President Donald Trump at the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland on February 22, 2025 (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
In 2024, there were many reasons to see Donald Trump as a liability for the Republican Party. He was facing four criminal indictments — one of which resulted in him being convicted on 34 criminal counts — as well as a range of civil lawsuits. And some well-known conservatives declared that they would be voting Democratic.
But Trump's stranglehold on the GOP only grew stronger when he won the GOP presidential nomination and went on to narrowly defeat Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the general election.
In an article published on May 10, New York Times reporters Theodore Schleifer and Shane Goldmacher emphasize that President Trump's influence among GOP power brokers has grown even stronger.
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"President Trump is harnessing the Republican Party's all-encompassing deference to him to exert even greater control over the GOP big-money world, which had long been one of the party's final remaining redoubts of Trump skepticism," the Times journalists explain. "For years, the super PACs allied with House and Senate Republicans have been some of the most powerful and independent fiefs in American politics, raising and spending hundreds of millions of dollars in each election. But even though Mr. Trump is in his second term and cannot run again, he is quickly bringing them inside his sphere of influence — a sign that his dominance over the party could endure well into the future."
According to Schleifer and Goldmacher, the Congressional Leadership Fund and the Senate Leadership Fund — two prominent GOP super PACs — are "working closer than ever with the White House" and are "installing veteran Trump strategists in senior positions." Meanwhile, Trump's own super PAC, MAGA Inc., and an allied group have, Schleifer and Goldmacher report, "amassed roughly $400 million since the 2024 election."
"Never before has a term-limited president amassed so much fundraising power," Schleifer and Goldmacher report. "The only other second-term president in the super PAC era to have such a group was President Barack Obama after 2012. But his super PAC, Priorities USA, effectively went dormant for the 2014 midterms."
The Times reporters add, "Mr. Trump made a different decision. He has headlined at least six fundraisers for MAGA Inc. since he was elected in November, with the price tag for a seat reaching as high as $1.5 million for an event with cryptocurrency executives that he attended on Monday in the Washington area."
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Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).