“I’m going to entertain you,” President Donald Trump told the RNC donors in Florida Friday. | Getty Trump pleads for cash at closed donor retreat 'I need you guys to step up and overwhelm them,' the president tells Republican high rollers.

PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump buttered up a room full of Republican donors Friday night by boasting of his upset 2016 election win and ticking through a list of his surprise swing state victories that even the party high rollers at the private dinner couldn’t have imagined possible.

But Trump also told them to focus on what he needs most: campaign cash to win 60 Republican-held seats in the U.S. Senate in 2018.


"I need you guys to step up and overwhelm them,” Trump said at the Republican National Committee’s spring retreat, according to one source who described portions of the president’s speech. The president delivered his remarks at an event closed to press at the five-star Four Seasons Resort, which is just a few miles down the Atlantic coast from Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate.

By all accounts, Trump was loose before his audience — “I’m going to entertain you,” he told the RNC donors — while mostly staying away from policy and bantering with the crowd for about 40 minutes. He described how important it was to win his home away from home, Florida, and how easy it had been to appear “presidential,” including his speech to a joint session of Congress and on a visit to a Navy aircraft carrier in Virginia.

At one point, he poked fun at Steve Wynn, the RNC finance chair and billionaire owner of a Las Vegas casino, for not backing him at the start of the 2016 campaign. Wynn, who initially backed Sen. Marco Rubio, wasn’t the only one in the room to have initially picked a different horse in the 2016 Republican primary race, drawing Trump’s scorn at the time.

“By now it doesn’t matter, does it? He’s our president,” said Mohammad Qazi, a Michigan-based health care executive who donated to Rubio during the 2016 campaign but now backs Trump.

As he left the dinner, Qazi described the president as “warm and relaxed” during his remarks as he boasted of his November victories in Michigan, Ohio and Florida.

“He was talking about the election, how against all odds he wasn’t supposed to win. I think that was his theme for the night, how he won and won big,” Qazi said.

Many Republican donors and insiders acknowledge they’re concerned about the upcoming elections. Generally, the political party of a president loses seats in Congress during a midterm election, and Trump’s poor approval ratings adds to the sense of worry.

Maxwell Colen, 15, from Bethesda, Md., poses for a picture next to President Trump's limousine outside a RNC fundraiser in Palm Beach, Florida on Mar. 3. The Secret Service later drove the car to a secure area to pick up Trump when he left the Four Seasons Resort. | Darren Samuelsohn / POLITICO

However, Republicans have a sizable majority in the U.S. House and the Senate electoral map seems to favor Republicans, with many Democrats up for election in red states in 2018, giving the GOP a chance to play offense.

To that end, Trump has personally asked Florida Gov. Rick Scott to run for Senate against incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson and, allies say, Trump is showing signs he’ll campaign hard for Republicans throughout the nation to win a supermajority in Congress.

Scott and Rubio joined Trump on Friday for a tour of an Orlando school, where they touted school choice. Scott and Rubio address the RNC donors Saturday.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the president’s remarks, which come at the start of his fourth weekend back in Florida since his inauguration (CBS News reporter Mark Knoller noted on Twitter the president will have spent all or part of 14 days at his Mar-a-Lago home. “Amounts to 31% of his days in office, so far.”)

Republicans leaving the dinner said Trump was well within his rights to keep talking about how he beat Hillary Clinton.

“It was something I heard several times,” said Robert Long, owner of Marine Concepts, a Sarasota-based boat building company. “He likes to brag about the election. He did tremendous. It’s something to brag about.”

But Trump’s visit to the Four Seasons didn’t come without some degree of controversy. About two dozen protesters with drums and megaphones chanted “No Fascist USA!” before Trump’s motorcade pulled into the resort. The Palm Beach Post reported one arrest.

While Trump addressed the GOP donors in an upstairs ballroom, hotel guests and locals swarmed the president’s limousine — nicknamed “The Beast” — for photographs in front of the five-star hotel.

“No touching the car!” an agent yelled as one woman posed for a picture. Moments later, "The Beast" drove off to pick up the president from a side exit and whisk him away to Mar-a-Lago, where he’ll start work Saturday.

Here's President Trump's limo arriving at the Four Seasons' front entrance, sans POTUS. pic.twitter.com/pGZ05jaHnO — Darren Samuelsohn (@dsamuelsohn) March 4, 2017



