Donald Trump is relying on the Republican National Committee to help him dig out of a financial hole, but GOP fundraisers are privately encouraging major donors who are leery of Trump to steer their cash to the party instead of to his campaign, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the solicitations.

The fundraisers are emphasizing to donors that they can write huge checks to the party, with only a small fraction of the cash — if any — going to the billionaire real estate mogul, according to documents and interviews with fundraisers and donors.


“There are lots of people who don’t necessarily want to support Trump financially, either because he wasn’t their pick or because he said he was going to self-finance and they took him at his word and now they say ‘why should we give you our money?’” said one fundraiser with knowledge of the party’s high-dollar fundraising efforts. Major donors became even more leery this month after Trump’s attacks on a Mexican-American judge, the fundraiser said, explaining “Whether it’s right or wrong, he was called a racist and nobody wants to be associated with a racist. That makes it difficult.”

The message to those leery donors, according to the fundraiser, is “people can give to the RNC and not to him.”

That type of private counsel runs counter to the RNC’s public efforts to present a united front with Trump. And, as the RNC’s joint fundraising efforts with Trump have ramped up in recent days, so too has the distrust between the two camps, according to operatives and donors on both sides of the divide.

Donors and operatives backing Trump have raised concerns that the RNC isn’t doing enough to help Trump financially. They say RNC fundraisers seem all-too eager to instruct wealthy Republicans on how they can minimize or zero-out the amount of their cash going to Trump through a pair of joint fundraising committees the RNC formed with its presumptive nominee.

And pro-Trump super PAC operatives in recent days have argued to wealthy Republicans in New York City and Dallas that, if the donors want to help Trump, giving to the RNC isn’t enough, according to two people familiar with the meetings, which were organized by the Great America PAC. The people say Great America PAC officials gave power-point presentations detailing how the joint fundraising committees allocate their cash, and stressing that only a very small percentage of it actually goes to Trump’s campaign.

Sean Spicer, the RNC’s chief strategist, denied that party fundraisers are steering donors away from Trump. “It would be 100 percent wrong that anyone working for us said that,” he said. He also has pointed out that donations to RNC do help Trump and other Republican candidates down ballot by allowing the party to fund state party operations and get out the vote efforts.

That’s a similar argument to the one used by RNC chairman Reince Priebus in reassuring wealthy Trump supporters that their checks to the joint fundraising committees will in fact be used to help the nominee in a general election matchup against the much-better-funded Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

But privately, RNC insiders grumble that Trump is hurting the party’s fundraising, not vice versa.

One RNC insider said it is “totally ridiculous” to suggest that Trump could have raised money on his own, while others have argued that Trump’s aversion to making fundraising calls to major donors is shortchanging both his campaign and the party.

After POLITICO reported last week that Trump failed to make good on a promise to Priebus to personally call about 20 donors, the RNC said it had not asked Trump to make donor calls. The assertion irked several longtime party stalwarts, who pointed out that such calls have long been considered part of the presidential nominee’s responsibility to the party.

The high-dollar fundraiser added that Trump “didn’t have anyone in place who could run a fundraising operation, so he needed to turn to the RNC, which has the infrastructure to put that together.”

It’s not unusual for there to be some tension between national party committees and the campaigns of their respective presidential nominees over cash and control. The campaigns prioritize the election of their candidate at all costs, while the parties have to weigh the sometimes competing interests of candidates up and down the ballot. Sometimes, when a party concludes that a particular candidate is a lost cause, it will shift resources to other more winnable races, as occurred when the RNC shifted resources away from Bob Dole’s faltering presidential campaign in 1996.

But there hasn’t been a major party presidential candidate like Trump, who entered the general election distrusted by wide swaths of his own party and its leaders, and who completely lacked his own fundraising and campaign infrastructure.

Trump had done almost no fundraising at all during a primary in which he collected only $17 million. Instead, the billionaire real estate showman loaned his campaign $45 million from his own pocket, and enjoyed an explosion of free publicity from his mega-rallies and outspoken interviews and social media presence. A central part of his message was that his opponents were beholden to major donors, some of whom he called out as puppetmasters, in boasting of his independence from the donor class.

When he pivoted last month to trying to raise money for the general election from some of those very same donors, it did not go smoothly.

One top donor who turned down a personal request for cash from Trump later told associates “if he’s worth that much, he should write his own check,” according a conservative operative who is close to several of the party’s top donors.

Trump only this week launched a small-dollar fundraising program, sending out his first fundraising email of the campaign, pledging to match donations totaling up to $2 million from his own pocket. His campaign boasted that the email, which targeted small donors, yielded $2 million in 12 hours for his campaign.

And Trump’s finance chair, Wall Street banker Steve Mnuchin, on Wednesday told The Wall Street Journal that Trump’s joint fundraising committee with the RNC had raised $19 million in recent weeks, including $10 million from fundraisers in New York City.

The details of that recent activity won’t be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission until next month. But the recent fundraising surge won’t come anywhere close to filling the massive hole revealed by FEC reports filed this week, which showed that Trump’s campaign entered the month with only $1.3 million in the bank, compared to $42.5 million for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. And two sources familiar with Trump’s finances say the campaign’s cash on hand dipped even lower than that this month.

Plus, Trump’s campaign likely will receive only a small fraction of the cash raised by the joint committees created late last month with the RNC partly to help his flagging finances. The FEC reports show that one of the committees — Trump Victory — transferred $3 million to RNC, but has yet to transfer any cash to the Trump campaign.

Party fundraisers have informed some Trump-weary donors that they can earmark their donations to Trump Victory and another joint committee called Trump Make America Great Again Committee in such a way that all the money will go to the RNC, and none to Trump, according to a finance operative who delivered such as solicitation and a donor who received such a solicitation.

The fundraisers also go out of their way to highlight that — even if donors don’t earmark their checks — the RNC is the primary beneficiary of donations, donors say.

The joint committees are comprised of Trump’s campaign committee and the RNC, while Trump Victory also includes 11 state party committees, allowing it to accept a maximum donation of $449,000, with the cash allocated to its component committees based on a formula.

The first $5,400 goes to the Trump campaign, with the next $233,800 going to RNC and its special convention and building maintenance funds, according to a document provided to donors that was obtained by POLITICO. The one-page document shows that the next $110,000 goes to the state parties and the final $100,200 goes to a special RNC recount fund.

The fundraisers have highlighted to donors a provision in the joint committees’ solicitations allowing them to essentially choose their own beneficiaries. It reads “Notwithstanding this allocation formula, a contributor may designate a contribution for a specific participant or participants,” according to one solicitation obtained by POLITICO.

Anti-Trump Republicans can donate almost as much money — $334,000 — exclusively to the RNC. To illustrate that point, the party’s fundraisers have been distributing another document to donors at the same time as they’re provided the Trump Victory one-page allocation document indicating how maximum checks to the RNC will be disseminated among the party committee’s funds.

Spicer, the RNC chief strategist, didn’t respond to a question about the donor documents. But he said the reason that Trump Victory didn’t transfer any money to the campaign was that the Trump campaign decided to forgo such a transfer in May.

“That was their call,” he said. “They can take it whenever as part of the agreement,” Spicer said, though he wouldn’t say how much the campaign was eligible for, saying that information will be disclosed in a July FEC report.

Spicer also pointed out that the provision allowing donors to earmark their contributions to component committees within the joint committee without regard the allocation formula is standard language.

Mnuchin, Trump’s finance chairman, didn’t answer when asked his thoughts on GOP fundraisers telling donors that they could give to the victory fund without any money going to Trump’s campaign.

“I’m just on a conference call so I can’t really go through anything right now, but shoot me a text and I’ll try to get back to you,” he told a reporter this week. He did not respond to a follow-up text.

Phil Ruffin, a Las Vegas businessman who has worked with Trump, expressed no qualms about the joint fundraising committees. He said that he and his wife had donated $500,000 to one of the committees and intended to also donate to a pro-Trump super PAC. And he said other wealthy donors are already stepping up.

“They are giving big — the money will be there in the end,” he said.

In an effort to attract major donors who aren’t sold on Trump, allies of mega-donor Robert Mercer are planning a super PAC geared at attacking Clinton, rather than directly supporting Trump.

The big donors will need to come through, Ruffin conceded. He admitted that Trump, who this week suggested he could sink another $50 million to $70 million into his campaign, simply doesn’t have enough cash to self-fund a campaign in which Clinton and her allies at the Democratic National Committee and on her super PACs are expected to spend in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion.

In a recent interview with Las Vegas journalist Jon Ralston, Ruffin hinted that Trump is working on a business deal that will free up “quite a bit of money” he could invest in the campaign, though Ruffin wouldn’t divulge specifics. Regardless, Ruffin told Ralston that Trump has “spent a lot of his own money and he has a lot more to spend. But I don’t think he can go to that billion-dollar level.”