicans are latching onto conservative outrage over the push to impeach President Donald Trump — and turning it into a 2020 fundraising bonanza.

Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican National Committee on Tuesday sent an array of fundraising emails inviting conservatives to donate and join the “Official Impeachment Defense Task Force,” which was described as a group “made up of only President Trump’s most LOYAL supporters, the ones committed to fighting for him, re-electing him, and taking back the House.”


By the end of the day, party officials said, the fundraising offensive had netted around $1 million.

The effort demonstrates how the GOP sees the impeachment push as a tool to stoke the grievances of the Trump base and monetize the president’s clashes with Democrats ahead of 2020. Party officials, who for months have been playing to Trump supporters’ distaste of the left through a merchandising effort, are convinced the inquiry could turn into a cash windfall — and not just for Trump himself.

Most of the proceeds of Tuesday’s fundraising drive will benefit Trump’s campaign. But the effort was partly aimed at Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin, one of a swelling group of freshmen Democrats who represent districts Trump carried in 2016 and have come out in support of an impeachment inquiry.

In one of the RNC emails, supporters were taken to a landing page where they were invited to contribute to a joint fundraising account, with proceeds split evenly between Trump’s reelection campaign and a fund for the eventual Republican nominee in Slotkin’s district.

The email cajoled donors into giving by urging them to “be a leader in defending the president against these baseless and disgusting attacks.”

Through Tuesday evening, the anti-Slotkin fundraising campaign had generated over $350,000, with half going to the president and half going to the Michigan race.

Republicans are orchestrating the new offensive through WinRed, a newly-launched and Trump-endorsed online donor platform. Republican officials hope the site will finally enable them to compete with the Democratic small dollar juggernaut ActBlue, which raked in around $1.6 billion during the 2018 midterms.

Republicans had long lacked a centralized apparatus that allowed them to engage in the kind of digital fundraising they did on Tuesday. The appeal allowed givers to evenly split their donations — a process known as conduit fundraising — to Trump and the Slotkin’s GOP opponent with a click of the mouse.

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Slotkin and dozens of other House Democrats benefited from similar programs in the 2018 election, when donors around the country socked away money in online “nominee funds” during big moments like the attempted Obamacare repeals of 2017. The next year, those funds disbursed hundreds of thousands of dollars each to swing-district Democratic primary winners.

Over the coming days, WinRed is expected to launch fundraising campaigns targeting nearly a dozen other House Democrats from pro-Trump districts who have come out in favor of an impeachment inquiry.

The fundraising push is partly designed to win over wary House Republicans who are skeptical of WinRed and believe party leadership is trying to foist it upon them. Just over half of House GOP incumbents, 56 percent, have adopted the system since it was unveiled in late June — a far lower rate than Senate Republicans and state parties, according to a memo WinRed released this week.

Slotkin, who hails from a Lansing-area district and served in a range of intelligence-related positions before running for Congress, was one of seven first-term Democrats from swing districts to co-author a Washington Post op-ed announcing support for impeachment over revelations that the president allegedly pressured Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden’s son.